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…
