Was this linked from any of his existing social medias? Do we have any way of knowing it's actually him? I'd be just a tad cautious at this stage, given that the Substack page says it was 'Launched an hour ago' as of writing. The article, sure, dead man's switch, but the Substack publication itself was only created after his arrest?
Edit: also worth noting that whatever this is, it's not the document he had with him when he was arrested, since that apparently contained[0] the following excerpt, while this doesn't
> “These parasites had it coming,” one line from the document reads, according to a police official who has seen it. Another reads, “I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done.”
this archive link is floating around on blind and reddit. I have no idea if it's authentic. I didn't find a link to his other social media but the part about back pain lines up with this bit I found in a nymag article [0]
> Something seems to have changed in recent months. Martin told a Hawaii publication that his friend had suffered chronic back pain and texted him images after getting surgery before going “radio silent” over the summer. Asked in court if he was in contact with family, Mangione said “until recently.”
The Substack is still live[0]. Anyway, one of the images in his Twitter banner[1] is an X-ray of a spine with a bunch of screws in it. The Substack is also named after Breloom and has a picture at the bottom, and that's also in the Twitter banner but doesn't seem otherwise prominent in any of his social medias. Not very hard to figure out a spinal issue as a potential motive and guess at an interest based on the banner and cook up a quick viral post. I'm not saying it's definitely fake, just urging a bit of caution for the time being.
I dunno, but the article continues to be live, and I can't imagine Substack doesn't know how to scrub posts from their platform if they wanted to. We'll find out eventually I guess, so I'll continue to urge people to be cautious with this and wait a bit.
Here’s a description of the actual manifesto from the NYT:
> The 262-word handwritten manifesto that the police found on Luigi Mangione begins with the writer appearing to take responsibility for the murder, according to a senior law enforcement official who saw the document. It notes that as UnitedHealthcare’s market capitalization has grown, American life expectancy has not. “To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone,” he wrote. The note condemns companies that “continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allowed them to get away with it.”
> The handwritten manifesto found on Mangione contained the passages “These parasites had it coming” and “I do apologize for any strife and trauma, but it had to be done,” according to a senior law enforcement official who saw the document.
I doubt this is real. The New York Times mentions that he comes from a prosperous family - seems incongruous with his mother lacking healthcare desperately.
I would buy that a wealthy person would have the anger and the resources to learn how to stalk, make a plan, use a weapon. Poverty is a drain on your mental capacity for nearly everything else besides survival.
Also I don’t doubt that his mother would lack healthcare desperately even when wealthy. Women in pain are one the biggest demographics of denied healthcare. Even extremely wealthy, well-connected women.
So instead of using her money to find care elsewhere with a different company or even in a different country, he just decided to murder the CEO of the company that denied his coverage?
How absolutely insane does that sound?
My buddy was a pro hockey player. He retired and a few years later, he blew out his knee. He didn't have insurance and was in a lot of pain every day. He knew he couldn't afford a 25K bill for surgery so he got on a plane, flew to Argentina, got his surgery done, stayed for two weeks and flew back. The whole ordeal cost him around 8K for the whole deal.
Instead of plotting to kill the CEO of some healthcare company, he found a solution to his problem instead.
This is the difference between this guy and thousands of other people who are in chronic pain. Some smoke weed, some find treatments in other countries, some find homeopathic remedies and many other combinations therein. They don't just go off the deep end and plot to murder someone because they felt so wronged by a health care company.
What has he accomplished by doing what he did? Nothing. There's already been a video of the new CEO to employees about how they intend to stay the path of denying necessary treatments and expenditures. All of that pent up hate and anger and instead of channeling that into doing something positive for himself and his mother, he just took out on the CEO of a company instead.
As someone dealing with a similar health journey of loved ones as the killer's, it takes a tremendous amount of time and effort to finally come to the conclusion that the medical system as a whole isn't very helpful for certain conditions, before one takes treatment into their own hands.
Doctors fear of malpractice and pressure to fit in as many billable moments in a day means that there's really no deep "engineering" of someone's problems that doesn't fit neatly into their mental diagnostic flow chart. So it's presented as needing expensive diagnostic work, to which the insurance companies also put up their hoops. And doctors are also not trained in nutrition and its effect on chronic illness such as this shooter's mothers.
So what it ends up feeling like is that if only the insurance companies were efficient, we could have an efficient route to hope while the insurance companies block such efforts.
Healthcare in America is one of those areas where unintuitive solutions are needed, and I would argue that it starts at the lifestyle prevention level before it even gets to the medical doctors and insurance companies.
Look up neuropathy. I know someone suffering from it.
> What has he accomplished by doing what he did?
