From posts on X to signs stapled up around Portland, and even on TV and radio from prominent faces, Democrats just can’t stop showing their love for accused United Health CEO murderer Luigi Mangione — and it doesn’t look like it’s going to slow down any time soon.
Elizabeth Warren made headlines shortly after the killing by telling left-wing outlet HuffPost that “violence is never the answer, but people can be pushed only so far.”
“This is a warning that if you push people hard enough, they lose faith in the ability of their government to make change, lose faith in the ability of the people who are providing the health care to make change, and start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone,” she said.
Warren added that “The visceral response from people across this country who feel cheated, ripped off, and threatened by the vile practices of their insurance companies should be a warning to everyone in the health care system.”
Then there was AOC (shocker!) offering that “people interpret and feel and experience denied claims as an act of violence against them,” (once again with the Left, anything that is actual violence is excused; behavior they don’t approve of that is non-violent is, however, inexcusable violence, you see).
Of course we’re not close to done. Bernie Sanders decided to defend Warren and her original comment (even though she tried to walk it back), telling NBC News “Look, Elizabeth Warren obviously understands killing and murder and shooting somebody in the back is totally unacceptable, but what I think has happened in the last few months is that what you have seen rising up is people’s anger at a health insurance industry.”
On Sunday, we had Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, another liberal’s liberal, opine on X (I thought they were all quitting for Blue Sky!) that “the outrage at the death of [the slain United CEO]… isn’t matched by the anger over the thousands of people who die often anonymous deaths every single day in this country at the hands of the healthcare industry,” by which he apparently means insurers.
Decent people are rightly outraged at the Left leaping to defend Mangione. But tey should also take note of the huge amount of hypocrisy at play in all this.
Warren, AOC and Bernie Sanders are all backers of single payer/Medicare for All. That policy inherently requires the government to do the exact thing that Democrats are complaining about: Cramp down hard on health care providers being able to push through and then bill to the payer (taxpayers or, in our current scenario, those paying insurance premiums) whatever they want for whatever procedures they decide to conduct on patients.
As left-wing Vox noted in discussing a different effort by a different insurer to limit how much they would pay anesthesiologists:
“In the past, progressives have emphasized that a Medicare-for-all system would reduce overall health care costs by forcing providers to accept lower payments. With its new policy, Anthem was attempting to do precisely this: force anesthesiologists to accept lower rates of reimbursement. And the case for forcing down payment rates for anesthesiologists is especially strong. According to Medscape’s 2024 Anesthesiologist Salary Report, the average salary for an American anesthesiologist in 2023 was $472,000. This represented a $70,000 increase over the field’s average salary in 2022. This makes anesthesiologists among the top five highest-earning specialists in the United States.”
And in fact traditional fee-for-service Medicare of the type loved by Warren, AOC, Sanders, et. al., is already doing this. Magione defenders’ beef with health insurers is supposedly to do with “prior authorization” policies that mean they don’t just pay out literally whatever a provider bills them, but they seem not to have noticed that traditional fee-for-service Medicare also uses prior authorization to stop providers from engaging in practices like dishonest billing at a time when providers are complying less and less with price transparency laws than they were a few months ago and hospital systems have been trying to force insurers into accepting way-above-inflation price increases all around the country and trying to force Medicare reimbursement rates higher, too. Note that if insurers– or politicians– cave on this, it means higher insurance premiums or taxes or both. Did you get a pay rise of three times the rate of inflation this year? Doubtful.
Let’s be clear, Warren, AOC, Sanders, Murphy and the rest are not just lining up with Mangione and his fanchildren; they’re lining up against a central feature of the Democratic Party’s own preferred policy; and they’re also lining up with people who already make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and want you, via your insurance or your tax bill, to pay them literally whatever they stick on an invoice.
This is, of course, the latest in a string of economically illiterate—as well as just plain ghoulish– positions these people have taken over the years. Warren not only dreamed up the big government Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (which even the Obama administration decided she was too radical to actually lead). She has also proposed a wealth tax that would force people like Elon Musk to sell off stock in companies they founded to pay higher taxes, or take on debt to pay tax bills (all of which is bad for those companies’ employees). She proposed universal free college and cancellation of student debt. And she also wanted to spend $200 billion a year on “green manufacturing.” AOC and Sanders want to limit credit card interest to 15%, which would cut off credit to people without good credit scores. Murphy, famously, doesn’t understand not just that the Second Amendment to the Constitution provides an individual right to bear arms, but also that Connecticut-style gun laws merely create black markets for deadly weapons and leave criminals with access to guns, but not law-abiding citizens who want to be able to defend themselves against violent crime.
Currently, the word on the street is that all or most of these figures want to team up with Josh Hawley, Bernie Moreno, Jim Justice and other more populist GOP senators to try to get her agenda advanced even though Democrats will soon be in the minority in the Senate.
Their comments on this murder provide a really good reason why those senators should give them the cold shoulder – or whatever it is you give opportunistic ghouls who thought cheering for assassination was a smart political move.
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