Used Cars and Insurance Salesman, Next Generation Crimin' and Crime Fighting and Trite, Ivy Leaguer Assassinations
My read on Luigi Mangione, the alleged perpetrator ? He is an obsessive overachieving workout enthusiast bisexual homosexual who harmed his back, got denied coverage, posts a lot online and gets encouraged to grease a confidential human source health insurance executive by Israeli interesting online networks. Maybe, just maybe, United Healthcare was correct to deny his claim because of his very odd lifestyle.
Of course it’s worth noting that the Thielverse has been encouraging people to take mind altering drugs for years and that Thiel himself has invested in psychedelics and even talked to Joe Rogan about MK Ultra on the Rogan podcast. We’ve been over this whole topic when we discussed here if someone can make you a mass shooter. They almost certainly can. The purpose of psychedelics and the Russian Jews who push them is to get you to do craaaazy things.
In your heart you know that Luigi Mangione would have been a Thiel fellow if he had applied.
Yes, both facial recognition and genomic genealogy were used to apprehend Luigi Magioine. And yes, it’s an indictment of venture capital firms — including a few in New York City — who passed on that very cutting edge technology which helped apprehend Mangione. Why is that?
While I sympathize with his cause we cannot have a society where murder in cold blood is mainstreamed. A decent society can reform its healthcare industry with both technology and antitrust enforcement. While it’s probably a good idea to have executives fearful for their lives it’s good to live in a world where these sorts of assassinations are rare.
No, I don’t think it’s good to live in a world in which people can kill other people with impunity, especially in our biggest city even and perhaps especially if the victim deserves it. There’s something terribly unsporting too about shooting a man in the back.
My friend D.C. asks key questions herself:
Did Thompson turn federal witness after UnitedHealth’s $1 billion fraud was caught by the DOJ in 2017?
Was Brian Thompson murdered because he was cutting down the waste, fraud, and abuse because transnational criminal organizations would lose money?
She helpfully points out that …
Brian Thompson was about to testify in an insider trading scam involving UnitedHealth from a pension fund in Florida which is the headquarters for the Russian-Israeli mafia. As we know with the Matt Gaetz and Hunter Biden operations, some investigations are used to target intelligence assets or federal witnesses. Why was there only a civil suit and no criminal charges?
If it’s true that Thompson was a confidential informant for the FBI we might ask if there was a conspiracy afoot to target Brian Thompson on behalf of the Russian-Jewish mob and if the highly suggestive Luigi Mangione was but their instrument.
Was Mangione himself tied to organized crime or was the kid of former mobsters targeted? Why was he being followed on X by the Likudnik organized crime friendly Jack Posobiec and Mike Benz, both of whom are also from Pennsylvania?
****
And yet I’d be remiss if I didn’t blame another player here — New York City.
To be perfectly candid with you I hate New York City. I had chalked it up to being from the city of my birth — Boston — but really, I think it’s deeper than that. Indeed hate is perhaps not strong enough a word here.
I find it expensive without much of the charms of the West Coast. It’s a sort of acquisition for its own sake. It’s cruel, it’s expensive, it’s dark and it’s not as fun as it used to be, especially after the coronavirus.
Peter Thiel once told me that New York is a place where one group of people give papers to another group of people and so on until the end of time.
I do what I can to go there and get out as fast as possible. I drive there if I can. I ride the subway sparingly. I fear the yellow cab. In and out. Like a surgical operation.
That said, to the extent I have a favorite holiday it’s spring dress day and I do try to find myself in New York whenever its distaff denizens jettison their parkas for more suitable attire. Like all good young people of a certain politics and sensibility I’ve fallen in love in New York and had my heart broken. But then so much of New York is on to the next. During my brief interlude there as a young man I found myself being consumed by its all consuming nature. As I don’t sleep much it doesn’t either I find its lack of closure to be a kind of fever dream. When I was younger I got very drunk and found myself awake and tended to by a lady of the night in Central Park.
