Thirsting for Love from UnitedHealthcare CEO Killer Luigi Mangione
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/3Zm_4kVn398
The biggest news story in the universe right now is that Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was gunned down in broad daylight on the streets of New York.
And for one brief moment, the whole of America was thirsting after his killer. Luigi Mangione had a few romantic days in the sun, holding hands with all 330 million of us for long walks on the beach. We got pictures of his rock hard abs, his sparkling shadow-encased eyes, and this shot of his glowing smile that may have accidentally led to his capture. He was America's boyfriend for a wonderful moment in our national consciousness.
But it was not to last. Some of us came to our senses, some of us didn’t, and some of us are evaluating all the incoming contextual information as it arrives and continuing to evolve our opinions as we go. And that’s my goal here--to provide a larger contextual analysis by uncovering the underlying facts and the data behind the killer’s motivations and his budding romance with a good portion of America. If this were a movie, it would be a collaboration between Hallmark and CNBC, and narrated by Sir David Attenborough.
I’m Kevin Lankes, and I’m your host for the unraveling of this corporate American love story. Stick around for the full scoop.
I think one of the most incredible things to come out of this event is the fact that all of America seemed united for one brief moment. Progressives, conservatives, libertarians, anarchists, leftists, rightists, boomers, millennials, gen Zs, cats and dogs, toddlers and meemaws. We all came together in solidarity over a steamy heartthrob with a great smile who became a symbol of something that’s deeply painful and sits at the unspeakable core of a shadowy corner of the American soul.
Inside the single darkest point is the American healthcare system. Ever since the Red Scare and McCarthyism, when the U.S. radically shifted direction from the rest of the developed industrialized world on its path toward social democracy, we’ve been under the polished leathery boot and increasingly harmful squeeze of oligarchy.
Nowhere is this more devastatingly consequential than in healthcare. Health insurance companies are so hated that the majority of the country is celebrating the death of the largest company's chief executive. The public response to Brian Thompson’s shooting was deep-seated, fierce, and immediate.
UnitedHealthcare had to turn off comments on a Facebook post memorializing Brian because the day after his death the post had 77,000 laugh reactions. And the memes and jokes are endless. The social media snark popped up immediately to throw out fun ideas like the CEO being denied coverage for his murder:
“I’m sorry, prior authorization is required for thoughts and prayers.”
“Does he have a history of shootings? Coverage denied.”
“Sorry sir, your policy only covers two gunshot wounds a year.”
It felt like a movement had started. Fake wanted posters with other CEOs’ faces on them began to appear plastered on telephone poles and subway cars across New York City. It felt like the shooting had opened a pressure valve to vent the frustration that had been festering forever in the minds of the American public.
One single shooter had done all this. One 26-year-old Luigi Mangione from Baltimore Maryland. But he wasn’t just any kid. Luigi had been his class valedictorian at his private high school, the Gildan School in Baltimore. He graduated cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, an ivy league school. He had an extraordinarily privileged education and upbringing. Up until recently he worked as a data analyst at TrueCar, and sometime in 2023 he seemingly disappeared. His last known address was in Honolulu, Hawaii, before he showed up as everyone’s favorite mysterious gunman on 54th street in Manhattan.
Luigi was smart, there’s no denying that. He produced fake IDs to register for his stay in a hostel in the city, he used a 3D printed ghost gun with a 3D printed suppressor, he put together a pretty detailed plan for escape including a prepared electric bicycle he also rode to the scene and a trip through the George Washington Bridge bus terminal that took him through Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. And he got away fairly clean to a sparsely populated area in the middle of the wilds of Pennsyltucky. On his escape, he planted the backpack he wore during the shooting in Central Park, which seemed to be intentional to send a very particular anti-capitalist message because when the NYPD found it it was filled with Monopoly money.
But do we know why he did this? Why did Luigi Mangione shoot UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson? Police found the words “delay, deny, and depose” written on the shell casings they recovered at the scene, which is a direct allusion to the health insurance industry mandate of denying coverage to increase company profits. This alone was enough to set the public alight with a vicarious vengeful lust. Because here was someone who appeared to be fighting back in the only way that seemed possible, yet still too horrific for most people to even think about. Here was someone living out the secret fantasy of a large portion of the American working class, squeezed and scared, terrified of each and every doctor’s visit or hospital stay because of the bill that would come attached, signed in a hand covered in the blood of their fellow citizens already doomed by some insurance company’s endless greed.
