Luigi Mangione-inspired ballot initiative targets health insurance denials

>What precedent are we setting by explicitly making "murder someone" a viable path to making progress on your personal political agenda?

No one's setting it. Things have been that way in the past. A lot of laws now are designed to avoid allowing organizations to brutalize people so badly that those people view violence as the only recourse.

When there are no judicial penalties for running a vast machine of death like UnitedHealthcare, then eventually people seek extrajudicial ones. Our goal should be to make sure that this doesn't happen. Luigi is a symptom, not the sickness to be treated.

It's becoming acceptable to people because many people increasingly feel their means for change are being suppressed or their voices ignored. This kind of violence is just the beginning. It's what happens when societies start to collapse.

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." -John F. Kennedy

The thing about MLK, is that he existed as a backdrop to more violent alternatives. He is celebrated for being the better of those options, but when companies are not willing to negotiate with the nicer option, eventually they will make the violent one inevitable.

Additionally, I think the thing people get wrong about the "Luigi as martyr figure" is that UHC is itself a violent organization responsible for many deaths. When you project that you are only able to listen to "profits" and people don't have any way to provide feedback via "profits" to you, then they're going to look for other kinds of speech. And unfortunately, this kind of speech was made clear to work (see insurance companies sitting up and fixing a couple of the policies they had in the pipeline as a result of this action, and people's response to the UHC CEO being not negative).

I don't like this direction we're headed in, but I'd be lying if I said I saw other ways to make headway here. Especially given the current administration's interest in regulation.

If the system were capable of holding companies and CEOs accountable for behavior that causes obvious and irreparable harm to thousands or millions of people, there would be no need for people like Luigi, and he would not be viewed the way that he is.

> In a lot of ways this is like all the media attention on school shootings: we will see copycats, and the next one may not be targeting an unsympathetic healthcare CEO.

Would it target unsympathetic CEOs in other industries? I am just trying to measure the pros and cons here.

Jokes aside, that Luigi Mangione is a martyr to some subset of the population is hardly surprising. Unlike school shootings, where the senseless violence victimizes only eminently innocent people, what Mangione did victimizes someone seem by a large section of society as a perpetrator.

I agree that it is unsettling, but only in the sense that it feels like some important piece of the social contract has been lost along the way, and it is hard to know where it will end.

There seems to be an increasingly large subgroup of people who would never have the nerve to commit murder but are participating in the radicalization of people that _are_ capable of doing such things. They are mostly OK with it now because it's benefitting them. The problem will arise when things inevitably get out of control.

> What precedent are we setting by explicitly making "murder someone" a viable path to making progress on your personal political agenda?

I think you got it backwards.

The question you should be asking yourself is why did so many Americans supported and even applauded the idea of murdering a CEO of a medical insurance company.

You barely get this level of reaction from condemning sadistic murderers with the death penalty. But when it happened to a specific CEO of a specific healthcare company, you saw a wave of popular support across the US.

Why do you think regular working people leading regular working class lives enthusiastically applauded it?

> What precedent are we setting by explicitly making "murder someone" a viable path to making progress on your personal political agenda?

If this is what you are worried about, America is pretty far behind the leading edge:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Shinzo_Abe

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/25/asia/court-dissolution-unific...

It's a great point. But then the other side of the equation is, when the providers charge too much and the insurance won't approve, or later (months later) decided they weren't paying and now there's a bill, then guess who gets the surprise in the mail. It's the customer, the patient, who has to mediate between these kafkaesque entities.

If insurance fought behind the scenes with each provider instead of blaming the patient, maybe they wouldn't be viewed as the bad guys so much.

The health care system - insurance and provider - needs a centralized perspective rather than attacking this or that piece of it. That's also how reform should happen - no one wants to hear it, but it has to be planned centrally or at least a central authority should expand the legal guard rails. It already exists with Medicare, why not expand on that idea and cover more ages?

Ballot initiative, informally named....

I think the article might be trying to be a little too edgy with its title.

The insurers are genocidal torturers who exploit everyone who's forced to interact with them. They're backed by all law enforcement.

[flagged]

No you're not.

You are going to see health insurance companies leave the state, just like the property insurance carriers did.

No developed country gives doctors absolute power to authorize treatments.

There isn't an infinite bucket of money to draw from. At some point, spending priorities have to be made and elsewhere, it's usually based on cost vs. years of quality of life improvement, so giving antibiotics to dozens of children wins out against a third MRI for acute back pain for an 80 year old.

The US is abnormal in how much discretion it gives doctors and we are incredibly inefficient with our spending because of it.