Primed for Madness

Will health insurance execs be the next target of mass rage?

As soon as police arrested Luigi Mangione, reporters began to investigate possible motives for the man suspected of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

Perhaps Mangione was angered by how the health insurance industry treated his grandmother. Perhaps his chronic back pain played a role.

Then came word of his review of the Unabomber’s manifesto in which he wrote that Theodore Kaczynski:

Had the balls to recognize that peaceful protest has gotten us absolutely nowhere and at the end of the day, he’s probably right … When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive. You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution.

In his own manifesto, Mangione added, “The reality is, these [companies] have gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit.”

Mangione wrote that he targeted Thompson as a “symbolic takedown” of his company’s corruption and “power games.”

What emerged even faster than the killer’s motive was the response from many Americans who greeted news of Thompson’s death with responses ranging from satisfaction to glee.

The broad strokes of this episode already seem depressingly familiar.

Academia, the entertainment industry, and the media cook up a myopic take on a hot-button issue and prime Americans to endorse that point of view. Then, thanks to social media, a high-profile event explodes throughout our screens, and quickly grows into a misguided movement that reflects the monoculture worldview.

The believers eschew nuance and tell a simple tale about devils and angels. They become consumed with fundamentalist zeal, and are certain they’re on The Right Side of History. Unfortunately, they’ve misdiagnosed the problem, so their efforts will probably make things worse.

We saw that sad story with COVID, George Floyd, and October 7. And we’ll soon discover if Thompson’s murder will unleash yet another wave of mass madness.

The Stories the Monoculture Tells

Different parts of the monoculture reinforce the others, and social media amplifies their work. But for now I’ll focus on the entertainment industry.

Way back 1997, Matt Damon played a young lawyer who takes on a powerful insurance company that denied a leukemia patient life-saving treatment. The most liked comment on The Rainmaker’s movie trailer comes from five days ago, and recalls the message written on the bullet casings used in Thompson’s murder: “Deny, defend, depose.” The words are followed by a clenched-fist emoji.

Hollywood tells the same story over and over—greed kills. And sometimes producers’ myopia gets especially intense, and they churn out content about the same topic in rapid succession. Note, for instance, Hollywood’s recent obsession with Big Pharma villains.

Hollywood’s movies and shows are often based on true stories—although in Tinseltown “based on” is a term of art. For instance, HULU’s Dopesick bends the truth to conform with producers’ preferred script. But the biggest problem with Hollywood’s stories isn’t that they often play fast and loose with the facts.

No, the biggest problem is that they’re myopic.

Instead of exploring the big picture with all its complexities, producers zero in on a small part of the landscape and rehash it over and over. Producers and actors puff their chests like they’re delivering hard truths to the masses, but what they’re really doing is avoiding most of the truth.

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Related

• Make it Stop! Hollywood’s Irritating Addiction to Big Pharma Villains

• Dissidents Need Not Apply: Is Campus Groupthink Coming to Hollywood?

• If You Know You’re Right, Step on the Gas! The Rise of Fundamentalism in Academia and Hollywood

• George Clooney: Now Who Will Fund Social Justice Movies!

• Don't Let Clooney and Company Fool You: Hollywood Isn’t Merely Shallow —How industry groupthink warps our culture

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The Whole Truth

If you were to take a big-picture view of the American health care system, what would you see?

You’d see many frustrating things, but also many wonderful things. You’d see private actors behaving badly and government actors behaving badly.

The mixed-bag theme continues when you consider what created our system and who pays for it. Government created some parts and the private sector created other parts. Government spending accounts for nearly half of all US health care spending, and the private sector accounts for just over half.

Mix the two ingredients—government and the private sector—and you get something called cronyism. It’s a theme my wife and I explored in our 2018 film Little Pink House, a based-on-a-true-story movie that does present the true story accurately.

Our movie explores cronyism as it relates to eminent domain.“Big Pharma,” as represented by Pfizer, was behaving badly, and we depicted that. But we were careful to show that Pfizer had no power to bulldoze a blue collar neighborhood for the benefit of a giant pharmaceutical company—only government possesses that power.

We often joked that if The Rainmaker star got his hands on that story, it’d be “Damonized” — it would tell a version of the same story Hollywood has been telling for decades.

The Player and the Game

There’s the story that Hollywood and the rest of the monoculture tells, and then there’s the story that plays out in real life. Often the story feels more like a cruel game.

In healthcare, we’ve seen the game played over and over—officials promise their great new plan will lower costs, but it ends up raising costs instead.

President Nixon gave us “Certificate of Need” laws because he actually thought decreasing the number of hospitals would lower costs. And the failure of his aptly named “CON” laws gave way to more grand plans, including President Obama’s ironically titled Affordable Care Act.

The failed plans almost always move in the same direction—more government control. What will we have to look forward to after this spasm of ignorant indignation, Medicare for All?

Our healthcare is delivered by a system of cronyism that mixes government and the private sector. Yet the monoculture regards our system as a failure of free markets, and nearly every “reform” moves us toward greater government control.

Hollywood is right in one sense—greed can kill. But it can also create life-saving drugs. The result we get depends on the rules of the game. Politicians can’t ban greed, but they can create rules that direct it toward productive ends.

I’d argue that our system’s failures have far more to do with government than the private sector. After all, figures on government spending in healthcare understate how much spending government controls. And from hospitals to doctors to drugs, the government restricts competition that would reduce costs.

But I'm a former libertarian think tanker, and it’s certainly possible that I have a too-rosy view of markets. I’m all for having that debate, but the monoculture shows little interest in participating. It prefers to stick to the same, old script.

Academia drives much of the discussion, and in recent decades it’s morphed into a one-party organ that drives out dissent. You’ll find the same fundamentalist streak in the legacy media and the entertainment industry. And today social media allows mobs to gather online and off. Agitators parrot a script written by elites and call it revolution.

Those who cheer the murder of a health insurance CEO hate the player. But if they really want to help Americans who suffer or die after being denied care, they should investigate the game.

Ted Balaker is a filmmaker, and former network newser and think tanker. His written work has appeared in many publications including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Reason, and The Washington Post.

His recent film work includes Little Pink House starring Catherine Keener and Jeanne Tripplehorn, Can We Take a Joke? featuring Gilbert Gottfried and Penn Jillette, and the new feature documentary based on the bestselling book, The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. Stream the very first “Substack Presents” feature documentary here on Substack or on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, and Google Play.

Ted and his wife and producing partner Courtney Moorehead Balaker are now making a narrative feature film based on Rob Henderson’s bestselling book Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.