That’s what we all thought, perusing the photos of his terrific smile uncovered from behind the mask. The outlaw and anti-hero of legend come to life. Many were comparing him to Robinhood, giving the rich the pushback they deserved. A recent piece in the New Yorker compares him to Jesse James, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Walter White. We were all flying high on Luigi’s supply.
And then he was captured. An elderly patron at a McDonald’s in the small city of Altoona, Pennsylvania noticed him working on his laptop in the back of the restaurant and called it in. This one is close to home for me because it’s literally close to home. I grew up twenty minutes from Altoona and spent at least a couple days a week there for different things over the years when I was a kid. I’ve probably eaten at the exact McDonald’s where old man boomer decided to call the cops on Luigi. When they arrived, they asked him for ID, and he gave them the fake ID he’d used to check into the hostel where he stayed in New York. From this fatal mistake, they connected the dots fairly quickly and searched him to find the gun he used to murder Brian Thompson. They also found his fingerprints on a water bottle and a granola bar wrapper he dropped at the crime scene, which he’d bought at the Starbucks where the photo of his unmasked smiling face was taken.
Immediately after his arrest, the social media posts started up again, this time with entirely too specific fake alibis for Luigi attesting to the fact that he couldn’t possibly be the shooter since his whereabouts were completely accounted for during the crime. Find some of these TKTKTK
Even his fellow inmates at the jail in Pennsylvania were getting behind him in this public PR campaign. They’ve been yelling out the windows at journalists standing by the outer fence, answering questions about Luigi’s cell conditions and calling things out like “Free Luigi!”
At the risk of speculating far too much on the murky waters of the unknown future that didn’t come to pass, there are skeptics of the narrative who are pointing out just how weird it is that Luigi would have the murder weapon on him while hiding out in a random McDonald’s in the vast wilderness of Pennsyltucky. It doesn’t really make a lot of sense, especially knowing what we know about how well planned the whole crime was. Since the weapon was 3D printed, assembled with the necessary metal parts, all of it could have been easily disposed of and never found. The only reason he’d still have it that makes any sense is that he was planning to keep using it. Which makes it entirely possible that there were more targets. But the fact that he was hiding out in west-central PA also kind of negates that idea, too. There aren’t a lot of high-profile insurance industry CEOs hanging out there. Unless he was laying low for a minute until things calmed down. In which case, he really messed up in his calculations, because he killed a rich white dude, and the complete systemic fury of U.S. capitalism wasn’t going to rest until all its hideous resources came to bear on the shoulders of whoever was responsible for that.
And still, a lot of media outlets, op-eds, talk show hosts, and influencers are trying to make this very black and white in one direction or the other. Some of us are still very in love with Luigi, and we hate the crap out of Brian. Or vice versa. Let’s talk about who Brian Thompson was, and then talk about what we’ve uncovered about Luigi Mangione after he was arrested, and when we take in all the facts, maybe we’ll find that the story isn’t so cut and dried after all.
Brian Thompson became the CEO of UnitedHealthcare in 2021. UHC is a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, the largest healthcare insurance company in the world. UnitedHealth Group has more than four hundred thousand employees and made $372 billion dollars in 2023. Thompson is from Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he still lived at the time of his death. He was in New York for an investor conference at the Hilton, where he was scheduled to speak later in the day he was murdered.
There are countless calls by apologists to respect and mourn the death of Brian Thompson, and there’s a pearl-clutching outrage springing up from the refusal of the public to oblige. People are feeling gaslit about the state of healthcare in America, and who else can face accountability other than those in charge of the decisions that determine whether someone lives or dies?
The truth about Brian Thompson is that after he became CEO of UHC, he increased company profits by five billion dollars in just two years. He did this partially by doubling the company’s denial rate for prior authorization coverage and post-acute care.
One of the most egregious and completely unconscionable moves that Brian made was to implement the use of a predictive algorithm to determine what deserved coverage and what didn’t. Called nH Health, the algorithm was developed by an acquired tech company called NaviHealth. It was lauded as an “innovation” to the shareholders of UHC, and the innovative things it accomplished were hellish scenarios like kicking disabled Medicare patients out of nursing homes and rehabs. Incredibly, the algorithm was found to have a 90% error rate. Its denial of coverage was 16 times higher than what’s expected. And yet somehow that didn’t deter Brian from using it, probably because it was making UHC a lot of money.
The Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations cited UnitedHealthcare in a report that offered scathing criticism of predictive health insurance. It concluded, in part, that “The data obtained so far is troubling regardless of whether the decisions reflected in the data were the result of predictive technology or human discretion. It suggests Medicare Advantage insurers are intentionally targeting a costly but critical area of medicine — substituting judgment about medical necessity with a calculation about financial gain.”
