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Apparently some stuff has been happening with Luigi Mangione lately; the front page of reddit is filled to the brim with pictures of the guy, and today I saw posts showing part of his arrest video (full video here, but does not contain the full arrest), and finding that he had a ticket for a bus to Pittsburgh on the night of the shooting, and also that the bullets in the bag were what made him a suspect for the CEO killing.
I am seeing some commonalities in all these threads: either hedged understanding/support for Mangione's actions, outright support, and extreme skepticism of the police along with claims that Mangione was framed or otherwise dastardly policing tricks were pulled on him. Police misconduct claims include that the backpack with gun and manifesto was planted on him and that they used an illegal method to find him, yet are claiming that an anonymous caller recognized him and tipped them off.
I find it interesting how pervasive these claims are. My own brother actually has told me that the backpack was likely planted on Mangione, (part of a wider array of left-wing conspiracy theories; he also was the first I'd seen state that the Trump assassination was one random attendee shooting another random attendee and accidentally wounding Trump, then later stating that it was the teleprompter glass that injured him, not the bullet itself). It's true, it's a little hard to believe that a murder suspect would keep such dangerous incriminating evidence on him in the face of a nationwide manhunt. However, I think a murderer might not make moves that someone might expect them to, and I also think that police officers have to be cautious in following the rules when it comes to the entire U.S. news media and also defense lawyers watching their every move carefully.
The thought strikes me that this is probably going to be
one of the most televised court affairs since Rittenhouse.apparently not televised since it's in federal court, but everything that comes out will be highly scrutinized, at least. This time, for the first time in many years, it seems that this is a more Left-aligned murder trial. I desperately hope he gets convicted, but anything could happen. There are many ways he could get acquitted, including plain-and-simple jury nullification, which is definitely a possibility on account of his popularity.This case, in particular, is one that really shows me the reality of the two screens effect.
In the communities online that I follow, I haven't seen much response to this case either way. CEOs do awful things, that CEO in particular was probably doing pretty normal stuff for his class, and freelance vigilantes murdering people doing legal things is crossing a general principle of liberalism that we mostly don't want to cross when it comes to people peacefully doing legal but arguably vile things. The same norm preventing this is the norm that prevents, say, the father of someone screwed up (by the father's lights) by trans ideology and surgery from going and vigilante-ing intellectuals like Judith Butler who are, in some diffuse but obvious sense, clearly culpable for the ideology and thus its downstream material effects. Lode bearing norm etc - this gets fully general in a hurry in a society with meaningful liberal pluralism, because it means everyone is tolerating other people who are (by their lights) behaving like moral monsters.
But I have interacted with a few adults recently - people who have FAANG jobs or similar and pensions and families and mortgages - who brought up the Mangione case unbidden, and their frame of it was very much, paraphrasing, "This is a canary in the coal mine. People are getting fed up. There's going to be more of this. CEOs better take note." And... I mean, it's not like I'm unsympathetic to critiques about health insurance companies. I get the frustration, absolutely. But the moral frame of it, and the flat certainty of who had culpability and agency, caught me off guard, I have to admit. There was a distinct undercurrent that the communities these people were in had already reached consensus that, legal or not, this kind of assassination was, functionally, licit. Or perhaps something like, there no longer appear to be political ways to address this problem, so extra-political solutions are on the table.
And in that sense, it very much does remind me (along a different moral axis) of the Rittenhouse case - where, again, it really did seem like the moral debate hinged on whether someone saw the protesting and rioting and destruction as a normal part of democratic participation, and thus only to be responded to by similarly legal democratic moves, or if you saw the situation as having devolved into an extra-legal situation where certain parties were behaving, essentially, as outside bounds of law, and thus other private citizens were morally compelled to defend their community by force.
I guess it brings to mind that old Arnold Kling model of politics, where conservative tend to have a strong barbarism-vs-civilization axis, and progressives tend to have a strong anti-hierarchy oppressor-oppressed axis.
If I say "Hey, it looks pretty stormy out there - there's a very high chance of rain, so you should take an umbrella" I'm not actually saying "Rain is morally good and I support the rain falling on you and getting your clothes wet". People are simply pointing out that when you live in luxury and riches earned via rent-seeking in an industry which can just arbitrarily ruin people's lives due to an accident or illness they weren't at fault for, you're going to create more and more Luigis (or whoever the real killer was, if it turns out he is innocent). They're not endorsing extrapolitical assassinations as a means to effect change, they're identifying that a large underclass of people who have no ability to effect change politically while occasionally losing the lottery and getting their lives completely ruined by people like Brian Thompson (have you looked at what he actually did? That man was no angel!) is going to regularly produce more and more violence.
It is true that one can say "this is a canary in the coal mine, CEOs take note" in a manner where they are not endorsing murder, just warning that it's likely to happen if things continue as they are. But in my experience, most people who say such things about the United CEO's murder are absolutely tacitly endorsing it. Perhaps not all, but it's enough to make one leery of anyone else who shares such a sentiment.
