Health, Wealth and Wisdom

The health insurance business model works on the premise that the insurer will receive more in premiums than it pays out in claims. To boost profits you can either raise the price of the premiums or reduce the amount you pay out in claims. It’s the same with car insurance. But there is a difference in refusing to pay for a repair to a  dented bumper and refusing to pay for emergency heart-attack treatment. People die and suffer tormenting pain so that insurers can turn a profit.

Little wonder then that, last week,  when Luigi Mangione shot and killed Brian Thompson (CEO of United Healthcare) there was no rush to condemn the gunman. Quite the opposite in fact. He has become something of a latter-day Robin Hood.

Of course the establishment with its poodle media has begun to traduce Mangione because that last thing they want is for us to believe that he was outraged at the immorality of health insurance. No, they want us to believe that he was somehow crazy, unreasonable and harbouring ill-will against corporate America. 

But if so many people have their umbrellas up, it is because it is raining. The ordinary Americans sense a poetic judgement of the 10 million-a-year CEO’s demise. Mighty revolutions have been caused by less than this.

‘Rise, like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you:
Ye are many—they are few!’