Social critic and documentary filmmaker Michael Moore said in a Substack post that he wants to "pour gasoline" on the anger Americans have expressed against the nation's health insurance industry.
Moore wrote Friday that fury directed at the US health insurance industry was "1000 percent justified." Following the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan last week, some Americans have taken to social media and other outlets to express their frustration with the state of private health insurance in the nation.
Moore — whose documentaries include criticisms of the US war on terror, gun violence, and health care, among other topics — was mentioned by name in the manifesto of Luigi Mangione, the man police believe killed Thompson.
Mangione allegedly described Moore as someone who "illuminated the corruption and greed" in the health care industry in his 2007 film Sicko.
“It’s not often that my work gets a killer five-star review from an actual killer,” Moore wrote in his Substack piece.
He noted that he had been receiving media requests, including some that were essentially asking him to "condemn murder."
“Do I condemn murder? That’s an odd question. In Fahrenheit 9/11, I condemned the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi people and the senseless murder of our own American soldiers at the hands of our American government,” Moore wrote.
He went on to argue that his body of work made it very clear that he expressly does not and has never condoned murder. But believing murder is wrong is not saying that the wave of anger toward the health insurance industry is unwarranted, he added.
“After the killing of the CEO of United HealthCare, the largest of these billion-dollar insurance companies, there was an immediate OUTPOURING of anger toward the health insurance industry.”
He added: “Some people have stepped forward to condemn this anger. I am not one of them. The anger is 1000 percent justified. It is long overdue for the media to cover it. It is not new. It has been boiling. And I’m not going to tamp it down or ask people to shut up. I want to pour gasoline on that anger.”
Moore said that Thompson's killing opened the door for Americans to express their long-simmering fury toward private, profit-driven health insurance companies.
“Yes, I condemn murder, and that’s why I condemn America’s broken, vile, rapacious, bloodthirsty, unethical, immoral health care industry and I condemn every one of the CEOs who are in charge of it and I condemn every politician who takes their money and keeps this system going instead of tearing it up, ripping it apart, and throwing it all away. We need to replace this system with something sane, something caring and loving — something that keeps people alive,” he wrote.
Even Andrew Witty, the CEO of UnitedHealth Group — the parent company of UnitedHealthcare — called the US insurance system "flawed" in a recent New York Times op-ed.
“We know the health system does not work as well as it should, and we understand people’s frustrations with it,” Witty said. “No one would design a system like the one we have.”
He also mourned the loss of Thompson, calling the CEO a "brilliant, kind man."
Moore has a suggestion for what changing that "flawed" system might look like — state-run health care akin to the system used in Canada and other nations.
“The solution is simple,” he wrote.
“Throw this entire system in the trash,” he wrote. “Dismantle this immoral business that profits off the lives of human beings and monetizes our deaths, that murders us or leaves us to die, destroy it all, and instead, in its place, give us all the same health care that every other civilized country on Earth has: Universal, free, compassionate, and full of life.”
