Predicting the Present: Cory Doctorow reflects on his 2019 story, “Radicalized,” about men on a message board who see their loved ones murdered by medical insurance companies, and who “egg each other on to spectacular acts of mass violence against health insurance company employees, hospital billing offices, and other targets of their rage.”
“Radicalized,” of course, foreshadowed real-life events, specifically the murder of Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Cory says he’s surprised there hasn’t been more violence directed against health insurance companies, given their flagrant abuses and given that the U.S. is awash in guns.
Cory:
Murder is never the answer. Murder is not a healthy response to corruption. But it is healthy for people to fear that if they kill people for greed, they will be unsafe."
Think about hospital exec Ralph de la Torre, who cheerfully testified to Congress that he’d killed patients in pursuit of profit. De la Torre clearly doesn’t fear any kind of consequences for his actions. He owns hospitals that are filled with tens of thousands of bats (he stiffed the exterminators), where none of the elevators work (he stiffed the repair techs), where there’s no medicine or blood (he stiffed the suppliers) and where the doctors and nurses can’t make rent (he stiffed them too). De La Torre doesn’t just own hospitals – he also owns a pair of superyachts:
It is a miracle that so many people have lost their mothers, sons, wives and husbands so Ralph de la Torre could buy himself another superyacht, and that those people live in a country where you can buy an assault rifle, and that Ralph de la Torre isn’t forced to live in a bunker and travel in a tank.
It’s a rather beautiful sort of miracle, to be honest. I like to think that it comes from a widespread belief by the people of this country I have since become a citizen of, that we should solve our problems politically, rather than with bullets.
But the assassination of Brian Thompson is a wake-up call, a warning that if we don’t solve this problem politically, we may not have a choice about whether it’s solved with violence. As a character in “Radicalized” says, “They say violence never solves anything, but to quote The Onion: that’s only true so long as you ignore all of human history.”