United Health care CEO shot dead in N.Y.'s gun free zone

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Hot off the fabrication presses...

NY Times names suspect: "The man being questioned in Altoona in connection with the killing of Brian Thompson is Luigi Mangione, 26, according to three law enforcement officials."

NY Post: person of interest in CEO shooting is "former Ivy league student" and "tech wiz" who "liked online quotes from 'Unabomber' Ted Kaczynski raging against the country’s medical community."

From press conference: Police: person of interest's gun was a ghost gun that may have been made on a 3D printer.


Me finding out they arrested a man named Luigi Mangione as the alleged UCH assassin.

As the media sweeps it out to make room for the next new current thing, I believe it'd be a mistake to pretend like we all just didn't witness the mass public reaction to what happened to UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a midtown Manhattan sidewalk in broad daylight.

Do we know what actually happened? No, we don't. Who does? As with all major events, it's doubtful anyone who claims to actually does either. However, even those who say "it's all theater" severely underestimate the power of theater — a point we will continue to repeat because it's extremely important to comprehend. The magician on stage performing an amazing trick may be just that, just a magician. The audience even goes to the show aware of this fact. But their reactions are real.

It doesn't matter what spin the media attempts to apply to it after the fact. That public outrage — that squelchy Eldritch Abomination-esque thing writhing in the dark — is still right there, right under the surface, barely concealed.

I've been doing this a while, and I've never seen a reaction like that, not even after 9/11. Never.

Are there parallels in history? I'm sure. But as it goes in the modern moment, even historians have since been asking when is the last time anyone has witnessed the public react this way to the announcement that one man's life was given an untimely end? In my whole life I have never seen so many deeply visceral, personal reactions to a major event as this one.

How many people's lives did this one man's existence inadvertently touch?
That's before we even get into what he symbolically represented in the eyes of so many. That's before we even discuss the lawsuit his company was involved in accusing said company —  the 8th largest by revenue in the entire world and the largest health insurer in the U.S. who by far denies the most health insurance claims — of utilizing a weaponized AI to deny people care.

“UnitedHealth uses AI model with 90% error rate to deny care, lawsuit alleges: For the largest health insurer in the US, AI's error rate is like a feature, not a bug,” reads the Nov. 16, 2023 Ars Technica headline:

    UnitedHealthcare, the largest health insurance company in the US, is allegedly using a deeply flawed AI algorithm to override doctors' judgments and wrongfully deny critical health coverage to elderly patients. This has resulted in patients being kicked out of rehabilitation programs and care facilities far too early, forcing them to drain their life savings to obtain needed care that should be covered under their government-funded Medicare Advantage Plan. That's all according to a lawsuit filed this week in the US District Court...

The next day after the shooting occurred, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield abruptly reversed its decision to implement what the media reported as “arbitrarily” capping anesthesia coverage during surgeries in certain states to a set time limit, a move which the American Society of Anesthesiologists president called “a cynical money grab” and “just the latest in a long line of appalling behavior by commercial health insurers looking to drive their profits up at the expense of patients and physicians providing essential care”.

It should go without saying that patients have literally no control over how long a surgery might last, and surgeons being put on what amounts to a financial gameshow timer seems ridiculous — dangerous at best and sounds like the plot of B horror film at worst.

When WFSB Channel 3 reported the decision's reversal on X in a post that has since received 8.7M views, this was the top comment underneath:



The bullet casings used in the crime supposedly had "deny, defend, depose" inscribed on them — an obvious reference to the tactics health insurance companies are known to employ in order to avoid paying claims.

It's only been a few days. There are memes. There's merch. While a manhunt for him is still underway, they're holding suspect look alike contests in NYC and stores are selling out of jackets that look like the one the gunman is wearing in the crime scene photo released by police. People forget that although Bonnie and Clyde were criminals, they were also widely seen as Depression-era folk heroes at the time. Robin Hood was technically a criminal, too.

This observation is in no way a condoning of vigilante justice whatever. It's merely an observation, but one I believe it is worth taking the time to fully consider.

Society wears a mask. Those who don't seem to realize it is a mask go about their daily lives acting as if that mask is the real true face of it.

Well, surprise. It isn't.

The pandemic should've taught more people to realize this by now. Others simply don't seem to want to face it (no pun intended). What keeps society together and functioning underneath it all is really just trust in a series of basic agreements, and those agreements have grown increasingly tenuous and fragile with each passing year — more especially since the authoritarianism unleashed in 2020, and perhaps most especially since the uptick in censorship of online discourse.

If We the People feel we have no outlets anywhere to redress our grievances and vent our frustration at a massive bureaucracy that has incredible power and control over our lives but refuses time and again to listen to us, that mask society wears is going to continue to slip until eventually it falls all the way off.

The French Revolution isn't some fictional horror story. It's a history lesson.

When people feel they have no other recourse for grievances in the face of an unmovable bureaucracy taking more than it gives, history shows what inevitably happens.

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
— John F. Kennedy

If the temperature of the nation just got taken on a mass scale, I'd say it's a bit feverish out there.

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