Can health insurance rage bring America together?
Finally: a truly bipartisan topic breaks through the noise
I read Elijah Wald’s Narcocorrido: A Journey into the Music of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas in 2002. Mexico has a long tradition of folk balladeers. Some artists celebrate murdering drug kingpins, the largest being the 32-million-album-selling Los Tigres del Norte. Songs like “Muerte Anunciada” pay homage to Pablo Escobar, and their fans love it.
Is it due to their celebration of murderous thugs? For some, perhaps, just as some celebrated the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Yet there’s been a specious argument made by certain commentators about the size of the population championing violence. As with narcocorridos—and at least one folk song that’s popped up this week—it’s about sticking it to the man while expressing our chronic dissatisfaction with a system actually rigged against us.
Would Luigi Mangione have hit so hard if we weren’t about to give the power of the government to the billionaire class? Perhaps. But the man captured a moment in American society nearly all of us can relate to: the despicable and murderous insurance industry that runs our healthcare system.
United Healthcare represents the worst of the worst. Their parent company, United Health Group, made $189B in revenue this year. The largest insurer by revenue in the nation, they’re also notorious for denying the most claims: 32% in an industry where the average is 20%. The CEO-to-median employee ratio at UHG is 352:1
These statistics are especially harrowing when considering the product: our health. People are, as a friend said to me long ago, “sick and tired of being sick and tired.” While I find no pleasure in violence, I can intimately understand the rage against an industry that has gone to great lengths to profit at our expense—a topic I spoke about in more detail in November.
Below are three articles that speak to this topic worth reading, followed by three other health-related pieces.
Alleged CEO Shooter Luigi Mangione Was Radicalized by Pain (Shatter Zone)
Robert Evans’s astute analysis of what we know about Luigi Mangione attacks the story from a variety of angles while maintaining an air of intellectual humility. He’s putting together pieces without overstepping the boundaries of speculation. A worthwhile read.
This is a man who had options. He could have been almost anything he wanted to be. And the thing he ultimately chose to do with his life, after suffering a debilitating injury, was to shoot the CEO of United Healthcare.
Luigi Mangione was radicalized by pain.
With Anger Roiling Around Health Insurance, Will We See a Class Awakening? (Truthout)
As mentioned above, the crack in partisanship that the insurance industry has inspired is one of the few rays of hope in recent months. The idea that an administration that’s stacking cabinet positions from the billionaire class will fight for the rest of us was always absurd. Now, the real challenge: maintaining momentum in an age of fractured attention.
Instead of mourning the death of a CEO, they mourned the tens of thousands who die each year in the US because they lack health insurance. They mourned their spouses, parents, and children whose potentially life-saving care was not covered by their insurers. They mourned their lost mobility. They mourned the lives they used to live, but could not maintain, due to untreated chronic pain. Rather than centering Thompson’s humanity, as scolding voices have demanded, they centered their own, and the humanity and suffering of others who were harmed by the insurance industry.
UnitedHealth Is Strategically Limiting Access to Critical Treatment for Kids With Autism (ProPublica)
United HealthGroup CEO, Andrew Witty, published an op-ed in the NY Times today championing Brian Thompson as someone unsatisfied with the status quo (while ignoring his former employee’s alleged insider trading) and promising that his company is fighting for a better healthcare system. Meanwhile, outside of this obvious damage control marketing ploy, the team at ProPublica has uncovered yet another hideous practice at UHG: denying autistic kids the care they need.
The insurer that has been paying for her son’s therapy, UnitedHealthcare, has begun — to the befuddlement of his clinical team — denying him the hours they say he requires to maintain his progress. Inside the insurance conglomerate, the nation’s largest and most profitable, the slashing of care to children like Benji does have a reason, though it has little to do with their needs. It is part of a secret internal cost-cutting campaign that targets a growing financial burden for the company: the treatment of thousands of children with autism across the country.
Hospitals Gave Patients Meds During Childbirth, Then Reported Them For Positive Drug Tests (Marshall Project)
For all the talk about informed consent around vaccines, it would be great if more energy focused on mind-boggling stories like this.
Amairani Salinas was 32 weeks pregnant with her fourth child in 2023 when doctors at a Texas hospital discovered that her baby no longer had a heartbeat. As they prepped her for an emergency cesarean section, they gave her midazolam, a benzodiazepine commonly prescribed to keep patients calm. A day later, the grieving mother was cradling her stillborn daughter when a social worker stopped by her room to deliver another devastating blow: Salinas was being reported to child welfare authorities. A drug test had turned up traces of benzodiazepine — the very medication that staff had administered before wheeling her into surgery.
America Stopped Cooking With Tallow for a Reason (The Atlantic)
Out of the other side of seed oil pseudoscience (it’s toxic!) comes the proposed solution: tallow. That’s RFK Jr’s take, who called for McDonald’s to return a great time when frying in animal fat was the real key to health. The problem: it wasn’t, which is why companies stopped using it.
In 1962, Americans began to consume more vegetable fats, largely in the form of margarine; four years later, cardiovascular deaths began a decades-long decline. From 1940 to 1996, deaths from heart disease fell by 56 percent, and they continued falling through 2013, albeit at a lower rate. Although the decline can be partly attributed to factors such as better blood-pressure control and lower rates of smoking, “the increase in polyunsaturated fat is probably one of the primary factors, if not the primary factor, in dramatically reducing heart-disease death” as well as lowering the risk of diabetes, dementia, and total mortality, Walter Willett, a Harvard professor of nutrition and epidemiology, told me.
Influencers selling fake cures for polycystic ovary syndrome (BBC)
Cosplaying endocrinologists has sadly become trendy in wellness spaces. Health “coaches” start ordering blood tests for their clients, then pretend they can read them—and then sell their clients supplements. In this case, a woman signed up for a $3,600 “health protocol.” A year later, none of her symptoms improved. But her bank account was certainly lighter.
“I left the programme with a worse relationship to my body and food, [feeling] that I didn’t have the capacity to improve my PCOS,” she said.