Luigi Mangione-inspired ballot initiative targets health insurance denials

https://www.newsweek.com/luigi-mangione-inspired-ballot-initiative-targets-health-insurance-denials-2052789

by howard941 • 1 year ago

75 119 1 year ago

newsweek.com

JumpCrisscross10• 1 year ago

This is a very Californian solution to the problem. Prediction: we’re going to see a lot more MRIs.

polski-g• 1 year ago

No you're not.

You are going to see health insurance companies leave the state, just like the property insurance carriers did.

JumpCrisscross10• 1 year ago

You are going to see health insurance companies leave the state

They’ll first raise rates. If those get rejected, they’ll leave. In the meantime, private equity will extract a payday [1].

[1] https://www.chcf.org/publication/private-equity-in-health-ca...

lolinder6• 1 year ago

I know this is an unpopular opinion here, but Luigi Mangione as martyr figure makes me extremely uncomfortable. This is a very different situation than the Aaron Swartz or any of the other victims of abuse by powerful people and corporations.

What precedent are we setting by explicitly making "murder someone" a viable path to making progress on your personal political agenda? It's one thing when you agree with the motive, but are we ready to accept the inevitable outcome that someone decides to engineer a high-profile murder to push a different agenda?

In a lot of ways this is like all the media attention on school shootings: we will see copycats, and the next one may not be targeting an unsympathetic healthcare CEO.

voidfunc• 1 year ago

It's becoming acceptable to people because many people increasingly feel their means for change are being suppressed or their voices ignored. This kind of violence is just the beginning. It's what happens when societies start to collapse.

JumpCrisscross10• 1 year ago

This kind of violence is just the beginning. It's what happens when societies start to collapse

Well, no. It’s what forms popular pretext for expanding police powers. If we get a second or third Mangione, search and arrest powers will have to be expanded.

Gigachad• 1 year ago

It makes people on this site uncomfortable because they are seeing that while they build their AI powered debt collectors and insurance denier startups, the general public would celebrate them being shot.

viccis2• 1 year ago

What precedent are we setting by explicitly making "murder someone" a viable path to making progress on your personal political agenda?

No one's setting it. Things have been that way in the past. A lot of laws now are designed to avoid allowing organizations to brutalize people so badly that those people view violence as the only recourse.

When there are no judicial penalties for running a vast machine of death like UnitedHealthcare, then eventually people seek extrajudicial ones. Our goal should be to make sure that this doesn't happen. Luigi is a symptom, not the sickness to be treated.

lolinder6• 1 year ago

When was the last time we named a law—informally or otherwise—after someone because they committed a high profile murder and wrote a manifesto about it?

gruez8• 1 year ago

When there are no judicial penalties for running a vast machine of death like UnitedHealthcare, then eventually people seek extrajudicial ones. Our goal should be to make sure that this doesn't happen. Luigi is a symptom, not the sickness to be treated.

Where do you draw the line between "When there are no judicial penalties [...] eventually people seek extrajudicial ones" and "some nutjob went on a shooting spree"? There's no shortage of people killing because of "the great replacement" or "pedophile elites", issues the government aren't exactly in a hurry to address. Are those also examples of "When there are no judicial penalties [...] eventually people seek extrajudicial ones", or can we just chalk them up to the shooters being nutjobs? Is the former just what people say when they're sympathetic to the shooter, similar to how terrorists you support are "rebels" or "freedom fighters"?

buzzerbetrayed2• 1 year ago

And just like that, the justification.

didgeoridoo• 1 year ago

vast machine of death

UnitedHealthcare was my health insurance provider when my daughter got her heart transplant. They paid over $2M over several years, without a single hitch. I think the only thing we were rejected for was when we asked them to cover baby formula (it was a long shot).

Mangione wasn’t even a UHC customer.

The only machine of death here was in that lunatic’s hand.

echelon2• 1 year ago

I don't think Mangione is ever going away. He's outright embraced by left-leaning folks as a hero and an answer to current ills [1].

America is a land of revolutionaries that fought to the death. That's still in our cultural DNA, and we still sell guns to people. If a Mangione incident happens again, it may embolden folks even more and become an increasingly frequent phenomena. (Teaching others how to behave through mimetic behavior and normalizing it.)

The French Revolution wasn't that long ago. A lot of incredibly violent rebellions happen all over the world. If you push people to a point, they'll act.

