Luigi Mangione Changed The Conversation, Plus
Whisky Pete just fired the military's lawyers, plus
Luigi Mangione Changed The Conversation
I’ve written endlessly about health care and health insurance in this country, including a lot about why this country spends much more per capita on health care with much worse outcomes than most developed countries, of which we can’t reasonably be considered one.
Writing about health care and insurance means reading about them; I’ve more than a passing familiarity with how the institutional press have traditionally approached the subject, and I can tell you that, since Luigi Mangione executed insurance giant UnitedHealth executive Brian Thompson, that approach has changed.
Three enraging characteristics of domestic coverage have held steady for decades. These are a matter-of fact-acceptance of fraud and criminality among insurers, in which it’s unremarkable what the companies are doing and that they aren’t punished for it beyond fines which rarely make a siginificant dent in profits and never lead to jail time for executives or the death penalty for a company; a refusal to compare health care outcomes here with those in other countries, and, in the rare cases when that did happen, to offer explanations; and a fanatical devotion to avoiding discussion of universal single-payer healthcare in the context of addressing the flaws in our system-not-a-system which are repetitively described without contrasting them to the robust social welfare systems in other countries which include but are far from limited to universal healthcare.
Even reasonably adversarial outlets like ProPublica often failed to provide that larger context in which the U.S. operates.
What Mangione did was uncap a lifetime of bottled-up, incandescent rage on the part of the great many people who have been ill-treated by insurers, or whose loved ones have, whether it’s being denied essential care to the point of permanent disability or death, or being tipped into financial ruin by billing decisions, or merely frustrated to the point of screaming before getting a satisfactory outcome.
Health care beat writers—not all but many—have been shocked out of accepting as normal what people exerience on a daily basis, and what insurers get away with. Coverage which more often than not tracked the ostensibly neutral, both-sides approach routinely inflicted on us by our political press has been transformed into advocacy journalism literally from one day to the next, and journalists who may never have covered the subjects have been drawn into the fray.
We’ve also been seeing a fair amount of please-don’t kill-me-sure-we-have-issues-and-we’ll-do-better responses from health insurance executives and apologists. And all of this happened all but overnight. We hear from people who say that the murder is unequivocally wrong and will change nothing, but it already has. The discourse is not nothing; it has been transformed, and it is not changing back.
This is not to say that we’re going to see universal health care overnight, or a different approach to punishing corporations and the people who run them when they attack individuals or our society, especially in our current circumstances, but I will repeat: the discourse is not nothing. The threat against the status quo is not nothing.
The inspiration for this particular discursion is a piece I saw on business journalism outlet CNBC, not known as a hotbed of anti-corporate sentiment.
While it includes dismissive segments from UnitedHealth’s top medical officer, explaining how actually the company treats its customers just swell, and better all the time, it also features outright hostile and well-informed appearances from academics and industry experts, and it includes relatively extensive discussion of those traditionally excluded unhappy comparisons between our health care outcomes and those of our other countries, and the reasons for them.
This is a business channel. This is all but unheard of. The discourse has changed. This is not nothing.
Whisky Pete just fired the military's lawyers
This might should be the lead item of today’s newsletter, but here we are. I wrote ages ago (like, three weeks) about the accelerationist characteristics of the maniacs at present in charge of our country:
and I wrote yesterday, with reference to the prospective takeover of the postal service, about my conviction that they have no intention of allowing the sort of midterm elections that might interfere with their project.
Firing the lawyers who tell the military what kind of conduct is legal under the uniform military code of justice and the Constitution, and replacing them with lickspittle dogs-bodies, suggests the intention to do stuff that will not pass consitutional muster, perhaps including using the military against civilians should we get to the point of mass protests.
Messing with the postal service’s delivery of mail-in ballots is one way to influence an election; declaring martial law, with a minor in incarcerating enemies of the state, is another.
I realize this sounds extreme, but one must recognize that three or four generations of these homicidal reactionary crackheads have been waiting and planning for somewhere between 50 and 80 years, depending on when one starts the count, to implement their vile plans for the country, and that those plans don’t include an emphasis on an inclusive democracy.
For what it’s worth.
Music
The Siegal-Schwall Band, 953 West, “Just Another Song About the Country Sung by a City Boy;”
King Hannah, Big Swimmer, “New York, Let’s Do Nothing;”
Warpaint, Warpaint, “Disco/Very;”
Aldous Harding, Designer, “Designer.”
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