I’m sure you’ve heard that a gunman killed United HealthCare CEO Brian Thompson last week. The killer’s identity is unknown but as Fred Clark says, nobody has any doubts about his motive: “No one — not police, not reporters, not the general public — heard about this crime and wondered “Why would anyone want to hurt this man?” UnitedHealthcare is one of the largest providers of private health insurance in America. It is also notorious for denying coverage — and thereby denying healthcare, denying health, denying care.”
(Note: it appears the gunman is yet another right-wing shooter. Whether that means a different motive, I don’t know as yet).
The jokes have been flying thick and fast on social media. About how you didn’t notify your insurer in advance so your treatment won’t be covered. About having a bullet hole being a pre-existing condition so no coverage! As Clark also says, “You can’t live like Pharaoh — enriching yourself by oppressing everyone else — and expect people to respond to your death as though you weren’t Pharaoh. When Pharaohs die, the people sing.”
(In an unrelated post, historian Kevin Leman points out many people judge blacks who led slave revolts much more harshly than slavers. People who challenge the system are held to a different standard — but not, apparently this time).
I agree with Courtney Milan that tying medical coverage to jobs is a flawed system (Paul Campos adds much more). And as Paul Krugman says, it’s not even that efficient — we pay way more for medical expenses than most nations and not because our care is vastly superior or has better outcomes. Some conservatives (John Stossel, for example) have complained that it’s our fault for going to the doctor too often or because insurance covers too much stuff so we don’t worry about cost. As someone who went to the E/R with what might have been a heart attack (it wasn’t), bollocks. I did have to pay but it was affordable. And while it wouldn’t have killed me if I hadn’t gone there was no way to know that — and inevitably, someone in the same situation will avoid going and die.
This brings up something I saw online about Trump’s victory (unfortunately I don’t have the link), that the system Americans live in has become increasingly dystopian—insurance that does nothing but suck up our money (the standard advice on homeowner insurance is that if you file a claim, they may cancel it), cops shooting innocent people in the street, the complexity of canceling a subscription, mastering yet another new app for some service provider, attempting to figure out your medical bills and your share of the costs. And it can always get worse. As Cory Doctorow says, Bluesky is currently a great environment but nothing stops investors or owners from making it worse for bigger profits.
Quite simply, everyone’s sick of it and Trump presented himself as the man who would change everything, shake up the system, sweep the board clean. Sure, his changes will make things worse, but if people are already pissed off and frustrated, is it any wonder he won? As Mo Ryan says after describing her own insurance nightmares: “People want radical change. Technocratic bullshit & bipartisan fairy tales are not going to cut it.”
I’m not entirely convinced. Oh, I agree things are a mess in many ways. This century we’ve seen 9/11, W’s inept response to Katrina, thousands of lives and billions of dollars wasted in attacking Iraq for weapons it didn’t have, the financial meltdown of 2007-8 (for which vast numbers of businesses got a free pass as “too big to fail”) Trump’s presidency, an attempted coup on 1/6 and covid. That’s a lot of shitty.
Would Democrats do better with an agenda of truly radical change? I’m not so sure. Maybe yes, maybe this is just another example of people assuming their own policy preferences are a magic bullet. And that’s aside from the challenges of getting such a message through the media or fighting the massive flood of propaganda that would come out of Fox News and similar operations. Plus the challenge of getting it through Congress. Single-payer insurance would have been a great improvement over the ACA but could Obama have gotten it through Congress? Or was going with ACA — which has made health insurance available to millions of people who were doing out — the right move?
Harris had a lot of good ideas and some of them would have been gamechangers, like extending Medicare to cover at-home medical care. They didn’t have much effect; would a stronger, bolder proposal to do more, bigger shit have made a difference? Cheryl Rofer at LGM suggests Harris ran against a trifecta of despair: existential despair after so many bad things, lack of accountability for the rich and powerful (the financial crisis, the failure to fight harder to hold Trump accountable) and loss of hope things can get better.
I do agree with the LGM team that Democrats treating this as an ordinary transition of power furthers the despair. When Obama’s talking about Trump — the guy who claimed Obama lied about being born in the US — as just a regular politician he doesn’t see eye to eye with, it undercuts all the talk during the campaign about Trump’s threat to democracy. And gives people little reason to vote blue. Yes, the precedents are to be a good loser but “the precedents and norms that are relevant here are those that apply to war, which involve doing things that one normally doesn’t do, because the alternative is letting the enemy win, which is unacceptable. Except it’s obviously very acceptable to very many very important and serious people, as evidenced by the fact that we’re even talking about whether or not Biden should do this thing.”
