“Luigi Mangione’s pals say CEO shooter ‘went crazy’ and fled to Japan after giant screws put in spine” (The Mirror):
The Ivy Leaguer accused of murdering a top CEO may have spiraled into madness following a botched back surgery that required ‘giant screws’ in his spine, according to friends.
Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer, had shared X-ray images on social media showing his misaligned spine, which was reportedly worsened by a surfing accident.
Some of those looking into the 26-year-old former high school valedictorian believe that this severe back injury, which required screws in his spine, led to a concerning decline over the past year.
Former classmates of Mangione suggest that the failed surgery could have pushed the Maryland man to the edge.
It’s a shame that current medical technology isn’t sufficient to fix the typical back problem, but why is United Healthcare to blame? Luigi Mangione was inspired by Harvard’s Ted Kaczynski, educated at Penn and Stanford, and presumably gifted with a high degree of rational reasoning. How did he come up with a model of the world where his back would have been fixed by surgery if United Healthcare had done something different?
Separately, given that people have so much familiarity with the inability of medicine to fix what ails them, their friends, and their family members, why do people accept uncritically the idea that a doctor can transform a man into a woman or vice versa? Who looks at the photo below and says “doctors have never been able to solve half of the seemingly simple health issues that I’ve brought to them, but they seem to be great at gender reassignment surgery”?
Finally, is Luigi Mangione further proof that mask orders can’t work? He had a huge incentive to keep his mask in place and might well be a free man today if he had done so, but his mask discipline wasn’t perfect, even in an all-Democrat city that encourages mask-wearing, which resulted in a security camera getting an image of his full face and then some McDonald’s workers recognizing him.
Misplaced Rage! Here is what I E-mailed my libertarian mailing list:
There is some outrage that many people are celebrating the death of a CEO by murder. Some people say it cannot be murder, if the victim is not human. Many “voices of reason” will say they don’t support violence, but will mention reasons that many people are righteously angry, because United Health used an AI model to evaluate claims, and the AI model caused an increase in the rejection rate. This is the ultimate red herring:
In order to distinguish between righteous outrage and unreasonable anger, one must analyze whether the object of the rage was acting unjustly. There is no attempt at determining this. Even if true that an AI model increased rejection rates from 10% to 30% which is approximately what is claimed, the real question is whether the rejection rate got closer to the just rejection rate, based on the terms of service, which can easily be determined by having actual trained and unbiased people that are familiar with the terms of service evaluate a statistical sampling of the claims. If indeed there exists error in the rejection rate, in favor of the company, then the customers are rightfully aggrieved whether the cause is malice or incompetence, and whether the mechanism is human processing, or automatic processing of claims.
This is a bit like the nearly always insufficient reporting about road rage, where reporters universally avoid digging into who was at fault. There is a big difference between someone acting out because someone on the road broke the law an bullied him, versus a rule breaking bully gets angry for being honked at or flipped off, and redoubles his efforts. The road rage reporting fails to care about who is the perpetrator, and who is the victim.
There is also two failures in this reporting on a deeper level:
1. The real victim is the taxpayer, net taxpayers are the ones to be hurt by excessive costs in the healthcare system, and in effect they are victimized by government choosing to treat illegal aliens for free, or not deporting them, and forcing health care providers to treat them, for free, for government choosing to let self sabotaging drug users get medicaid coverage, for government not using its monopsony power to lower the prices, and for approving new expensive drugs where efficacy is not proven to exceed that of the older established drugs.
2. In all this coverage, the use of an AI decision system and high claim rejection rates are on the forefront, but frivolous billing by hospitals and healthcare providers are given a free pass.
Lastly, this murder is a symptom of the self serving legal profession making justice too expensive and too slow, coupled with government laws and regulations that failed to align the interests of health insurers with the interests of their customers:
If penalties for claim rejection errors in favor of the insurers were sufficiently harsh, then one could expect the health insurance companies to have a really low error rate in claims rejections, because they would act in their own interest.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/04/us/brian-thompson-united-healthcare-death/index.html
PS: There is news that some health insurer (blue cross?) decided to limit the anastesia time permitted based on the estimated time of the surgery type, and they reversed their decision following the Thompson murder. This was supposedly evidence that violence works.
https://x.com/truthstreamnews/status/1866017288240906625
“Who looks at the photo below and says “doctors have never been able to solve half of the seemingly simple health issues that I’ve brought to them, but they seem to be great at gender reassignment surgery”?
I don’t think those are the correct photos to illustrate the issue. I have read unverified stories about “bottom surgery” results which would give you PTSD for life.
Not to mention that if one thinks that reproduction has anything to do with sex, it stands to reason that these procedures have, collectively, a long-term world-wide success rate of 0% full-term pregnancies.
Luigi could’ve been forced to a rookie surgeon by UHC. Heck he could’ve had interns “train” on his spine. The UHC reimbursement might be so low that “good” surgeons won’t take the procedure and ask to be paid in cash. Admitingly, Phil might still have a point that the difference between successful and problematic back surgery might not be that great and patient might still be in pain for life. I propose that surgeons are quite good at cutting off/into things – problem is they suggest it to people who are better off without surgery so they can make money, even if it’s a token $1000 reimbursement from UHC…
Gino: I’m not an expert, but I think that UHC is distinguished from other insurers by having a larger network of providers. Maybe Blue Cross and Medicare are yet larger. Possibly Medicaid is the largest in some states, such as Maskachusetts. A friend used the Mass Health Connector web site to transition from $28,000/year private insurance (family of 4) to MassHealth (Medicaid) for $3/month. (He answered all questions truthfully and the system kicked out the $3/month quote despite the fact that he had over $10 million (pre-Biden dollars) in assets at the time.) . He and his wife then reported that the entire world of providers opened to them as every physician and hospital network they wanted to use accepted MassHealth (some dire consequences to a provider who doesn’t, I think).
Phil: that’s a good point. UHC probably offered plenty of providers, and even if few of them were the top of their field, or optimal for Luigi’s situation, that’s not UHC’s fault. He is free to find his own surgeon and pay them cash. If a rookie surgeon was assigned as I suggested, that’s a hospital’s call, not UHC. It’s like blaming your credit card company for a bad haircut.
Animal reassignment surgery is the next frontier. What little has been shown of him makes him look crazy. The back surgery is like a real life Spiderman villain. Elon had a similar back problem, but hasn’t become a villain yet.