Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren excused the outrage at the healthcare industry many Americans have expressed following the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson Tuesday.
Thompson was shot dead outside the Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan on Dec. 4, with authorities arresting Luigi Mangione — an Ivy League graduate who reportedly despised the health industry — in connection to the murder. When asked about the killing, Warren remarked that “violence is never the answer,” but claimed that people “can only be pushed so far,” and that health insurance companies should consider the outcry of online support for Mangione a “warning.”
“Violence is never the answer, but people can be pushed only so far,” Warren said in an interview with the Huffington Post. “The visceral response from people across the country who feel cheated, ripped off, and threatened by the vile practices of their insurance companies should be a warning to everyone in the healthcare system.”
Warren is an outspoken advocate of government health care, and introduced the Corporate Crimes Against Health Care Act of 2024 in June to “root out corporate greed and private equity abuse in the health care system.” She also spoke at a Senate hearing in April titled, “When Health Care Becomes Wealth Care: How Corporate Greed Puts Patient Care and Health Workers at Risk.”
Authorities suspect Thompson’s assassination was motivated by opposition to the U.S. healthcare industry, with the words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” written on bullet casings found at the scene in what is suspected to be a reference to Rutgers Law Professor Jay Feinman’s book “Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It.”
Like Warren, Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders also brought up flaws in the healthcare industry when asked about Thompson’s murder, saying that the support for the act proves “that millions of people understand that healthcare is a human right and that you cannot have people in the insurance industry rejecting needed health care for people while they make billions of dollars in profit.”
Democratic Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman struck a different tone from his Senate colleagues.
“No shortage of shitty takes on the 2024 election or on this assassination,” Fetterman wrote on X Saturday. “The public execution of an innocent man and father of two is indefensible, not ‘inevitable.’ Condoning and cheering this on says more about YOU than the situation of health insurance.”
Warren’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Sanders’s office referred the Daily Caller News Foundation to the comments quoted above.
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