A gun with three bullets; one man dead on the pavement, one man in custody.
From a distance, the death of Brian Thompson looks like any other in a uniquely violent America.
I, personally, wish every family be spared the fate of the Thompsons.
UnitedHealthcare signage is displayed on an office building in Phoenix, Arizona on July 19, 2023.PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP/Getty Images
So long as we tolerate the existence of health insurance for profit, no one will be spared.
The arrangement of our health finance system is lethalandinordinately expensive.
Few are spared and none are distant.
Only12 percent of these campaigns reach their goals.
Yet without insurance, things can be even worse; the same punishments somehow magnified.
Health insurance works the same way.
David Roth of Defector explained whyin his reflectionon the 2024 election.
These tiny reforms, as titanic and final as theyre sold to us as, will continue to fail.
American Excellence
Shit is fucked up and bullshit.
We now live in the era of Bailamos nothing is forbidden anymore.
Let me explain how.
In a given year,50 percent of medical expenses come from 5 percent of the population.
Meanwhile, the price of care increases every year,totally unassociatedwith how much health care people receive.
In the 1960s, the government stepped in.
Thats not even counting the roughly17 percentprivate insurers spend onadministrativecosts, about six times what Medicare spends on administration.
The CEOs of insurance companies will whine about how costs are increasing.
But the insurance industry altogether isnt really that upset.
This is not meant to depict health care providers as blameless.
Theres a lot of waste in health care.
Prices are totally unmoored from costs.
Two MRIs from the exact same MRI machine can havea 4.5x cost differencebased on whos paying for them.
Sometimes theresoutright fraud, usually perpetrated on the most vulnerable patients 90 percent of hysterectomies are unnecessary.
The rot runs deep.
Americas private insurance connection is supposed to be a counterweight to all this graft.
Its failed; after 70 years, we must consider that perhaps it doesnt want to succeed.
(Its the prices, stupid, quipped legendary health economist Uwe Reinhardt.)
One in five adults with medical debt thinktheyll never be able to pay it off.
Two-thirds of adults who avoided care because of cost said their problems had worsened because of it.
Theres no room for equivocation: Health care costs kill people.
But that lets the people who put us here off the hook.
Nobodys put it better than epidemiologist and writerAbby Cartus.
The wretched circumstance of health finance in America may not be intentional, but neither is it accidental.
It emerges directly from its organization according to the sole principle of having to create shareholder value.
December 4 isnt how things are supposed to work.
Executives are supposed to look down from atop the great murder machine, not get crushed under its weight.
But violence the loud kind will inevitably erupt from an institution created and nourished by acts of violence.
If all lives are equal, then all deaths are too.
Gains made under the Affordable Care Act have been erased.
More people are insured than they were before the ACA, but many more people areunderinsured.
This is not a question of policy, but power.
Its been five fallow years for health justice.
Is this the spark we need, or is it just a directionless moment of cultural catharsis?
Im not optimistic, but Im hopeful; Im putting my boots on.
There is no alternative but the nihilism of lonely Luigi Mangione.
