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Luigi Mangione and the Morality of Killing

Luigi Mangione and the Morality of Killing

written by Kieran Allen December 22, 2024

Kieran Allen delves into the establishment spectacle of condemnation surrounding Luigi Mangione, who has gained folk hero status after allegedly assassinating Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Health Care. Allen explores the morally bankrupt world of private health insurance, where companies like United Health Care prioritise profit over people’s lives on a daily basis, leading to thousands of preventable deaths.

Luigi Mangione has achieved folk hero status after his alleged assassination of Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Health Care. One viral post showed Tony Soprano with the caption, “In this house, Luigi Mangione is a hero, end of story’. It captured the mood of millions.

The mainstream establishment are worried. The Irish Sun, for example, ran an opinion piece from a professor of criminology who stated that Mangione ‘is not a hero nor an anti-hero, this is just another violent man who thinks his violent rantings deserve our attention, our time and airtime’. More substantially, the big US health insurance corporations have taken down photos and details of their executives from their websites.

The context is straightforward. Luigi Mangione comes from a relatively privileged background but suffered from severe back pain. Like many Americans, he dealt with the health insurance industry. In his manifesto, he wrote, ‘Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but has our life expectancy?’

Irish readers may need some insight. In a privatised health care system many rely on insurance to cover any hospital admittance. But as the primary aim of the health insurance sector is profit, corporations take in millions in public funds and then overbill agencies like Medicare or just cut off treatment for patients. If you need to know how it works, just watch Michael Moore’s film, Sicko, which you can get for free on Youtube.

United Healthcare had the highest claim-denial rate of any private insurance company, at 32%. This meant that chemotherapy treatment for patients was stopped while others were just cut off from other life-saving treatments. Brian Thompson received total compensation of $10.2 million in 2023. Company profits rose on his watch, jumping to more than $16 billion that year, from $12 billion in 2021. In other words, the more patents that were denied health care, the more the corporation’s profits soared.

Now we return to the question of morality.

When someone pulls out a gun and kills another person, the political establishment demand that every public figure engages in a ritual of condemnation. This type of official pacifism is particularly prevalent in the Irish Free State. It is as if Daniel O Conell’s reputed words,  ‘No political change is worth the shedding of a single drop of human blood’, has echoed through the generations.

Yet every single day, 4,000 people die because they lack clean drinking water. Many of these lives could be saved though the supply of water purification tablets which cost less than €10 for two hundred. In the longer run, of course, it requires investment in sanitation and sewerage facilities. Yet when asked why water purification tablets cannot be supplied, we are told that it is due to the working of the market and the laws of supply and demand.

In one case, there appears an individual with a conscious will, who is morally judged. In the other, there appears an inevitability caused by the outworking of economic laws. Despite all talk of responsibility for your actions, individuals disappear.

This paradoxical contrast between individual assassination and mass killing broke down in the case of United Healthcare. There was an individual who actually took decisions that led to life or death. Of course, he did not stand at a hospital bedside and ‘choose’ a patient’s fate but probably decided on algorithms which anonymised their victims. The result was still the same.

So, no, we will not be condemning Luigi Mangione. Far better to condemn a for profit system that leads to the premature death of many. Even better, know that behind the anonymous rule of the market lie decision makers – real people – who make life and death decisions. 

The reaction on social media is a form of fantasy. Many think that the CEO of United Healthcare got his just desserts by a 21st century Jessie James or Robin Hood. Most would probably agree that it would be better if Brian Thompson were jailed for manslaughter rather than assassinated. But in the absence of this becoming a realistic prospect, many engage in a social media fantasy.

This is not to advocate for the assassination of CEOs. This is not because of a moral argument, but a simple recognition of the fact that others will fill the boots of Brian Thompson. Tragically, United Healthcare will continue to deny lifesaving medical treatments. It will require more than Luigi Mangione to right that wrong.

The assassination of Brian Thompson brings to mind the case of Herschel Grynszpan who was a Jewish refugee living in Paris. In 1938, he walked into the German Embassy in Paris and assassinated a Nazi diplomat. In faraway Mexico, Leon Trotsky wrote, ‘A single isolated hero cannot replace the masses. But we understand only too clearly the inevitability of such convulsive acts of despair and vengeance. All our emotions, all our sympathies are with the self-sacrificing avengers even though they have been unable to discover the correct road.

It is a sentiment that we share concerning Luigi Mangione.

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