And while it is top notch for womanizing these are the sort of soulless creatures who see you more as a wallet than as a man. Los Angeles is far more honest in its shallowness. There’s a certain charm of taking a young woman on a sunset jaunt on the West Coast. If there are such vistas to be had in New York City I can’t afford them and wouldn’t want them anyway.
New York in the winter is punishment enough and no one need be greasing one another in the wee hours of the morning. It seems rude even if you’re rich.
Nevertheless in the small hours of this week a wealthy trust funded gunman shot and killed a Midwestern health insurance executive.
If anything Thompson seemed pretty miserable. He was living separately from the mother of his kids and he had that certain Midwest fatness one comes to expect from stress of corporate life. The toned trigger puller seems to have had every advantage — private schools, lavish lifestyles, Hawaiian residency without discernible income — and to have frittered them away. I am reminded of how slavery is bad for the slave and the slave master.
****
There are two technologies being brought to task here — facial recognition and genomic genealogy. I’m an investor and a cofounder in both so I can’t be said to be objective here.
My other friends in the bloggeratti have chronicled all the ways in which United Healthcare misbehaved and I can’t say I’m much surprised.
Yes, of course. That’s the logic of health insurance markets. Consolidate the market. Drive up costs. Decrease quality. Don’t hate the player, change the game. But how?
Well, obviously not through Obamacare, old spot. I hated Obamacare because it was all about helping the insurance companies but what did you expect from Obama, the compromised blackface for the Russian-Jewish Obama? He’s not interested in making you healthy again safe behind his Martha’s Vineyard walls and well funded by his private chefs. Shamefully Obama went to go work for Illumina and did absolutely nothing at all to advance genomics. Obama was a defender of the insurance industry as David Sirota helpfully notes.
I’d like instead to focus on another alternative — one which I think it is altogether needed when we talk about health insurance.
The used car market, or what Nobel prize winning economist called “The Market For Lemons.”
It’s worth copying a bit from the Wikipedia page here.
Asymmetry of information, in which no buyers can accurately assess the value of a product through examination before sale is made and all sellers can more accurately assess the value of a product prior to sale
An incentive exists for the seller to pass off a low-quality product as a higher-quality one
Sellers have no credible disclosure technology (sellers with a great car have no way to disclose this credibly to buyers)
Either a continuum of seller qualities exists or the average seller type is sufficiently low (buyers are sufficiently pessimistic about the seller's quality)
Deficiency of effective public quality assurances (by reputation or regulation and/or of effective guarantees/warranties)
In other words… the modern health insurance industry.
Insurance companies have extensive application processes in place to protect themselves against the market asymmetric information. This can include examinations of previous medical history, blood samples, medical tests and signed questionnaires to ensure consumers are being transparent and truthful when it comes to their health. Insurance companies also have the option to decline applicants due to their ill-health, spike up the premium for high-risk individuals, and also add exclusions (e.g. cancer, mental health) to health insurance policies. Health concerns and age-related illnesses will likely develop as an individual gets older, so insurance premiums are increased with age.
Was Mangione a “high-risk” individual? Well it certainly seems like he liked to do extreme exercises.
There’s a lot of people who are correctly excited about Make American Healthy Again but again all these efforts overlook the quality of the food and the genetic underpinnings of many ailments.
The proper way to deal with overly high healthcare costs is to mass sequence the population and allocate health care resources accordingly.
Which brings me to my cousin Dylan Johnson who passed away this past week at age 58. He was a marathon runner and married to a professor at UPenn, Luigi Mangione’s alma mater.
I loved him very much. He was much loved by his wife and their two children. My father, in particular, was quite close to Dylan who was but 14 years his junior, as was my sister who had recently moved to his adopted Philadelphia.
I would have loved to live in a world in which Dylan was more famous than Luigi but that’s a fantasy.
Of course there’s a different story that would have gripped the headlines — that of Daniel Penny, the Marine who did his duty and protected his fellow subway riders.
Daniel Penny rode the subway; Luigi Mangione rode Citibike. Can I make it anymore obvious? By their fruits ye shall know them, I suppose. I just want to thank Luigi Mangione for being gay so that he doesn’t create an unrealistic standard of male excellence for women.