He accomplished that this particular CEO no longer goes to bed smugly each night, resting in wealth, while profiting of the suffering of others. It also made social media fun as it hasn't been in a long, long time. It's bringing all sorts of people together, wondering if they might not be so different after all. It's also causing a lot of people to get tattoos.
Probably more importantly, it causes all sorts of people to come out with stories about their or their loved ones' experiences with the health care system in the US.
Then there are all the news pieces where people in golden cages express shock at the pesky rabble celebrating. The pesky rabble notices and discusses that, too. They particularly notice the hypocrisy, how their lives are worth nothing, and how they once again are told what to think.
It put little a crack in the scheme of riling poor people up against each other, where there was no crack at all before.
What did your buddy achieve? He fixed his problem for 8k dollars which is still insane considering health should not be for profit. And if he wouldn't have have had 8k, he maybe would have just stayed in pain with a weed addiction, but at least he didn't become a murderer. Good for him, but if he wants to sit here and judge this dude for losing it after what his mother went through, let him speak for himself maybe.
So you acknowledge a problem and think it’s perfectly acceptable to have our healthcare broken and using some other country’s resources is an ok substitute? Laughable. And this isn’t even getting into all of the denied cases under the direction of this CEO for actual insurance that is supposed to cover you. Kids not getting cancer meds. Give me a break.
How does your buddy feel about the shooter, given his experience with the medical system? Would he approve of you using him as an example of why an elderly woman with a severe, largely untreated nervous system chronic illness, which cannot be solved by any one procedure domestically or abroad, should just fix herself somehow?
This reads very “I have black a black friend, so I can speak on race issues”.
>> How does your buddy feel about the shooter, given his experience with the medical system?
He's already said he would never support what he did, regardless of what happened to him or how he was treated.
>> Would he approve of you using him as an example of why an elderly woman with a severe, largely untreated nervous system chronic illness, which cannot be solved by any one procedure domestically or abroad, should just fix herself somehow?
He's already told multiple people in multiple conversations I've been around him that he felt compelled to leave the country to get treatment because the system is so broke here. I don't need his approval or permission to use his experience.
Its been widely reported the shooters family is wealthy. With such financial resources, both the shooter and his mom could've easily sought treatment elsewhere, but did not. Apparently people don't like the idea that life is hard and sometimes caring for your loved ones isn't easy, is time consuming and takes a lot of energy to endure.
Its clear the shooter decided he didn't have the constitution to do something different and instead of taking the decision process out of UHC's hands and do something himself to help his family, he merely acquiesced to what UHC was doing until he decided he needed to murder the CEO of the company.
>> This reads very “I have black a black friend, so I can speak on race issues”.
"Those who preach about tolerance and acceptance rarely, if ever, practice it themselves."
Thanks for confirming this is your level of discourse.
> I don't need his approval or permission to use his experience.
But you are using his experience to justify your own positions. I’m just pointing out that you’re merely speaking from authority that you don’t have just because you know some guy. That’s your dismissal speaking from a position of assumed knowledge you don’t actually have.
Also, it’s strange you consider polite disagreement to be intolerance. I’m not shooting you or advocating violence, I’m merely saying I think your logic is dumb. That you seem to equate the two the level of discourse you are bringing, not me.
Joe Biden, the vice president of the United States at the time, was seriously struggling with healthcare costs. Prosperous families can quickly become unprosperous from healthcare in this country.
The underlying point of the manifesto is that insurers have corrupted medicine itself. Regardless of whether the care would be covered, the doctors were trained to diagnose and treat in a way that isn’t designed to cure, but to “care.” Sure, she had visits and specialists and diagnoses and it was largely incompetent, because incompetent doctors are cheap in a system where inaction has no real consequence.
Which is total nonsense. There is certainly plenty of room for improvement in the healthcare system. But the average competence level of doctors is higher now than ever before. If you think we have problems now than look how many quacks there were a century ago, before health insurance even really existed.
I think both views are partially right. Yes, medicine has advanced. There are many areas where the treatments simply didn’t exist, even 20 years ago. There are different people involved with different incentives. However, that doesn’t mean that insurance hasn’t also had a negative effect on quality of care. The example that comes to mind the standard of care for back injuries. Treatment begins maybe with an x-ray to check for fractures, but then NSAIDs. If that doesn’t work, then physical therapy a couple times a week for a few weeks. Then patients may get an MRI a couple months later… after it’s too late to see bruising to the spinal cord. So, there’s almost never direct evidence that a herniation is work-related, and thus it isn’t covered by workers compensation. The path of escalation is designed to reduce costs, but starting with an MRI on day one is decidedly better for patient outcomes.
