No 21st century columnist should have to write this to members of a civil society, but murder is wrong. It is immoral by every measure of that word. That ought to be self-evident.
This is a nation governed by laws and processes, not vigilantism. When people applaud the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, as many have done, they dishonor civilization and reveal their own warped sense of ethics.
Ugly as this is, it isn’t new to America. In the 1930s, when the nation was in the grips of the Great Depression, people cheered bank robber and accused murderer John Dillinger when he appeared on newsreels in movie theaters. They hissed when those films showed the federal agents trying to catch him.
This is a nation governed by laws and processes, not vigilantism. When people applaud the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, as many have done, they dishonor civilization and reveal their own warped sense of ethics.
Ugly as this is, it isn’t new to America. In the 1930s, when the nation was in the grips of the Great Depression, people cheered bank robber and accused murderer John Dillinger when he appeared on newsreels in movie theaters. They hissed when those films showed the federal agents trying to catch him.
That adulation has never ended. Several years ago, I visited the Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis, pausing at the graves of former president Benjamin Harrison, three vice presidents and numerous war veterans dating to the Revolution.
Dillinger’s grave is there, too, marked by a simple slab in the ground. It was the only one I could find that was covered in coins left by admirers.
One popular story alleges Dillinger abruptly paused during a bank robbery and returned the money his men had just taken from a farmer who happened to be there at the time. Legend has it he said, “We don’t want your money, only the bank’s.”
You don’t need an advanced degree in logic to expose this as less than heroic. Most likely, every dollar Dillinger and his gang stole that day belonged to a farmer or a laborer who had deposited it and couldn’t afford to lose it.
Some people at the time apparently didn’t care about logic or the harsh realities of running a small bank during hard times. They looked for someone to blame for their miseries.
And while the two examples are not analogous, the people cheering accused killer Luigi Mangione today don’t seem too interested in logic or nuances, either.
Lots of Americans, myself included, have had to deal with insurance denials or the second-guessing of care that doctors have prescribed. A lack of transparency makes it hard to know the extent of the problem, or of the role artificial intelligence may play, or how many people may have died for lack of care.
However, before the murder of a CEO sent social media into a lather, none of this seemed to be top-of-mind with most regular Americans.
A poll in October by the Deseret News and the Hinckley Institute of Politics, conducted by HarrisX, asked voters which issue was most important in determining which presidential candidate would get their vote. Only 5% said health care. A New York Times/Siena poll taken at about the same time found less than 1% of voters nationally identifying it as the most important issue.
And while that apathy has now been kickstarted into a top concern among some, those who laud this act of violence and accuse CEOs of murdering patients by denying care seem to understand health care about as much as Depression-era movie goers understood banking. As a study several years ago from the University of North Carolina, on “the ethics and reality of rationing in medicine” put it, “Rationing is unavoidable because need is limitless and resources are not.”
That is true whether the provider is a private insurer or a government. However, the way systems determine who is excluded, and for what reasons, is important. That is where the conversation should begin.
In the meantime, I agree with Graeme Wood, who wrote for The Atlantic, “Only the most incurious moral observer could accuse this CEO, whose name few activists knew until they started tattooing his assassin’s face on their legs, of mass killing — as if his company hunted its customers and gunned them down in the streets.”
Speaking of the CEO, Brian Thompson, Andrew Witty, the head of UnitedHealth Group, described him in a New York Times op-ed as “a brilliant, kind man who was working to make health care better for everyone.”
Thompson then said what ought to be obvious to any serious observer. “No one would design a (health care) system like the one we have. And no one did. It’s a patchwork built over decades.”
That includes many little decisions and unrelated circumstances over time.
To offer just one example: The federal government froze wages during World War II. Employers, desperate to offer something to lure new hires, gave them employer-sponsored health insurance instead of more money. This quickly caught on and led to a situation today where employment and health care go hand-in-hand.
Yes, the nation needs to reform health care and find better ways to help people, but not at the business end of a gun or under the threat of more violence.
In his manifesto, Mangione pats himself on the back for using “brutal honesty.” But, as Wood wrote for The Atlantic, “honesty and brutality are often opposed to each other.”
They make no more sense here than they did when Dillinger was talking about banks.
Dillinger’s grave is there, too, marked by a simple slab in the ground. It was the only one I could find that was covered in coins left by admirers.
One popular story alleges Dillinger abruptly paused during a bank robbery and returned the money his men had just taken from a farmer who happened to be there at the time. Legend has it he said, “We don’t want your money, only the bank’s.”
You don’t need an advanced degree in logic to expose this as less than heroic. Most likely, every dollar Dillinger and his gang stole that day belonged to a farmer or a laborer who had deposited it and couldn’t afford to lose it.
Some people at the time apparently didn’t care about logic or the harsh realities of running a small bank during hard times. They looked for someone to blame for their miseries.
And while the two examples are not analogous, the people cheering accused killer Luigi Mangione today don’t seem too interested in logic or nuances, either.
Lots of Americans, myself included, have had to deal with insurance denials or the second-guessing of care that doctors have prescribed. A lack of transparency makes it hard to know the extent of the problem, or of the role artificial intelligence may play, or how many people may have died for lack of care.
However, before the murder of a CEO sent social media into a lather, none of this seemed to be top-of-mind with most regular Americans.
A poll in October by the Deseret News and the Hinckley Institute of Politics, conducted by HarrisX, asked voters which issue was most important in determining which presidential candidate would get their vote. Only 5% said health care. A New York Times/Siena poll taken at about the same time found less than 1% of voters nationally identifying it as the most important issue.
And while that apathy has now been kickstarted into a top concern among some, those who laud this act of violence and accuse CEOs of murdering patients by denying care seem to understand health care about as much as Depression-era movie goers understood banking. As a study several years ago from the University of North Carolina, on “the ethics and reality of rationing in medicine” put it, “Rationing is unavoidable because need is limitless and resources are not.”
That is true whether the provider is a private insurer or a government. However, the way systems determine who is excluded, and for what reasons, is important. That is where the conversation should begin.
In the meantime, I agree with Graeme Wood, who wrote for The Atlantic, “Only the most incurious moral observer could accuse this CEO, whose name few activists knew until they started tattooing his assassin’s face on their legs, of mass killing — as if his company hunted its customers and gunned them down in the streets.”
Speaking of the CEO, Brian Thompson, Andrew Witty, the head of UnitedHealth Group, described him in a New York Times op-ed as “a brilliant, kind man who was working to make health care better for everyone.”
Thompson then said what ought to be obvious to any serious observer. “No one would design a (health care) system like the one we have. And no one did. It’s a patchwork built over decades.”
That includes many little decisions and unrelated circumstances over time.
To offer just one example: The federal government froze wages during World War II. Employers, desperate to offer something to lure new hires, gave them employer-sponsored health insurance instead of more money. This quickly caught on and led to a situation today where employment and health care go hand-in-hand.
Yes, the nation needs to reform health care and find better ways to help people, but not at the business end of a gun or under the threat of more violence.
In his manifesto, Mangione pats himself on the back for using “brutal honesty.” But, as Wood wrote for The Atlantic, “honesty and brutality are often opposed to each other.”
They make no more sense here than they did when Dillinger was talking about banks.
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