Last week, I had to write an exam about coordination, cooperation, and collaboration in public policy, which ended up really being an essay on power, while the news regarding Luigi Mangione was breaking in real time. As I typed up my exam throughout Tuesday afternoon, I took breaks on social media, where there were consistent updates regarding his life. There were screenshots of his mug shots and social profiles. There were people crushing over him and rallying against the McDonald’s worker who turned him into the police. When I was done scrolling, I had to turn back to my academic essay on: whose beliefs are the ones that actually get translated into some kind of outcome in our society? My conclusion was that the elite—those with the most power—find it easier to coordinate among their select group of people, and therefore are able to translate their beliefs into actual outcomes. The battle over power is a tale as old as time, but circumstances change. As Octavia Butler writes, “There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.”
One of the new suns—the new arenas for quests for power—in the modern age is in health care. I won’t speak about the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson itself here, but I will write about the public response. Major news outlets are condemning the violence, whereas the public is giving fandom and praise. Are people excited about Luigi Mangione, or are they more excited about him as a medium, through which they can express that they want to topple power? In Mangione, people see anger personified, someone who has caused disruption. I don’t know if people want to focus on his legal repercussions, but people do want to be a part of this resistance.
One of my biggest takeaways this week is: people want to be a part of something. Mangione has become an instrument through which people can channel their anger. Retweeting his picture and saying “Here’s someone who’s actually done something” translates to: Nothing I’ve tried has worked. My voice hasn’t felt like it has mattered, and now someone’s has caused attention. However, sharing where he went to school, where he worked, and the details of his Twitter profile are not the entire story. And if we make it the entire story, if we continue to only have conversations about Luigi Mangione and not about UnitedHealthcare (or any other major insurance company), this momentum and frenzy will end right here, because it will center around the medium and not the cause. In order to use all of this anger and channel it into something tangible, that energy should be directed towards 1) learning more about unethical health care practices 2) ideating demands and 3) creating impactful action that is actually disruptive to these health care companies. To translate this momentum into impact, we must coalesce around the cause rather than a medium.
Health care companies like UnitedHealthcare will let the public have their moment and obsess over Mangione because this is not disruptive to their practices or their profits, yet. Are employers—the largest provider of health insurance for those under 65—going to back out of their deals with UnitedHealthcare? Are employees at UnitedHealthcare going to go on strike over unfair practices? Will UnitedHealthcare tangibly receive less revenue because of how this event has unfolded? If the answer to these questions is no, then this whole event will be recorded as another blip in the radar, where the public became passionate about health care reform, with no tangible effects on the health care system.
Here are some questions, in order to understand what public demands could be:
Some employees at UnitedHealthcare are leaking emails and correspondence to the entire company—what role do these employees play? Can we learn any lessons from the ways in which way Boeing employees pushed for reform and apply them to this context?
Can employers threaten to back out of their contracts with UnitedHealthcare?
Who is involved in the supply chain which could directly impact the revenue of major health insurance companies?
Who defines violence? There is physical violence and structural violence; why isn’t purposefully denying life-saving claims denoted as violence?
What kind of pressure has shown to affect insurance company policies the most?
To me, these questions have potential to consider change that is disruptive to these health insurance companies and create tangible demands. Notice this moment with really calm, quiet eyes. By wearing a lens to truly take stock of the moment, one will subtly notice how much explicit anger and discontent exists in the U.S. People elected Trump, despite weeding him out in the last election. People are celebrating a murder. People are watching celebrity trials with wide eyes. People are really tired, and they don’t know who to blame it on. People just want to see power fall. People are tired of feeling crushed by bills and pushed into poverty over their health when they just want to get by. Notice where people are.
Systemic issues take time to weed out; they won’t change overnight, no matter how much we retweet. Movements need to be beyond just their leaders, and unfortunately, for the health care companies, there are many small leaders and micro-lobbying projects. For the interests of the average citizen, there are a few central leaders. One of my conclusions this week is that it’s difficult for masses to organize and hold meetings and strike and put pressure in a disruptive, orchestrated manner. To orchestrate these kind of tactics among millions takes a serious amount of leadership, and people must understand what’s at stake. On the other hand, it’s so much easier for a few select elites to coordinate among a select few on a phone call and collude with each other. The dynamics of this conundrum are making the masses suffer, and we see this unfolding in real time. We want change. We want to lead better lives, with more affordable ways of being.
I’ll continue to think about how to make this event translate into more tangible policy change, but for right now, I think we can acknowledge the discontent. It’s alluring to get excited over a person’s profile, but it’s not enough. We can notice that we may be on the precipice of change, but only if we expand our vision past Mangione and onto the bigger picture.
things i’m reading (and you can, too!):
“Executive Safety” by
in“In other words, the massive corporations know the harm they cause and the anger they foment, and instead of addressing and changing how their business models are built on exploiting people, hurting people, and at times killing people, they are instead attempting to sort out how to go about their business without changing a thing.”
“Insurance companies like United Healthcare are not the only ones to blame for a broken system” in STAT News
“Special interests show up, the rest of us don’t. This is formally known as the “‘collective action problem.’”
“I used to do health insurance company PR. Here’s what I think the backlash is missing” by
in STAT News“In the years since then, UnitedHealth, Cigna, and a handful of other New York Stock Exchange corporations have cemented their roles as unelected gatekeepers to care, and Americans are now waking up as they never have before to the consequences of that. If their rage can be harnessed and channeled with clear policy proposals, that dike the industry built might just give way without more violence.”
“A Manifesto Against For-Profit Health Insurance Companies” by
“And that’s why they are scrubbing their executives’ profiles from their websites and putting up fences around their headquarters. Because they know what they have done.”
P.S. thank you for making the movie SICKO freely available!
“Luigi Mangione Wrote Online About a Spine Disorder. Other Patients Say It’s Hell” in Rolling Stone
“‘I don’t think this story is about Mangione at all, really,’ Basile says, noting that she would never support gun violence. ‘And I don’t think this is about the CEO either. I think it’s about a revolution of the people who are constantly suffering at the hands of greedy insurance companies. I also think that chronic illness and disability communities have been saying this for years and years and years.’”
“CNN Argues Americans Are to Blame for How the Health Care System Works” in Rolling Stone
“As Democrats negotiated the Affordable Care Act between 2009 and 2010, health insurance lobbyists quietly funneled more than $100 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to run a sprawling campaign slamming the legislation and its supporters.”
Thank you for reading! If you liked this post, you may also like “who gets to hold power?” and “The People, United, Will Never Be Defeated,”