Even before the algorithm, UnitedHealthcare had the highest denial rate of all insurance companies at 32%, which is double the industry average.
All this in a climate where one in five Americans had claims denied last year and where two-thirds of all bankruptcies are due to medical debt. Which is, by the way, a thing that just does not happen in the rest of the world. Where Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield just announced time limits for anaesthesia during surgery, which was quickly reversed after intense public backlash.
With all of this damning evidence right before its eyes, corporate-captured journalism is really bending over backward to somehow make Brian the good guy in all of this. Not being the bad guy in one scenario doesn’t mean he comes out smelling like roses across the board.
The truth is, Thompson caused a number of deaths and irreparable harm by denying coverage to more and more people in order to increase company profits. If you need any additional contextual evidence regarding his character, on top of everything else, he was also under investigation for insider trading at the time of his death.
It all seemed very clear that Brian Thompson was a comic book villain, who lived life in his executive mansion a mile away from his kids and his wife he’d been separated from for several years, just swimming in his Donald Duck vault and counting his unlimited gold coins. It was very clear that Luigi had stuck it to the American corporatocracy by doing something most would never dream of.
Until the story became even muddier. We’ve found out more about Luigi Mangione’s background recently, and it’s honestly not what a lot of us were expecting. The narrative was built from immediate assumptions that he was a working class hero, a progressive, anti-capitalist who was standing up for his fellow Americans. But that’s not who Luigi is turning out to be.
In actuality, it seems that Luigi wasn’t sparking a class war. It was more a disagreement among peers, since Luigi is in reality very far from the plumber he shares a name with. He attended the Gilman School, a private high school where tuition is up to $40,000 a year. He graduated from an Ivy League university. Luigi’s grandfather, Nicholas Mangione Sr., was a real estate tycoon who owned nursing homes, country clubs, and a radio station. Loyola University has an aquatics center named after the family. Luigi’s family is loaded.
Luigi’s cousin Nino Mangione is a state representative from Maryland, and is, shocker, a republican.
We also found out recently that even though Luigi was widely read, his choice of reading material was pretty damning. It seems that he’s less of a violent Bernie Sanders than he is a nepotism-fueled Joe Rogan. From his online presence and writings if everything being reported about them is accurate, we can see that Luigi seems decidedly red-pilled. He railed at times against the “woke mind virus” and praised the right-wing “gray-tribe” and “intellectual darkweb” ideologies. He has an apparent libertarian leaning and a bro science streak obsessed with what adherents to these loose-knit groups call “self-optimization,” which follows closely parallel to RFK Jr.’s bizarre ideas about health and wellness. It all smacks of a new-age “enlightened thinker” mentality that’s really just a thinly veiled way of operating somewhat credibly as nothing but a dedicated contrarian. If you want a real rabbit hole of crazy, go dive in to the gray tribe and TPOT stuff, and see how long you can last trying to read about that. It’s disturbing.
Super fun note, but Luigi also left a four-star review of Ted Kaczynski’s Industrial Society and its Future, also known as the Unabomber manifesto. From what he wrote in the review we can see that he believes that he does believe that Ted was rightfully imprisoned because he caused real harm, but that he shouldn’t be dismissed outright as a lunatic, and instead viewed through the lens of his vast intellect and thoughts on society. Luigi wrote that we should see the Unabomber as a political revolutionary. Honestly, if we break all of this down to a fundamental level, it seems to me that maybe Luigi was looking for that kind of notoriety for himself. Maybe he set out to be seen as that kind of political revolutionary.
Factually, what we know about where Luigi ran afoul of the health insurance industry is when he injured his back. Possibly due to an underlying condition where a vertebrae slips out of alignment, it came to a head while surfing in Hawaii. His roommate at the time described a point where Luigi couldn’t get out of bed or move without pain. He would go on to have surgery and send his roommate text messages with screws in his spine from a fusion procedure, an image that’s been widely circulated in the media. It’s after this point that he disappeared, with his family stating the last time they’d talked to him was over the summer of 2024. Friends and family began to post on Twitter to plead with him to let them know where he was, and why he’d disappeared.
The writings Luigi was found with when he was arrested comprised just 262 words. They were mostly emotionless and did not betray any particular meaning we can attribute across the left or right divide. He was a kid in pain, lots of pain, suffering because of the decisions of those responsible for his healthcare, and he was angry. And, like Ted Kaczynski before him, he was highly intelligent and influenced by an array of debunked pseudoscientific counterculture ideas that drove him to an antisocial mindset. And he acted on it.
