USA: Why the Shooter Is Seen as a Hero

by Daniela Ranieri

It happens that a 26-year-old Italian-American, Luigi Mangione, is suspected of having waited at 6 a.m. outside a Manhattan hotel for Brian Thompson, CEO of United HealthCare, a health insurance company, and shooting him dead with a few gunshots. It also happens that Mangione becomes a hero on social media for having “executed” one of the direct beneficiaries of the brutally ruthless system in which, in the United States, only those who have health insurance or an employer providing it can receive treatment — and therefore survive. Thompson’s company recorded $300 billion in revenue in 2023. Mangione, who is not exactly a member of the proletariat (he is the son of real estate entrepreneurs, attended private schools, and studied at elite universities), justified his choice in an “anti-capitalist manifesto” (he was arrested while eating at a McDonald’s, ironically). Even if he acted out of madness caused by back pain (he suffers from a bone disorder), he highlighted a socially relevant point: “These parasites had it coming.”

Despite so-called Obamacare, which funded a few million private insurance plans with public money, the system built on the monetization of health care remains unchanged. The insurance meat grinder requires an American citizen to spend between $500 and $1,800 a month for partial coverage, meaning that the costs of additional procedures or exams fall on the patient. We remember, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, people hospitalized in intensive care with bilateral pneumonia who received bills for tens of thousands of dollars.

After Thompson’s murder, stories and testimonies of horror have emerged: patients going to hospitals for surgery, only to be left in the operating room after discovering that their policy does not cover procedures for conditions involving adjacent organs; elderly people dying alone without assistance; impoverished new mothers left to agonize in trailers. The real dystopia of fentanyl addicts collapsing on the streets of San Francisco epitomizes the collapse of American-made Western society, where, among other atrocities, if you don’t have health insurance, you are considered disposable (see the 2023 film A Good Person).

Therefore, the news of the shooting and the sympathy it has generated is not merely a matter of crime reporting, no more than the Sarajevo assassination by Gavrilo Princip was. It marks a peak moment in the crisis of liberal democracies. The world’s most ruthless society — America, built on brutal social Darwinism — remains our ideal model, just as the United States dominates our foreign policy. Don’t you see the rising number of advertisements for private insurance companies, where famous, wealthy, and healthy individuals tenderly ask viewers, “How are you?” — viewers who may have just spent hours on the phone trying to book an urgent exam through the public health system, only to receive an appointment 16 months later (if they’re still alive)? Isn’t it clear that enriching private healthcare and gutting the public system is the strategy employed by all recent governments (except the Conte II government, where Minister Speranza’s planned funds were slashed by the pandemic) to lead us inevitably toward the American model?

What is the differentiated autonomy law recently rejected by the Constitutional Court if not a precise plan to create top-tier healthcare for the wealthy — where the best professionals will be deployed — and subpar public healthcare for the poor, with fewer, likely less competent doctors, and more premature deaths (which means fewer pensions to pay)? Hospitals, like universities, have become businesses. In 1993, the Local Health Units (USLs), established in 1978 under the National Health System, were renamed Local Health Companies (ASLs). A company has a clear function: replacing a public-service director with a manager whose primary duty, in the post-welfare era, is to balance the books.

A democracy where even a social call to action like that of Landini is silenced or harshly condemned as a call to armed struggle is a regime conditioning us to avoid dissent and suppress conflict — even in matters concerning life, dignity, health, and work, the cornerstones of collective living. This allows Meloni to claim she has increased healthcare funding, when in fact it has decreased relative to GDP. In the past ten years, €37 billion has been cut from the National Health System, but the dismantling is not yet complete. The Mangione-Thompson case reveals that, in the absence of genuine democracy, private violence becomes the only form of defense against systemic violence.

Il Fatto Quotidiano, December 12, 2024