Michael Moore Responds to CEO Shooting

"It's not often that my work gets a killer five-star review from an actual killer," Michael Moore writes in a post on Substack addressing the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. Moore was named as one of the people who have "illuminated the corruption and greed" in America's health care system in a paper police say they found on Luigi Mangione. Moore says he has been repeatedly asked if he condemns murder—and his response is that he does, which is why he condemns the health care system, USA Today reports.

• "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," Moore writes.
• Moore says he has, throughout his life, repeatedly stated that he is a pacifist. The filmmaker says he has denounced violence in documentaries like Bowling for Columbine, which condemned the "murder of 50,000 Americans every year at the hands of our gun industry and our politicians who do nothing to stop it." His 2007 documentary Sicko, he writes, was "about America's bloodthirsty, profit-driven and murderous health insurance system."

• In America, Moore writes, "we have a whopping 1.4 million people employed with the job of DENYING HEALTH CARE, vs only 1 million doctors in the entire country! That's all you need to know about America. We pay more people to deny care than to give it."
• Moore says he will not condemn the outpouring of anger against the health insurance industry that followed the shooting. He describes it as "1000% justified," and something that has been "boiling" for a long time. "People across America are not celebrating the brutal murder of a father of two kids from Minnesota," he writes. "They are screaming for help, they are telling you what's wrong, they are saying that this system is not just and it is not right and it cannot continue. They want retribution. They want justice. They want health care."

• Moore calls the shooting a "RICH ON RICH crime," describing Mangione as a "young rich man with a couple of Ivy League degrees, scion of a family that owns 2 of the biggest country clubs in Maryland and who is in line to inherit a chain of nursing homes."
• "No one needs to die. In fact, that's my point," Moore writes. "No one should die because they don't "have" health insurance. Not one single person should die because their 'health insurance' denies their health care in order to make a buck or Thirty Two Billion Bucks."
• Moore says his solution is simple: "Throw this entire system in the trash, 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."

(More Luigi Mangione stories.)