Is this thing on? Was it ever?
I’ve been watching this story play out regarding the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO and the subsequent arrest of the perpetrator and the publishing of his manifesto.
What strikes me the most aside from the, you know, murder (I do not condone! Nor do I applaud it! In any way!) is how incredibly useless this plan was. He decides to make a homemade gun with a silencer, take a bus to New York, and ambush the CEO of his healthcare insurer. For what end? He has to know that this won’t change anything. They’ll get a new CEO and keep right on trucking.
Surely, this is a tragic miscalculation, likely brought on by the stress of dealing with the pain from a chronic back injury and possibly from ingesting whatever hallucinatory drugs he was using to try to alleviate it. There has to be some number of ways to address this injustice in some manner that might actually bring about change. Merely offing one CEO is not going to do it. I’m sure it felt satisfying for a few seconds to see a representative of the bane of your existence hitting the pavement, but that feeling didn’t last or produce any subsequent results, aside from him having to flee and then eventually landing in a jail cell.
No, this required some careful planning and innovative thinking that this person didn’t have time for. That’s the problem: the people this affects most are the least able to fight against it, either because of chronic disease, lack of money, or both.
So what could he or anyone in this situation have done? I don’t know, but trying to correct the injustice of a corporation killing people by withholding medical care for profit by becoming a murderer is probably the worst possible idea. It puts you not necessarily morally below the people and the system you are trying to change, but it doesn’t solve any problems and it puts you on the opposite (wrong) side of the law from the insurer as far as the state sees it. United Healthcare is legally allowed and, in fact, in many ways, obligated to deny healthcare for the sake of their shareholders. Nobody, not even this guy, is allowed to shoot somebody in cold blood with a gun unless they are being immediately threatened. It’s pretty clear.
The problem, then, is the law. It has been written in such a way to deny healthcare to sick people as part of the standard operating procedure. Laws written by people are not immutable. They require in most cases overwhelming support to change them, but they can be changed. And, when a person stays within the law (aside from possibly minor civil disobedience), their cause is not only morally superior to the people committing the injustice, it is morally superior in an absolute sense. It becomes an immutable thing, in contrast to what the person might initially wrongly believe they are fighting against.
Who can afford law suits? Who can afford a protracted campaign of sieging lawmakers or drumming up popular support for changing the laws or the lawmakers? Who can afford to do anything but work and try to stay healthy? Pretty much nobody, but to be effective, anything needs to be close to impossible. If it is easy, and especially if it is profitable, we are already doing it, hence our current situation.
Probably the best way is to become a healthcare justice influencer. You can MAKE money if you get big enough, and if you stay the course, it might actually work. Unfortunately, we just lost one of the most photogenic people who might have gone this route.
I don’t know if this post got to where I thought it was going, but since no one reads it, it falls noiselessly in the forest.