The Intentional Erasure of Luigi Mangione
And why it simply has to happen
It’s no secret that our media is almost entirely controlled by about half a dozen people, all of whom hate anyone and everyone who has ever clocked in for a shift at work. Most Americans already know this and feel the effects of it each and every day. And most also know that this fact has a huge bearing not only on how stories are presented and spun, but also on which stories are presented at all.
So it should surprise none of us that stories about Luigi Mangione have completely disappeared, and discussions about why he did what he did have disappeared as well.
And the “why” discussion is one that America really needs to confront.
That said, I’m not going to assume or simply state why I think Luigi Mangione allegedly shot and killed United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. But why he did it, and why it is almost certainly going to happen again very soon … these are conversations we should have, and our corporate media is stealing them from us and inserting a Kardashian or a ballroom or a B-roll loop of a missile hitting a fishing boat to distract us.
Meanwhile, costs are going up, people are going broke, the recession is fully here for anyone who isn’t already independently wealthy, and all of it is getting monumentally worse by the hour. And the CEO class is responsible for all of it.
So rather than speculate, let’s talk about what we know. We know that roughly 68,000 people per year die simply because they cannot access healthcare in the wealthiest country in the history of history. And while healthcare insurance companies make money in a variety of ways, the single biggest driver of profit in the industry is the denial of care.
That’s right – the companies in charge of our health care make the most money when you and I have the least access to it. Denial is profit. Delay is more profit. Death is the absence of costs. All of these are windfalls for the industry, and they happen every day to people we know and love, and collectively, we sit by and let it happen.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It’s the actual business model. Collect revenue from insurance premiums, spend less than that amount when working people get sick, and keep the difference. That’s a very basic summary of a much more complex system, but it’s not inaccurate. Denial of care is the revenue generating cog in that system. Always has been.
And this is why the story must die, and why Luigi Mangione must simply be forgotten. If it were actually being covered in any meaningful way, certain questions would come up, questions that have knowable and obvious answers, but cannot be asked in public or else the system itself could come crashing down.
For example, we know denial of care is the model. We know denial of care causes mass death each and every day. And we know the people who make the decisions about who lives and dies are CEOs like Brian Thompson. So my question is: How many people did Brian Thompson kill before Luigi did what he did? And how many will die today because the next Brian Thompson is already in place and keeping the denial machine churning?
Who is the greater criminal – the man who kills one with a gun, or the man who kills thousands with a pen and a balance sheet?
Because one of these guys is in jail, and the other is probably on a yacht right now.
And you and I are not allowed to discuss it.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.