This is probably just the start.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1jnfgnb/antiteslamusk...

92834092322• 1 year ago

You say he is embraced by "left-leaning folks" as if he isn't embraced by conservatives as well. Ben Shapiro tried to play the same card you are and his fanbase ate him alive saying "stop trying to make this left vs right. It's a bi-partisan issue." When Ben Shapiro's fans are able to see the light for a brief moment, I think it's fair to say this specific issue reaches across the aisle.

mplanchard3• 1 year ago

If the system were capable of holding companies and CEOs accountable for behavior that causes obvious and irreparable harm to thousands or millions of people, there would be no need for people like Luigi, and he would not be viewed the way that he is.

lolinder6• 1 year ago

That is a totally separate question from whether this precedent will directly cause deaths that you and everyone else here will feel bad about. What happens when people internalize that it's not only okay but good to go kill the "bad guys" since the law won't?

zer8k2• 1 year ago

Denying life saving treatment to bolster your bottom line for shareholders is also murder by any other name. If you consider murder as requiring malice aforethought then it certainly fits the bill. Just because someone hides behind legalease does not release them from the moral and ethical corruption. No different than the death penalty this is simply a form of murder society has decided is acceptable.

So then it should be easy to see why a large portion of Americans vocally approved of this. So much so, that the media couldn’t even run enough cover to deaden even half the sound of the cheering.

I don’t know a single person who has gone through, or watched a love one going through horrific health insurance “process” in order to gain life saving care, that wouldn’t want someone to be “paid in kind” for their suffering.

Is “murder someone” just? No. Do I agree that this was how we should’ve approached fixing healthcare? Absolutely not. But there is an interesting moral and ethical dilemma that, much like everything else in life, paints a picture that is not exactly black or white. Many people view healthcare as an inalienable right. You can see how this creates a potentially dangerous high stakes conflict. The proper solution is, of course, to use our legal system to provide safeguards for the most vulnerable health insurance customers. If we focused hard on this, as we should, this entire situation could’ve been completely avoided.

lolinder6• 1 year ago

I'm not especially interested in the moral and ethical dilemma of whether it's okay to murder—in my own frame of ethics it's not up for debate, and I don't share axioms with people who think it is. I'm far more interested in the fact that not everyone has the same set of values and the next victim of a politically motivated murder by someone looking to make a statement will probably be a victim that those here won't consider to have deserved it (but of course the murderer will!).

kortilla3• 1 year ago

Denying is not for shareholders, it’s for policyholders. A health insurance provider that doesn’t put guardrails on treatments will fail because the required policy rates will go up so much that the healthy people will go to a lower cost provider.

People are happy saying the insurance provider should just pay for everything until the bill comes due in higher monthly premiums.

Insurance companies are doing the only thing they can to exist in this fucked up system where people can bail when prices increase.

SpicyLemonZest• 1 year ago

And if we focus hard on it in the future, we can hopefully avoid it in the future. Requiring people to glorify murder as the price of healthcare reform is a great way to negatively polarize people away from it; speaking for myself, I'm absolutely unwilling to make common cause with murderers, and if this initiative makes it to the ballot I will vote no even though I support its text.

krapp• 1 year ago

What precedent are we setting by explicitly making "murder someone" a viable path to making progress on your personal agenda?

None. It already is. People murder other people all the time, sometimes to make progress on their personal agendas. Vigilantism isn't new, it's been romanticized and elevated as noble and virtuous ever since Thomas Jefferson waxed poetic about watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants.

I don't understand why so many people consider this one incident so existentially threatening. Is it just because the victim was rich? Why did everyone clutch their pearls and worry about the fate of civilization because one rich guy got shot, but write off countless other victims of gun violence as just the price of living in a free society? Is it just that people were surprised there was such little sympathy for the victim? Have you seen the way people talk about black victims of police violence? was that callousness and lack of empathy just shocking because the victim was white?

I mean, it didn't even move the needle on anything. There was no uprising, no revolution. Just fucking memes.

JumpCrisscross10• 1 year ago

don't understand why so many people consider this one incident so existentially threatening

Nobody, perhaps other than his supporters, does because it wasn’t particularly important. Just visible because of where it happened and that the shooter is hot.

sepositus• 1 year ago

There seems to be an increasingly large subgroup of people who would never have the nerve to commit murder but are participating in the radicalization of people that _are_ capable of doing such things. They are mostly OK with it now because it's benefitting them. The problem will arise when things inevitably get out of control.

