According to coverage in The Wall Street Journal in the case against Luigi Mangione, suspected of murdering the CEO of UnitedHealthcare outside a Manhattan hotel, potential arguments in his defense will be his "mental state at the time of the killing."
"Two defenses in New York state -- a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity and claiming extreme emotional disturbance -- might be relevant," per the coverage.
Per other reporting, in a note handwritten by Mangione discovered by the police, he wrote, "the U.S. has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy."
Indeed, Mangione is exactly right.
Per KFF Health System Tracker, in 2022, the U.S. had the highest annual health care spending per capita in the world -- $12,555. Number two was Switzerland at $8,049, about two-thirds that of the U.S.
A glance at life expectancy by nations, published by the U.N. and posted on Wikipedia, shows the U.S. actually ranked number 55 in the world.
It seems clear that Mangione's thinking is quite clear and acute. This appears to be the same young man that was class valedictorian at his elite high school and that earned bachelor's and master's degrees at ivy league University of Pennsylvania.
The problem is not his ability to think and analyze but what he chose to do with the information he produced. After the notes about the U.S. health care system noted above, he wrote, "These parasites simply had it coming."
Now if this defines insanity, both Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should be booted from Congress as being insane. Their observations, both of which implied justification of the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, were not much different from what Mangione said:
Warren: "The visceral response from people across the country who feel cheated ...by the vile practices of their insurance companies ...Violence is never the answer, but people can only be pushed so far."
Ocasio-Cortez called our health care system "depraved," continuing that "people interpret and feel and experience denied claims as an act of violence against them."
Warren and AOC are queens of America's left and are leading architects in building a mindset and culture in our country where the idea of personal responsibility does not exist. It's a worldview that says if you are suffering, if you don't have what you want, there must be someone or something to blame that is the source of your problems.
This horrible incident hopefully will provoke as much soul-searching in our nation as it is provoking bewilderment and shock.
A young man capable of analyzing data to say accurate and meaningful things about the U.S. health care system is also capable of understanding good and evil, if he believes they exist.
But what if he does not believe, or was not taught, they exist? What if he believes he can decide ultimately what is right, what is wrong, who should live and who should die?
What if there is no act that is evil but only the result of "extreme emotional disturbance"?
How this works with a society that claims to value freedom I don't know. What does freedom mean in a society with no right and wrong, with no personal responsibility, where being denied a health care claim can be considered "an act of violence"?
It remains to be seen what demons drove a talented young man who, by the standards of most, had everything, to destroy another life and his own.
But if we want to reduce these kinds of incidents, which we see far too often, and if we want to fix our health care system, we need to restore the quality of freedom in our country.
That means returning personal responsibility to the center of our culture, which means restoring appreciation that indeed good and evil (i.e., thou shalt not kill) exist.
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