I'd like to point out that this is the exact same argument feminists use when they say that any advice like "Don't get drunk in a skimpy outfit and hang around lots of desperate horny men" is actually blaming the victim and morally wrong. That said, my personal position (not that I can speak for the people you're referring to) isn't so much "more health insurance ceos need to be gunned down in the streets" as it is "these health insurance ceos need to be reigned in so they aren't causing so much damage to society". If a fentanyl dealer gets killed because he sold a bad batch of drugs that killed a bunch of his clients, I'm not going to pretend that I'm terribly upset when someone gets revenge on him. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes - and when your industry performs as awfully as the US healthcare insurance industry does, profiting on the back of destroying lives and denying people medically necessary procedures, you're going to be buying a lot of tickets for the Luigi lottery. Sure, most of the victims will just die or suffer in silence, but all it takes is for the right person to get screwed over and something like this will happen again. The right thing to do would be for the government to crack down on these people and implement a much better healthcare system, but seeing as how that isn't happening anytime soon we're just going to get more and more cases like Brian Thompson as the years go on.
Insurance companies, in general, tend to make more money when they don't have to pay out. They often make the worst day of your life even harder by looking for any excuse to not pay you. I got rear-ended at a stoplight a while ago; I took a picture of the car that hit me, including their license plate, as they sped away. When submitting the claim, I included the license plate number, the photo, and described the person driving the car as a "man between ages 20 - 50 with dark hair". My claim was denied because the license plate I reported belonged to a 70s model car (the car in the photo was obviously an older model, so definitely matched) registered to a man in his 30s. Because it was a government monopoly (thanks, ICBC), I couldn't do anything about it, and had to pay the repair costs out of pocket. This was obviously infuriating, and the start of my character arc towards hating any and all governments.
With something like healthcare in the US, where the costs range from "all the money you'd make in a month" all the way up to "all the money you'd make in a lifetime", dealing with individuals who are determined to nickle and dime you over things your physician said you'd need in order to not be dead is something that boils the blood; like, it's more surprising to me that someone didn't do something sooner. I've also heard that Brian Thompson/UnitedHealthcare was particularly stingy; that may or may not be true, but it's probably a bit of a factor.
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Feminists are saying that it is possible to say such things sincerely but most people who say them in real life aren't? I find this unlikely as a feminist position.
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But they're not. US healthcare is overpriced, but the money is flowing to doctors and hospitals, not to the insurance industry, whose profits are small. The insurance industry are just the middle man, paid to redirect the customers' ire from those lovely doctors and nurses.
Although your misunderstanding does really highlight how bad the 'randomly execute people I assume are responsible for my problems' method of political activism is.
This is a more complicated question than it sounds.
It's true health insurance companies have very thin margins: almost always <5%. And it's even true that the ratio of premiums paid out to revenue collected (the 'loss ratio') is rather high across the board: >80%. ...But the reason it's strictly >80% is that that's the legally mandated minimum per the ACA. If they fall below that number, they have to issue rebates to customers to meet it.
On the face of it this sounds like a good thing, right? I've argued in the past that corporations aren't always eager in practice to maximize profit (principal-agent issues where employees and not owners are making most of the decisions), but they largely do try to maximize their own size. The law limits administrative bloat!
Except... it doesn't. It limits bloat to a percentage of payouts. If they negotiate well and push prices down, they reduce their profit/operating budget! Unless it's compensated by more custom, of course; the normal competitive pressures do still exist. But this rule absolutely acts against that pressure.
This is a classic example of Goodhart's Law. Without this requirement, loss ratio is a good measure of efficiency; since a company will always try to minimize their expenses (the ones that involve sending checks to other businesses and don't benefit any employees, anyway), high loss ratios just mean there's adequate competitive pressure to keep them lean. But now? Who can say? The number is going to be >80% no matter how much or little competitive pressure they're under. If competition is insufficient, they'll just throw money at doctors and hospitals, because that's the only way they're allowed to raise profit/operating budget (via higher premiums). And if they were, it would exactly like you're describing.
But are they? I'm really not sure. Loss ratios were often lower before the ACA (sometimes as low as 60%), but a lot has changed about the healthcare market since 2011. Health costs are going up everywhere, not just the US. It's a murky subject and I don't think there are many easy answers to be found.
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I don't see any numbers in that linked post, or in the posts linked from that, that compare hospital profit and insurance industry profit.
And even some of the links from that post blame the problems on the insurers when you seem to think they don't.
The bloat is not necessarily "profit". For instance, when insurance companies and hospitals hire armies of bureaucrats to argue over the claims, all those bureaucrats get paid and none of that is "profit" to either side.
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Er... what? I'm not making any argument of the sort, simply observing that most any time I see someone expressing the "that's to be expected" point of view it's because they are actually happy the guy was murdered. I'm not sure how you get from there to some kind of thing about victim blaming.
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