TMWNN2• 1 year ago

There seems to be an increasingly large subgroup of people who would never have the nerve to commit murder but are participating in the radicalization of people that _are_ capable of doing such things.

I've come to believe that the average Redditor is mentally ill. A recent comment: <https://np.reddit.com/r/California_Politics/comments/1jmqsbn...>:

There was a question on r/askreddit yesterday. If you woke up tomorrow with Superman’s powers. What would you do. 90% of the comments immediately jumped to murdering the president and every Republican

A reply:

You weren't kidding <https://np.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1jmd6c8/you_wake_...>. There was even talk about launching Cyber Truck's into space with their passengers.

no_wizard8• 1 year ago

What precedent are we setting by explicitly making "murder someone" a viable path to making progress on your personal political agenda?

If you head a big corporation like say Exxon, and you sign off on lobbying efforts to reduce pollution regulations, deny climate change etc. which will inevitably kill thousands of people, all in the service of the CEOs political agenda, is that different somehow?

Yet the police aren’t arresting those folks

In a lot of ways this is like all the media attention on school shootings: we will see copycats, and the next one may not be targeting an unsympathetic healthcare CEO

I wonder if we dug into most CEOs of public companies if they’d be sympathetic.

After all, they say psychopaths excel at two things, being CEOs or being serial killers.

I suspect the skeletons in the closet are quite voluminous for many, many of these folks

Jensson4• 1 year ago

Yet the police aren’t arresting those folks

Do you really want the police to take the law in their own hands and just start arresting people they don't like?

surgical_fire• 1 year ago

In a lot of ways this is like all the media attention on school shootings: we will see copycats, and the next one may not be targeting an unsympathetic healthcare CEO.

Would it target unsympathetic CEOs in other industries? I am just trying to measure the pros and cons here.

Jokes aside, that Luigi Mangione is a martyr to some subset of the population is hardly surprising. Unlike school shootings, where the senseless violence victimizes only eminently innocent people, what Mangione did victimizes someone seem by a large section of society as a perpetrator.

I agree that it is unsettling, but only in the sense that it feels like some important piece of the social contract has been lost along the way, and it is hard to know where it will end.

ok_dad3• 1 year ago

The social contract was lost when big business and its execs stopped caring about the humans they employ or serve as customers. Eventually, when regular people see that laws and ethics don’t apply to the rich and powerful, they decide they shouldn’t have to follow stupid laws either.

The leaders of America started it, of course the followers of America will follow.

antisthenes2• 1 year ago

Would it target unsympathetic CEOs in other industries?

Industries that are essential to living, sure. I think the health insurance industry is so egregious is because you PAY them money and they DENY you health care.

It evokes a very strong response, because it can clearly be interpreted as theft.

I can't imagine a comparable scenario in e.g. grocery industry where you'd pay for something in a grocery store and get nothing for it.

harimau7773• 1 year ago

To take a slightly broader perspective: I don't think this is actually particularly new or unusual. Criminal folk heroes have a long history. See for example Robin Hood, The Outlaws of the Marsh, Jessie James, and murder ballads (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_ballad).

JKCalhoun3• 1 year ago

Whether popular or not makes no difference. The guy murdered.

Nonetheless I also feel a sense of helplessness given the current political climate.

I posted once that if you invite violence to dinner you'll find you have a guest unwilling to leave. It was not a popular comment. Most of the responses said something to the effect of, "So you don't think violence ever accomplished anything?" I thought that was orthogonal and was an appalled frankly by the apparent justification for violence.

Having said the above though, I am surprised that with so many denied health care and — facing essentially a death sentence — why do we not see more of them going postal?

gruez8• 1 year ago

Having said the above though, I am surprised that with so many denied health care and — facing essentially a death sentence — why do we not see more of them going postal?

Did Mangione's even have personal beef with UNH, or even with the insurance industry? I thought he wasn't covered by UNH, and although he had a botched back surgery, he wasn't denied coverage?

ceejayoz• 1 year ago

Whether popular or not makes no difference. The guy murdered.

The people who tried to blow up Hitler in the 20 July plot were trying to commit murder.

Hitler’s concentration camps weren’t murder under German law at the time.

