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American Horror Story
Rage at the U.S. healthcare system may be the only thing that unites us
Nearly everyone in America has a healthcare horror story. If you don’t have one personally yet, you likely have close friends and loved ones who do. Maybe you’ve been on the receiving end of a bloated and Kafkaesque health insurance system that is fundamentally designed to eliminate patients (you) as a cost center. You or someone you love may have faced chronic and debilitating pain and denied treatment because in an attempt to curb our country’s opioid crisis, healthcare providers are forced to treat people who need prescription painkillers as suspect and possibly criminal actors. You may even know someone who died because healthcare was denied or delayed, which happens to a little under 70,000 people a year. And perhaps you live in fear that this will happen to you if you become sick or seriously injured.
In the days following the shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, America responded with an outpouring of rage and frustration–not at the shooter, but at the for-profit healthcare system that failed him, and fails Americans all the time. Luigi Mangione was smart and promising, well liked by his peers, and there were no indications before the shooting that he planned to carry out a murder. In the wake of his arrest, however, we’ve learned that he was suffering from Lyme disease and horrific back pain that sometimes left him confined to bed for days at a time, and that he was convinced this would prevent him from ever having a relationship or a normal life. He had a spinal fusion surgery that instead of making things better may have made things worse. In a manifesto he was carrying, in his notebook, and scattered among his trail of internet posts, there’s a story of despair, increasing desperation, and finally anger.
None of this justifies what he did, but it’s easy to see why the overwhelming response in the days following was often sympathetic to his rage, if not his actions. Americans have a near universal experience of being betrayed by a heavily for-profit system that is designed to help them and often harms them instead, solely for the sake of higher profits. This experience cuts across partisan and class lines. Only the richest of the very rich can buy their way out of a catastrophic health event and…
