Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who has campaigned for a national healthcare system, has said the UnitedHealthcare CEO’s shooting underscores people’s frustration with the industry.
Sanders, an Independent who caucuses with the Democrats, made the remarks on Meet the Press on Sunday morning.
“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, which denies people the health care that they desperately need while they make billions and billions of dollars in profit,” the senator told the show’s host Kristen Welker in response to a question about whether now is the right time to be discussing health insurance policy.
Luigi Mangione, the suspect in the murder, allegedly gunned down UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on December 4 in New York City. He was arrested days later at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pennsylvania. At the time, police said they found a handwritten manifesto on him outlining his motive.
“Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming. A reminder: the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy,” Mangione allegedly wrote. He’s been charged with second-degree murder in New York and gun-related charges in Pennsylvania.
While condemning Mangione’s murder, Sanders, who chairs the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, reiterated some of the points made in the alleged manifesto.
“We need to ask ourselves when we talk about health care is why we are the only major country on earth not to guarantee health care to all people, why we have a life expectancy which is significantly lower than in other countries, why working-class people die five to ten years shorter than the people on top,” he said
“I think the time is long overdue for us to guarantee health care to every man, woman, and child, especially at a time when we’re spending twice as much per capita on health care as the people of every other nation.”
Other Democratic lawmakers have recently highlighted problems with the healthcare system. In a TV interview earlier this week, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren said “you can only push people so far and then they start to take matters into their own hands.”
She later said: “I should have been much clearer that there is never a justification for murder.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a Congresswoman from New York, said the shooting revealed a “mass bubbling of resentment.”
“Of course, we don’t want to see the chaos that vigilantism presents,” she told Business Insider. “We also don’t want to see the extreme suffering that millions of Americans confront when your life changes overnight from a horrific diagnosis.”
UnitedHealthcare denies more claims than other insurers, according to a report from Forbes. After Mangione’s arrest, his supporters donated tens of thousands of dollars to his defense funds, surpassing $100,000. He’s currently being held in a Pennsylvania detetion facility while he fights extradition to New York.
Source: independent.co.uk