“Unlawful” and “immoral” are often the same, but not always.

happytoexplain• 1 year ago

I know this is an unpopular opinion here

This always poisons the tone of a comment. Just like, "I know this will get downvoted": You should just state your opinion without proactively casting yourself as the minority voice. It feels like self-pity, and at the same time implicitly colors disagreement with you as dog-piling or talking-down.

That said:

Luigi Mangione as martyr figure makes me extremely uncomfortable

Is that even a minority opinion? Glorifying assassination should make everybody uncomfortable, no? That's a big, central part of the point of glorifying his crime.

This is a very different situation than the Aaron Swartz

Is a comparison to Aaron common? I mean specifically in terms of the imposition of law onto them. I haven't seen that opinion here, personally. Just because people have sympathy for both of them doesn't mean there is an implication that what they each did is comparable.

What precedent are we setting by explicitly making "murder someone" a viable path to making progress

An extreme one. And not a novel one.

lolinder6• 1 year ago

This always poisons the tone of a comment. Just like, "I know this will get downvoted": You should just state your opinion without proactively casting yourself as the minority voice. It feels like self-pity, and at the same time implicitly colors disagreement with you as dog-piling or talking-down.

I wish it weren't necessary, but it's pretty much the only way to get a minority opinion any traction. It's primes the few who do agree with you to preemptively upvote before the mob of downvotes sets in, and it does also work to reduce the number of reactive downvotes that get added.

I try to avoid "I know this will get downvoted" because it's too meta, but yes, it accomplishes the same thing.

Is that even a minority opinion? Glorifying assassination should make everybody uncomfortable, no? That's a big, central part of the point of glorifying his crime.

In the comments section of HN, it absolutely has been. Every Mangione thread is filled with his fans, and every comment that critiques the glorification of what he did is mobbed by them.

chrisoverzero• 1 year ago

What precedent are we setting by explicitly making "murder someone" a viable path to making progress on your personal political agenda?

If this is what you are worried about, America is pretty far behind the leading edge:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Shinzo_Abe

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/25/asia/court-dissolution-unific...

JumpCrisscross10• 1 year ago

Luigi Mangione as martyr figure makes me extremely uncomfortable

Mangione is viewed sympathetically by like 20% of Americans [1] and about double that fraction among 18 to 29-year olds. You can find similar stats for flat Eartherism (10% yes, 19% including unsure [2]) or Nazism (10 and 17%, respectively) [3]. Essentially, there is no evidence he is a martyr beyond the baseline fraction of crazy beliefs in society. (Note: I am not suggesting he’s viewed favourably by Nazis. Just that everyone has some niche beliefs, some more, some fewer, and they have a weird tendency of distributing such that about a fifth of the population entertains one of the popular ones.)

In this case, the Mangione connection will help get the initiative on the ballot before promptly guaranteeing its failure.

[1] https://d3nkl3psvxxpe9.cloudfront.net/documents/econTabRepor...

[2] https://carsey.unh.edu/publication/conspiracy-vs-science-sur...

[3] https://www.langerresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/1190a1Trum...

kelipso• 1 year ago

A third of young people aren't flat Earthers or Nazis, what the hell.

tehjoker• 1 year ago

If they target someone unsymathetic, they won't get plaudits. Simple.

xracy2• 1 year ago

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

The thing about MLK, is that he existed as a backdrop to more violent alternatives. He is celebrated for being the better of those options, but when companies are not willing to negotiate with the nicer option, eventually they will make the violent one inevitable.

Additionally, I think the thing people get wrong about the "Luigi as martyr figure" is that UHC is itself a violent organization responsible for many deaths. When you project that you are only able to listen to "profits" and people don't have any way to provide feedback via "profits" to you, then they're going to look for other kinds of speech. And unfortunately, this kind of speech was made clear to work (see insurance companies sitting up and fixing a couple of the policies they had in the pipeline as a result of this action, and people's response to the UHC CEO being not negative).

I don't like this direction we're headed in, but I'd be lying if I said I saw other ways to make headway here. Especially given the current administration's interest in regulation.

motorest3• 1 year ago

What precedent are we setting by explicitly making "murder someone" a viable path to making progress on your personal political agenda?

I think you got it backwards.

The question you should be asking yourself is why did so many Americans supported and even applauded the idea of murdering a CEO of a medical insurance company.