Medicine, like engineering, is a domain of trade-offs.
You could order MRIs for every back pain complaint, which would improve outcomes for some % of patients, while probably worsening outcomes for others (due to red herring findings that lead to unnecessary treatments), but at what cost? Who will bear this cost? Regardless of health care system, someone will have to. Most back pain self-resolves with home care, so it makes sense to try that first, unless you have reason to suspect severe trauma that needs immediate treatment (e.g. the patient just fell off a ladder).
Regardless of insurance issues, are there actually evidence-based medicine guidelines to support an immediate MRI for back injuries? By injury do you mean some kind of specific trauma, or any serious back pain regardless of suspected cause? Many patients do recover with OTC analgesics, proper physical therapy, and time.
What you'll find with imaging for those structures is that many patients appear to have abnormalities or apparent pathologies, including patients who don't have any pain. So while MRI can be helpful for diagnosis and treatment it isn't necessarily definitive.
There is always going to be a resource allocation and care rationing issue with expensive services like MRI. Other countries with socialized healthcare often have long queues for non-emergency MRIs. In fact, we often see affluent Canadians coming to the USA as medical tourists to skip the queues.
No idea if this is real or not but neuropathy is horrible. I had a mild case of it after hurting my back which caused spinal inflammation.
Sensations of tiny zaps all over my body 24/7, most noticeable when falling asleep.
Ibuprofen helped a bit, fortunately it went away after a few months.
Hopefully this is the catalyst to major reform. Insurance companies have a deal with us, yet constantly find ways to deny claims. Even pregnancy I had a claim denied, from a procedure the INSURANCE demanded I get.
He would be awaken in the night to his mother screaming in pain while United healthcare denied claims and refused new treatment. She had severe neuropathy.
Holy shit this would leave a scar on anyone. I couldn't even imagine the emotional pain this causes.
Not saying this justifies murder but what would you do if a close loved one was screaming in agony daily and there's nothing you can do about it because the insurance company is blocking treatments?
Reposting since my other comment is hidden under a flagged comment.
It really sounds like he has hEDS. Hypermobile Ehlers Danlos (hEDS) can cause Small Fiber Neuropathy and back pain, as well as poor healing from surgery. It’s also more common in engineering type people, higher IQ, ADHD, anxiety disorder etc
It’s probably the most under-diagnosed condition in general. It’s also autosomal dominant. Can present as psychosomatic - gaslighting from doctors is typical.
It’s a shame more people don’t know about it because there are ways to effectively treat it - it’s an area where patient communities are far ahead of the medical community. So this could be a failure on two fronts, a failure of insurance but even if they had unlimited coverage there still would have been a failure in treatment.
Hypermobile Ehlers Danlos (hEDS) can cause Small Fiber Neuropathy and back pain, as well as poor healing from surgery. It’s also more common in engineering type people, higher IQ, ADHD, anxiety disorder etc
It’s probably the most under-diagnosed condition in general. It’s also autosomal dominant. Can present as psychosomatic - gaslighting from doctors is typical.
It’s a shame more people don’t know about it because there are ways to effectively treat it - it’s an area where patient communities are far ahead of the medical community. So this could be a failure on two fronts, a failure of insurance but even if they had unlimited coverage there still would have been a failure in treatment.
I don't have sciatic pain, thank God, but I have bulging discs from a spinal compression injury. The first few months were excruciating -- I couldn't exist without horrific pain, no position I could lay in, sit in, stand in, etc., would provide any relief. I couldn't stand fully upright for weeks. And, even post-recovery, the last 2 years haven't exactly been pleasant. I am still managing my lower back on a day-to-day basis but I am primarily pain-free today.
Chronic pain really takes you somewhere else mentally. Now that I am, for the time being, on the other side of it, it has also made me extremely empathetic to people who suffer through it.
He could have asked for charity, or asked hi multi-millionaire grandfather or fabulously wealthy family for help, or sued the insurance company, or taken out loans, or made a ton of money of his own and paid cash and negotiated directly with the providers, or mortgage the family mansion, sell everything he owns. There are millions of things he could have done.
"Nothing you can do about it" is just a lie people tell themselves to justify violence.
Well, it fixed a perceived wrong.
Oftentimes injustice is what actually hurts.
I do believe, though, that there is a vast spectrum of behaviours in between non violent inaction and an isolated random killing, that make a lot more sense in every way and that is called politics.
I really don’t think we should be giving it any attention right now without any verification of it. Probably some loser asked ChatGPT to spit shit out.
https://archive.is/2024.12.09-230659/https://breloomlegacy.s...
Sounds like both he and his mother were suffering from chronic pain and UHC dicked them around and refused to act in good faith