To my disappointed comrades who are beside themselves over the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooter’s unrequited love, I just want to say that, though the events that transpired are not ideal, and we can say for certain that no one in this situation is a hero, the good thing to come out of it is that our stupid healthcare system has been caught in the spotlight once again, and the conversation has been opened and furiously active once more.
As Andrew Witty, CEO of UnitedHealthcare’s parent company wrote in a New York Times op-ed, “We know the health system does not work as well as it should. No one would design a system like the one we have. And no one did. It’s a patchwork built over decades.”
Well America, it’s time to gut that patchwork system and build it up anew, to the point where it does actually work as well as it should. The excuse that it doesn’t work, especially coming from one of the richest people in the universe, feels a lot like crocodile tears, seeing as there’s so much money invested in maintaining our current dumpster insurance infrastructure.
Ultimately, Luigi was indicted by New York state on eleven counts, including murder as a crime of terrorism, and is now facing additional federal charges. He was extradicted to New York City and perp walked to the courthouse with another alleged criminal in tow, New York Mayor Eric Adams. You can’t make this up. Why are we even doing any of this anymore?
Luigi is, as of the time of this recording, sitting in MDC Brooklyn with over a thousand others who are awaiting trial in the city, like Puff Daddy, which is a fun coincidence since they’re both represented by the same lawyer.
Donations are pouring in for Luigi through crowdfunding campaigns. I’m not going to link to any of them, because even if I believed in giving money to a country club millionaire, anyone can launch a crowdfunding campaign and who knows where your money is actually going.
Okay, so this really is a lot and also it’s very depressing, so what can we do about the mess that Brian and Luigi have made? Can we learn anything from what happened here?
We absolutely can. The first thing we can do, which I think is kind of important, is that we can stop worshipping murderers. Just in general. From Ted Bundy to the Unabomber to Luigi Mangione, the public thirst for dudes who do stupid things for maybe almost something close to what you might call justified reasons, is just not a good look for humanity overall.
Something super, super, super important now. Get the full context behind every story. Make sure to have all the facts. Do not accept things as gospel as soon as they come out, especially in a complicated and high-octane case like this one where the media wants to publish everything as quickly as they can, because there are going to be mistakes and at the very least a lack of context. Wait for the relevant information to come out, otherwise there’s actually no way for you to be right about something.
Another thing we can do is to refuse to participate in scams, which is very likely what we’re seeing with all these crowdfunding campaigns that are popping up for Luigi’s Legal defense and other things. Dude’s a bazillionaire, he doesn’t need your help. And besides, your money is not going to him, it’s going to whoever is sitting in Eastern Europe with their PayPal account linked to the campaign they started in order to take advantage of you.
One amazingly practical thing we can take from all this and do going forward is to appeal more health insurance denials. Crazy stat, but nine out of ten people on medicare advantage plans don’t appeal, even though this is a right introduced by the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, in an effort for more transparency in healthcare. And 80% of appeals actually work and reverse the denials so that claims are covered. The problem is that most people are confused by their coverage and by the process for appeal and really just don’t know how to do anything about it at all. The other thing is that most people probably don’t have the time to spend hours on the phone with a representative who has no decision making power to try to get things straightened out with their healthcare coverage. The lack of transparency and difficulty to navigate the corridors of coverage is intentional and made specifically to benefit the insurance companies.
Okay, this is not an action item but it’s still hilarious so one last thing; one of the funniest anecdotes I’ve come across in all my reading about this whole situation is that after Brian Thompson was killed, a journalist from the American Prospect called an 88-year-old woman who was the source on a different story about the UnitedHealthcare company, who unfortunately had been one of many victims of UHC’s denial of coverage, which ultimately had a hand in his death. This 88-year-old woman picked up the phone and immediately answered with “It wasn’t me. I didn’t kill him. I can’t even ride a bicycle.”
Look, the healthcare system is totally a complete mess in America. The only thing we can do is stick together and advocate for better care, and a better system overall. The best way to get there is to vote for the people whose policies include healthcare reform. Make sure you know the policy platforms of the people you put in office. And then be proactive. Badger them until they pass the legislation they say they will. This is how our democratic system is supposed to work. Make sure the officials we put in power answer to their actual bosses--us--the citizens of the country they represent.
Let’s get together on crazy healthcare murders and steamy heartthrobs with red pill fetishes and 3D printers. Let’s do some f*cking good about corporate healthcare in America.
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