The American health insurance system is deliberately opaque, labyrinthine, and profit-driven. Delays and denials of insurance claims are not administrative inconveniences—they are engineered as obstacles to receiving care. Health insurance policies use “technological efficiency” to disguise measures that systematically prioritize profit maximization over patient care. For example, a class-action lawsuit filed against NaviHealth, a branch of UnitedHealth Group, alleges a 90% error rate in the AI model it used to assess claims. Moreover, health insurance is almost impossible to navigate as patients and families drown in procedural barriers and technical jargon. But the healthcare insurance bureaucracy is designed to exhaust policyholders into surrender. For 14 million Americans in crippling medical debt, this means cutting spending on food and other essentials. 

Luigi Mangione’s murder of Brian Thompson is not a moral revolution for healthcare, nor should it be glorified as such. But its aftermath speaks volumes. Mangione’s actions were a desperate, violent attempt to catalyze awareness against a fundamentally broken system. In his words, “Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.” 

In his eulogy for Thompson, UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty wrote that “healthcare is both intensely personal and very complicated.” While he acknowledged flaws in the system, he did so with an air of blamelessness and omitted faults about his company: that no for-profit insurance company is incentivized by their policyholder’s successful treatment; that United Healthcare is notorious for employing any and all means to deny claims; that his company was generating record profits the last few years; and that, with a $480 billion market cap, it is the nation’s largest healthcare conglomerate. 

The words inscribed on the bullets that killed Thompson—deny, defend, depose—resonated with a nation disillusioned with its healthcare insurance system. Despite the charges that Mangione faces (which are a litany of felonies, from first-degree murder to terrorism), he has become a folk hero for everyday Americans wronged by the health insurance system. 

The overwhelmingly positive reaction from the public shocked many. It is rare to see an issue in America become so viscerally uniting, but healthcare injustice transcends ideology because illness does not discriminate. The public reaction, though unprecedented, is an indicator that our healthcare system is abysmal. Widespread sympathy for Mangione is not because people believe he is innocent but because they believe he did it. From then on, a following was built around Luigi Mangione as a hero for the common man (in response to the large volume of support, Luigi’s legal defense team created a website to update the public on his trial). Republicans even commented under a Ben Shapiro video “I’m not buying this ‘left vs right’ shit anymore Ben, I want health care for my family,” revealing the mass consensus about the principle behind Mangione’s actions. Many people began to share their grievances and traumatic experiences with health care insurance on social media. Suddenly, the sheer amount of individual stories revealed the systemic magnitude of injustice in the healthcare insurance industry. 

But it is precisely because this moment is historic that we must consider its implications carefully, not with absolutist stances. It is important to remind ourselves that the internet amplifies extremes, that it is too easy to get stuck in echo chambers, and that we are living in an age rife with disinformation. The narratives we create on social media tend to separate from complex realities and become illusory truths. Although people laud Luigi Mangione as a revolutionary sparking class consciousness, we must avoid idolizing him as a faultless martyr when we don’t know him. But because there is no other productive outlet for people’s anger at the exploitative healthcare insurance system, frustration is threatening to erupt. When people no longer believe democracy is working properly, the only path to reform seems to be going outside the system. Elections start to feel empty, policy debates a distraction, and incremental reforms a stalling tactic rather than genuine progress. The appeal of extralegal action grows because institutional pathways for change are inaccessible or fundamentally compromised. 

Despite the momentary unity in the nation’s psyche, it is unlikely that a revolution will happen. Americans don’t want to give up comfortable, convenient, materialistic lives for the sake of greater change. We are so quick to indict unethical aspects of the system we live in, but nobody is willing to upend the safety and security guaranteed by that very system. Some view Brian Thompson’s death as justified, even necessary, to achieve change through political violence, but this is futile; the bourgeoisie will not be moved by the killing of an executive who is one of them. If anything, they will heighten security and punish those who threaten their power. 

At the end of the day, we must draw a difference between being apathetic about the death of a billionaire CEO and actively promoting violence as an answer to problems. Justifying death because of outrage is a slippery moral slope, especially when arguing that someone truly deserves to die. If we apply this logic in other contexts, would those who openly celebrated this extrajudicial execution support the death penalty? Because the system is so vast and corrupt, it is understandable that people want to point fingers at someone. If there is no face for the problem and no one to blame, it is easier to slip back into complacency with the sentiment that “the problem is bigger than one man.” Instead of viewing Luigi’s actions as a strategy for reform, we can understand it as an indictment of a system so broken that such an act could be seen as justified. 

The fact that it took the death of one man to bring to light the faceless millions who suffered as a result of poor healthcare insurance comes down to our definition of violence. If we are ready to label murder as violence, what about the denial of medical treatment? Postcolonial author Rob Nixon introduces the concept of slow violence as violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, typically not even viewed as violence at all. 

The prolonged dying and suffering of those who are denied care do not impress upon human memory as much as an isolated incident. The long, quiet deaths caused by denied claims, unaffordable medications, and inaccessible treatment are no less violent than a gunshot, but they lack the spectacle that demands public outrage. Our assumption about violence is that it is a highly visible act that is newsworthy only because it is “event focused, time bound, and body bound.” Instead, slow violence is exponential, where the conditions for sustaining life become increasingly but gradually degraded. And when we remain ignorant to slow violence, its effects accrue to become greater than any singular, “traditional” act of violence. Similarly, Berkeley anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes warns of the “little violences” produced in everyday life that render the most vulnerable as statistical nonentities, their suffering normalized to the point of invisibility. 

The things that are hardest to perceive are those that are right before our eyes and therefore taken for granted. We must reconsider the links between the violence of everyday life and state repression, which has grown in the absence of public opposition. Luigi Mangione probably wasn’t thinking of academic theories when he allegedly shot Brian Thompson. Still, his actions sparked an important and long-overdue discussion of how health insurance companies let people suffer at the expense of profit. This is the paradox at the heart of the Mangione case: the murder of one man elicits a national reckoning while millions suffering remain background noise. It is not that people are unaware of the injustices of healthcare; rather, they have been conditioned to accept them as an unchangeable fact of life. But Mangione’s actions, for all their brutality, have forced an uncomfortably direct confrontation with these realities.

Perhaps Mangione intended to inspire a social revolution. Perhaps he was aware of the symbolic weight of his actions. Perhaps he was just seeking vengeance. Perhaps violence is part of the ebb and flow of a democracy. Either way, the murder resembled an act of insurrectionary anarchism: targeted, direct, and provocatory. Luigi’s carefully premeditated execution of a corporate leader incited uncomfortable national discussions and awoke the public’s conscience. By targeting a figurehead of the health insurance industry, Mangione sought to challenge not only the institution but also the broader societal complacency that enables its abuses. 

But Mangione’s actions are not a blueprint for reform—they are a symptom of a nation at its breaking point. Throughout history, violent acts have often sparked public outrage but have rarely brought about deep, lasting change. The real tragedy is not in Thompson’s death but in the fact that it took a desperate act of violence to ignite this conversation. If this moment is to mean anything, it must go beyond outrage—we must seize this moment as an opportunity to collectively demand a system that values human life over profit.