Travellers from abroad share their thoughts on American health care from the hostel where Luigi Mangione stayed.
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The killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has captivated the nation and caused a wide range of reactions. But what do the people who may have crossed paths with suspected triggerman Luigi Mangione right before the shooting think about it?
To find out, WhoWhatWhy visited the hostel where he spent the night before allegedly committing murder.
Both foreign and domestic travelers were shocked to learn that they may have brushed shoulders (or even roomed) with the 26-year-old. While the American guests remained tight-lipped, foreign tourists were appalled — not just by the crime itself, but also by its uniquely American nature.
“Woah,” said South Korean surgeon Hyo Won Seo, wide-eyed as he smoked a cigarette around the corner of the building.
Seo, who hopes to be a surgeon in the US, sees the problems of gun ownership and private health care as intertwined.
After medical school, he trained at Stanford University Hospital where he became accustomed to the surgical consequences of gun violence and the thought of potentially one day treating a victim. When it came to the question of Mangione’s alleged assassination of a CEO to spark a national reckoning, he tossed his cigarette on the ground and stamped on it. “I object,” he said.
“Homicide is a terrible way to solve this situation,” he added. “It’s just revenge, and anyway, not good.”
However, comparing South Korea to the US, he also pointed to the differences in the cost of health care and who pays for it, which is Mangione’s suspected motive.
If someone requires particularly expensive care in South Korea, it is declared what Seo described as a “medical disaster” and is covered as such by the Ministry of Health and Welfare. A doctor’s visit costs about the price of a McDonald’s Big Mac meal.
Seo’s description of his country’s health care system tracks with the experiences of Kate Robbins, the former director of the Campaign for New York Health and an advocate for universal health care.
When asked to help explain Americans’ outrage over the US’s dysfunctional system, Robbins reminisced about her time in South Korea as an English teacher.
“I just remember being, you know, all of 24 and giddy to have access to health care,” she said. “I’d just be paying two percent of my paycheck and then I get to go to the doctor; I paid a tiny bit more for an English-speaking doctor, I went to the dermatologist, I went to the dentist.”
She pointed out that the words Mangione shouted as he was whisked away in an orange jumpsuit mirrored the talking points of single-payer advocates.
“Completely out of touch and an insult to the intelligence of the American people,” he said, presumably referring to the status quo of corporate health care giants.
Of course, acts of violence were never part of the playbook for Robbins. Her organization used different tactics, sometimes to great effect.
Much of the work that the Campaign for New York Health and other groups do isn’t only rooted in advocacy. They directly target companies like UnitedHealthcare, Blue Cross, and Aetna in particularly egregious cases of claim denials. In one case, an employee of one of these major companies sought out Robbins, who was picketing outside of an office building in lower Manhattan, and said, “Okay, we’re approving the care. You win.”
Back at the hostel, of the American travelers milling around the entrance, two swiftly rebuffed requests for comment while a third claimed that speaking would create a conflict of interest at their job.
Foreign tourists were less guarded.
Jane, a French traveller, admitted she was trying to identify the furniture visible behind Mangione in the widely circulated CCTV image to gauge her potential proximity to the alleged killer.
She expressed pride in her country’s universal system as one where citizens “give [their] money to help everyone. It’s like, solidarity,” she said.
However, she also noted that there is currently a debate in France over whether undocumented migrants should have access to free health care.
Morgan Moore, executive director of Physicians for a National Health Program’s NY Metro Chapter (PNHP), warned that other nations should pay attention to the state of health care in the US before “reforming” their own systems.
“They should take this incident and the grievous state of health care in the US as a cautionary tale,” Moore said. “The push to defund and profitize national public health care systems in places like the UK is an indication of the utter insatiability of corporate greed.”
When asked if a crime like this could happen in a peer nation, she responded, “No. I don’t believe this could have happened elsewhere. On this issue in particular, the US has no peers.”
She noted that the US is the only wealthy nation without at least some form of basic universal health care.
“The US stands alone in this barbarity of allowing corporations to prey on people by selling inadequate, piecemeal, astronomically-priced insurance plans and then delaying and denying care for profit with often devastating and deadly results,” Moore said, adding, “Denial of care is violence.”
While statistics show that a majority of Americans are unhappy with the health care system as a whole — according to a November Gallup poll, 71 percent say the quality of coverage in the US is only fair or poor — some fear the alternative and oppose the implementation of a single-payer system.
When asked about their own health care, 25 percent of Americans rated their health care coverage as excellent, with 46 percent calling it good, 21 percent only fair, and 5 percent rating it poor.
Those numbers could change in the wake of the murder and the unwelcome attention the health care industry is receiving.
Moore believes that the US has reached a “remarkable, unprecedented moment of unity and solidarity across the political spectrum” and predicts that “we might at last have reached a critical mass of awareness in the US, of people now seeing clearly and calling out the corporations and oligarchs that are behind the curtains and pulling the strings, causing this entirely preventable misery.”
When compared to peer nations with universal health care, Americans pay more, see the doctor less, and die younger, not to mention the alarmingly high rates of chronic disorders and obesity that are unique among OECD nations.
At the same time, health care spending in the US is a jaw-dropping $12,742 per capita, while France covers its citizens with $6,924 per person and South Korea just $1,110.
Meanwhile, the largest insurance companies in the US are earning huge profits. UnitedHealth Group, the parent company of UnitedHealthcare, made $23 billion in 2023.
The debate over health care is not a new conversation. For decades, activists and politicians have been advocating for an American single-payer system.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) made “Medicare for all” a central theme of his two presidential campaigns, both of which exceeded expectations but ultimately fell short in spite of a lot of grassroots support.
Sanders vehemently condemned the murder of Thompson but also pointed out that the reaction to it reflects a deep-seated anger among regular Americans.
“What it did show online is that many, many people are furious at the health insurance companies who make huge profits denying them and their families the health care that they desperately need,” he said.
That anger has been reflected in the reactions to the murder, with 41 percent of 18 to 29-year-old Americans saying the killer’s actions are “acceptable.” Many have taken to online platforms to share health care horror stories of denied treatment and exorbitant medical bills.
Of course, those close to Thompson have also experienced the assassination on a deeply personal level and praised the UnitedHealthcare CEO as someone who “lived life to the fullest” and was “incredibly loving” and “generous.”
Laurie Wen, a long-time activist and writer working to establish a national health care system, said she felt sorrow for the grieving loved ones, but then asked, “Incredibly generous and loving to whom? Not to the people who made him rich.”
“To me, it’s about two things,” she continued. “One, who gets blamed for the completely inhumane health care system that we have, and two, what do we want to do about it?”
As a devoted activist, she works to help Americans “connect the dots.” To her, the true heroes in this fight are unsung and nonviolent.
And she hopes that this case, the attention it has received, and the anger it has unleashed will swell the ranks of these heroes, if Americans channel their anger in a productive way.
“The people who are giddy about this, how else do they spend their time?” she asked. “I mean, do they vote for the people who are enabling this? Do they spend any time organizing for Medicare for all?”
These are the key questions that decide what will happen next, and whether a system that benefits wealthy corporations but not regular Americans is going to change.
This story was written by a member of our Mentor Apprentice Program (MAP). It gives aspiring journalists an opportunity to hone their craft while covering national and international news under the tutelage of seasoned reporters and editors. You can learn more about the MAP and how you can support our efforts to safeguard the future of journalism here.
