Midwest Dispatch: Luigi Mangione Sits Behind Bars. Where is the Revolution?

Just before dawn on December 4, 2024, twenty-six year-old Luigi Mangione allegedly gunned down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on a Manhattan sidewalk. Now, nearly two months later, the shock of the early morning attack and subsequent manhunt has worn off, and Mangione now sits in a Brooklyn jail, awaiting court proceedings that will include an official indictment.

The “Free Luigi” fever has subsided a bit, but support for Mangione continues to spread worldwide. If you’d like to know what Mangione had for Christmas dinner in prison, you can take a look at People Magazine’s exclusive feature on him. (I’ll spare you the hassle: He was served Cornish game hen while enduring life on a very thin, prison-issued mattress. Poor Luigi.)

Mangione is accused of assassinating Thompson as an act of vigilante justice in response to the horrific conduct of for-profit health insurance companies, such as UnitedHealthcare, that operate with seeming impunity in the United States. Though he comes from a wealthy family and has access to the kind of legal counsel many people accused of crimes do not, it seems likely that he will be convicted given the amount of evidence tying him to Thompson’s murder.

It’s perhaps unsurprising that a recent poll found support for Mangione ranks relatively high among young people. In a recent survey of more than 1,000 college students across the United States, the youth-focused polling firm Generation Lab reported that nearly half of respondents found Mangione’s alleged actions justifiable. More than four-fifths of respondents also reported having a negative view of Thompson. 

I don’t think young people want more CEOs to be killed in broad daylight—but I do think this information shows us that young people want something more than what researchers Peter Nathanial and Ludo Van der Heyden called the “all-powerful cult of the CEO” in an opinion piece for Newsweek in July. Nathanial and Van der Heyden draw clear lines between America’s CEO culture and that of our decidedly undemocratic political landscape. Money and special interests dominate both our corporate and political cultures, Nathanial and Van der Heyden argue, to the point that America is governed by a “CEO-cracy,” a system ruled by “the all-powerful CEO in corporate America, whose decisions are not to be questioned but carried out with conviction.” This system seems to be unabashedly ramping up under President Donald Trump. 

UnitedHealth Group, the Minnesota-based parent company of UnitedHealthcare, fits neatly into Nathanial and Van der Heyden’s description of corporate culture run amok. In February 2024, Thompson and other UnitedHealth executives reportedly sold off personally owned shares of the company’s stock worth millions of dollars just before the announcement of a Department of Justice antitrust investigation against the company, which tanked the company’s stock price. In December, a judge in Massachusetts ordered UnitedHealth Group to pay $165 million in damages for its role in a supplemental insurance scheme.

And then there is UnitedHealthcare’s high rate of denial of coverage. In 2023, it denied approximately one out of every three claims, putting its coverage denial rate in the industry-leading range of thirty-two percent. The company’s strategy of denying or delaying coverage made their way onto the bullets used to kill Thompson, which were scrawled with the words “deny,” “defend,” and “depose.” After the UnitedHealthcare CEO was deposed, so to speak, people flooded social media sites with personal stories of the harm the company’s policies have caused. 

I don’t take violence lightly. But I do wonder where – besides social media – people should turn when companies like UnitedHealthcare continue to sail forward, amassing incredible profits while both denying coverage to millions of people and engaging in allegedly criminal actions. Killing Thompson has landed Mangione behind bars, perhaps for life, but so far it’s not clear where the revolution goes from here. 

Prior to the 2024 presidential election, the push to expand publicly funded, single-payer health insurance programs such as Medicare for All was gaining traction in an increasing number of states, largely because of a stalled effort to enact Medicare for All on the national level. Joe Biden did not make universal health insurance a priority while President, either, and although former Vice President Kamala Harris voiced support for Medicare for All in 2019 during her brief campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, she had dropped the issue by the time she took over Biden’s candidacy in 2024. 

Trump’s renewed ascendancy to power likely means any broad push for greater health insurance coverage on the national level will continue to flounder. Amid the recently instated Trump Administration—which seems bent on trolling us with wildly unsuitable cabinet-level appointees such as Pete Hegseth (who was confirmed as Trump’s defense secretary in tie-breaking vote last week) and nominees such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—universal healthcare and the ease of mind that comes with it will likely remain little more than a fantasy. 

Mangione may go down in history as someone like John Brown, the abolitionist who launched a deadly, failed insurrection as part of the movement to end slavery in the United States. Or even someone like Italian American anti-fascist radical Carlo Tresca, who also pricked consciences around the world before being executed on the streets of New York City in 1943.

For now, we have to deal with our current reality. We need somewhere to direct any lingering outrage regarding the United States’ extractive and deeply harmful health insurance industry. Mangione may have taken out one CEO, but he is clearly not the leader of a broad uprising against companies like UnitedHealthcare.

I don’t know if anyone else is, either.