Like many, I was shocked to hear of the assassination of UnitedHealthCare’s CEO Brian Thompson. But, perhaps like not-so-many others, I was more shocked to hear the cheers of online anti-establishment folks rejoicing in this father-of-two’s murder.
It seems the alleged assassin Luigi Mangione is now being hailed as a Robin Hood-style character, meting out street justice for the millions of health insurance-denied citizens the world over. As an allegorical tale, I can certainly relate to that. There is a massive injustice going on right now in the US and people are dying because of lack of access to care.
But this is not an allegorical tale. And real life is always more complicated. For one, Brian Thompson didn’t deserve to die, just as anyone wouldn’t reasonably expect a death sentence for carrying out their normal, legal business. Shooting Mr. Thompson in the back was callous and cowardly.
If one was hellbent on justice, many other ‘punishments’ could have been equally effective and less damaging. Why not kidnap and ransom? Why not paintball him or inflict some minor injury and pin him with a warning note? Why not douse him with orange paint and make a video disgracing the man? Of course I’m not condoning these acts either, but it seems to me they would make an equally strong point without resorting to taking someone’s life.
But this is all incidental of course. The fact is, Brian Thompson was merely doing everything by the book as expected of anyone in his position. It’s obviously not his fault that the health insurance system is such that it is. He was just another cog in a giant machine. Not blameless, but small in the grand scheme of one heinous US insurance scam.
During the course of my own online discussions on this topic, I found myself repeatedly met by joyous celebration of Brian’s murder from people who I had previously considered pacifist and reasonable. But, for all that, I just couldn’t bring myself around to the idea that killing Brian Thompson was in any way a good idea.
Usually when I’m met with adversity to my ideas, I go plumb the depths of my consciousness to try and discover why it is I think so differently about something. During this meditation of sorts, an idea occurred to me that explains my response, and also, from what I can tell, explains a lot of what goes bad in our society. And it’s simply this:
We tend to ignore small problems until they become really big problems.
Or, in this case: we don’t address minor injustices until they become huge injustices. The US health system has deteriorated into an evermore disgusting for-profit racket over a long period of time, through many different administrations, companies and policies. It didn’t happen all at once. Expectations of the health and insurance system have steadily declined until one day, to people like Mangione, it appeared plainly for the gross injustice it has now become.
It’s common sense that if you don’t address the minor problems in a car, some day you will inevitably be faced with a major, possibly life-threatening malfunction. So too in society. Small injustices that continually go unchecked will surely culminate into a brutal assassination, a riot, or even a war.
What issues were ignored and steps not taken in the years preceding the Russia-Ukraine War to prevent it from happening? What lesser injustices were never addressed in Gaza and Israel that could have prevented the ensuing terrorism and bloodbath? What small policy decisions were taken in the interests of UnitedHealthCare shareholders that ultimately led to the deaths—not just of Brian Thompson—but of the many thousands of patients not getting the right care when they needed it most?
Let me be pragmatic. Brian Thompson is dead—as are many of his company’s clients—as a result of this same problem. There’s not much anyone can do about that now. But could we at least learn the more valuable lesson from this unfortunate incident before it creates more unfortunate incidents?
And I don’t just mean that health insurers revise their policies (which they obviously should), but that more of us can understand how major injustices of all kinds are usually the result of compounded years of minor injustices, and that taking a hammer to them as a solution is almost never going to be effective.
It’s true that sometimes you have to cut off the affected limb to save the patient, but the superior solution by far is to treat the festering wound before it ever reaches that point.
Now think about this: what small injustices exist today that, if left unchecked, are going to create our next global crisis?
And, if you don’t really care about that, then maybe you can understand how the big, bad things that happen are almost never out of the blue, but are the result of people ignoring smaller problems while they are still manageable.
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