You barely get this level of reaction from condemning sadistic murderers with the death penalty. But when it happened to a specific CEO of a specific healthcare company, you saw a wave of popular support across the US.

Why do you think regular working people leading regular working class lives enthusiastically applauded it?

areyouliving2• 1 year ago

I agree, but Luigi only killed one. The insurers murder many and by default torture the entire country constantly. The reason Luigi exists as a positive figure in our zeitgiest is because government is captured by industry and doesn't represent the will of the voting public.

Manuel_D6• 1 year ago

Associating a political initiative with an unrepentant murderer is a pretty bad idea. Imagine anti-abortion activists decided to make James Kopp the centerpiece of the movement.

JKCalhoun3• 1 year ago

Ballot initiative, informally named....

I think the article might be trying to be a little too edgy with its title.

areyouliving2• 1 year ago

The insurers are genocidal torturers who exploit everyone who's forced to interact with them. They're backed by all law enforcement.

Spivak2• 1 year ago

Good, your insurance company should get no say on this matter. If your doctor prescribes it, insurance pays. If you think the doctor is committing fraud then you can take that up with the doctor, not the patient.

The mistreatment by insurance companies is so normal now that people are just defeated. My MIL has been trying different treatments for over a decade and finally found a drug that can manage her chronic spinal pain. She's finally mobile enough to play with my nephews. And because her work switched insurance she now going through years of needless bullshit to prove to this insurance company that no really, this is the only thing that works. And now she has to pay for it out of pocket and it's over $1000/mo. I know, I know, you would really rather pay for the cheaper thing that doesn't.

Aloisius• 1 year ago

No developed country gives doctors absolute power to authorize treatments.

There isn't an infinite bucket of money to draw from. At some point, spending priorities have to be made and elsewhere, it's usually based on cost vs. years of quality of life improvement, so giving antibiotics to dozens of children wins out against a third MRI for acute back pain for an 80 year old.

The US is abnormal in how much discretion it gives doctors and we are incredibly inefficient with our spending because of it.

Spivak2• 1 year ago

The world you've envisioned sounds nice except:

1. That's not the trade that's happening. Every person in the US is paying for their own health insurance. Having Aetna tell you your claim is denied because someone else needed a heart transplant makes no sense. Also this is unrelated but the whole "years of quality of life" is such a made up bullshit thing it's laughable. It's reasonable on the physician end especially when treatments have hard recoveries but for the insurance end it's ridiculous. Can you imagine your car insurance not paying out after an accident because they decided you don't have enough years driving left? That's just patently not your job to evaluate.

2. For most treatments the fight with insurance happens after the services are rendered and even when you do get prior auths they're not binding so that's always fun for people. The money is already being paid, the only question is who.

3. Doctors aren't given absolute power under this system, they're still limited by all the same restrictions they had before—medical board, government regulations, standards of care—except there isn't a private 3rd party with a direct financial incentive to deny care inserting themselves in the middle.

missedthecue• 1 year ago

It's very interesting that insurance companies take so much of the blame for healthcare costs in the US, given that they are essentially the only player in the entire system, (alongside the patient), that is against price increases and overbilling by providers.

I recently had an endoscopy done. Simple 15 minute operation where they look at your insides with a camera. They put you under for it. I got the itemized bill in the mail and the anesthesiologist alone charged $738 for the 15 minutes. Of course they probably also did some work pre/post op, but the fact that there were 4 people in the room and one charged $738 for 15 minutes makes it very hard to imagine healthcare costs going down without pinching providers. AKA doctors. My insurer isn't even for-profit.

mancerayder• 1 year ago

It's a great point. But then the other side of the equation is, when the providers charge too much and the insurance won't approve, or later (months later) decided they weren't paying and now there's a bill, then guess who gets the surprise in the mail. It's the customer, the patient, who has to mediate between these kafkaesque entities.

If insurance fought behind the scenes with each provider instead of blaming the patient, maybe they wouldn't be viewed as the bad guys so much.

The health care system - insurance and provider - needs a centralized perspective rather than attacking this or that piece of it. That's also how reform should happen - no one wants to hear it, but it has to be planned centrally or at least a central authority should expand the legal guard rails. It already exists with Medicare, why not expand on that idea and cover more ages?

Luigi Mangione-inspired ballot initiative targets health insurance denials

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