I keep coming back to a phrase, half joking, half not, that I think actually captures something true about the entire Luigi Mangione saga better than most of the earnest political commentary surrounding it, and that phrase is rich on rich violence. I say it with a little bit of a smirk because it sounds absurd, it sounds like a category that should not exist, violence in this country almost never gets discussed in class terms that flatter the wealthy, and yet here we are, looking at a case that involves a man from a family worth tens of millions of dollars, connected to a network of golf courses and assisted living facilities, accused of killing a healthcare executive who was, by any measure, even wealthier than he was, a man who ran one of the largest health insurance divisions in the country and who was reportedly paid something in the range of ten million dollars a year in total compensation. Two men, both comfortably, undeniably rich, one dead and one facing trial, and somehow the story that got told around this, the story millions of people online chose to believe and repeat and build merchandise around, was a story about class struggle, about the little guy finally striking back against the machine. Except there was no little guy in this story. There were two men who had both, in their own very different ways, already made it, and the entire narrative of righteous working class vengeance got built on top of a foundation that, if you actually look at it, has nothing to do with the working class at all.
I want to sit with the CEO’s wealth for a second because it tends to get treated as self-evidently deserved or self-evidently villainous depending on which side of this argument you are standing on, and neither treatment is especially useful. Brian Thompson ran a business that, like most large health insurers in this country, generated profit partly by denying and delaying claims, that is simply how the industry works, it is baked into the incentive structure, and his compensation reflected running that business successfully by the metrics that business rewards. That is worth being angry about, genuinely, structurally angry about, the fact that a health insurance executive can be paid eight figures a year while people on that same insurer’s plans are fighting tooth and nail to get a claim approved is one of the more grotesque features of American healthcare, and I am not interested in pretending otherwise or asking anyone to feel sympathy they do not feel for the specific position he occupied in that system. But none of that changes the fact that he was, personally, a wealthy man, insulated from the exact harms his company inflicted on other people, living a life about as far removed from the average denied claimant as it is possible to live in this country. And Mangione, whatever his stated motivations turn out to be once this actually goes to trial, was not some claimant himself, was not someone denied a procedure and radicalized by his own medical bills in the way a lot of the mythology implies, he was a young man with chronic back pain who, by his own family’s resources, had access to surgery, to specialists, to the kind of care that most Americans with his exact medical complaint would never be able to afford or arrange. So you have one very wealthy man allegedly killed by another, less wealthy but still extremely wealthy man, over what increasingly looks, from the documents and reporting that have come out, less like an ideological crusade on behalf of the uninsured masses and more like a specific, personal grievance, a beef, in the most literal and unglamorous sense of that word.
That is the part that I think gets buried under all the symbolism, the sheer smallness and specificity of it. This was not, as far as the public record shows, a man who spent years organizing with healthcare advocacy groups, who testified before Congress about claim denials, who built a movement and then, in some catastrophic final act, decided that violence was the only remaining option after exhausting every other avenue. This appears to be, again pending trial and whatever actually gets established as fact in a courtroom rather than online, a young man with a personal grudge, shaped by his own medical experience and his own reading of internet radicalization material, who targeted a specific executive at a specific company. That is not a class war. That is not Les Mis. That is one guy with a specific problem doing a specific violent thing to a specific other guy, and the fact that it happened to occur inside an industry that genuinely harms millions of people gave the act a symbolic weight that the actual facts of the case may not support once you look closely at them. People wanted a Robin Hood story so badly that they built one out of material that, on inspection, looks a lot more like an interpersonal or ideologically self-directed vendetta that happened to have a corporate target, which is a very different thing than an act of working class solidarity, even if it is dressed in the same aesthetic.
This is where the rich on rich framing actually does some useful work, because it forces you to ask an uncomfortable question that the folk hero narrative conveniently skips over, which is what, exactly, does this event have to do with the people it supposedly represents. If you are someone who has actually been denied a claim, who has actually spent a year appealing a decision, who has actually gone without a medication because your insurer decided it was not medically necessary, what do you materially get out of this? Not symbolically, not emotionally, but materially. The answer, as far as I can tell, is nothing, the claim denial process did not change, the executive compensation structures did not change, the company itself barely stumbled, its stock dipped and recovered, business continued, other executives were promoted into the vacated role, and the actual apparatus that harms ordinary patients every day kept running exactly as it did before, because the apparatus was never dependent on one man, it is a system, built out of actuarial tables and shareholder incentives and lobbying budgets, the kind of thing that a single act of violence against a single executive, however dramatic, simply cannot touch. What did change, what actually moved, was public conversation, attention, a brief surge of articles about claim denial rates and prior authorization horror stories, which is real and not nothing, but it is also not the same thing as the structural victory the online mythology implies, and it is worth being honest that the primary beneficiaries of this entire saga, in terms of actual tangible outcomes, have mostly been media outlets generating traffic, a defense fund, and a young man’s own personal notoriety, not the uninsured, not the underinsured, not the people actually being crushed by the system everyone claims this was about.
I think the reason the rich on rich framing makes people uncomfortable, even people who would otherwise agree with a lot of what I am saying, is that it deflates the drama, it turns a story people wanted to be about righteous rebellion into something closer to a very sad, very specific act of interpersonal violence between two men who both had more resources and more options than almost anyone else in the country, and sad and specific is a much less satisfying story than righteous and collective. Righteous and collective gives you a movement, gives you a symbol, gives you something to put on a shirt. Sad and specific just gives you a tragedy, one dead father, one young man likely facing decades in prison or worse, and a healthcare system that continues to grind along exactly as it did before either of their names became famous. I understand the emotional pull toward the bigger story, I really do, when a system fails you again and again and again, the fantasy of someone finally striking back at it is intoxicating, it offers a kind of catharsis that slow, grinding policy work never quite manages to provide. But catharsis is not the same as change, and building an entire folk narrative around an act that, when you strip away the symbolism, looks a lot more like one very online, very aggrieved rich kid deciding to solve a personal problem with a gun, does something I think is actually corrosive to the broader project of fixing American healthcare, because it substitutes the satisfaction of a myth for the much harder, much less cinematic work of organizing, legislating, and building the kind of sustained political pressure that might actually force insurers to change how they treat claims.
There is also something almost darkly funny, in the way only American class dynamics can be darkly funny, about the fact that this entire saga started with two men from worlds most Americans will never enter, playing out a violent, deeply personal drama, and ending with millions of people who have never met either of them, who share none of their material circumstances, projecting an entire class struggle onto it from the outside. It is a bit like watching a fight break out between two people in first class and deciding, from your seat in the back of coach, that this is actually your fight too, that one of them is fighting for you, when in reality neither of them has ever had to check a bag or worry about a connecting flight in their life, and the outcome of their fight changes exactly nothing about coach. That is not to say the anger people feel toward the healthcare industry is misplaced, it is not, it is completely justified and it is not going anywhere, and it should not go anywhere until the industry actually changes. But the specific vehicle chosen to express that anger, one very wealthy man allegedly killing another very wealthy man over what looks more and more like a personal grievance than a political program, was never actually built to carry the weight that got loaded onto it, and pretending otherwise, laughing off anyone who points out how strange it is to build a working class hero myth around two men who never missed a meal in their lives, says a lot more about how badly people want a hero right now than it does about the actual facts of what happened on that Manhattan sidewalk.