Luigi Mangione Pleaded Guilty. Now Check the Scoreboard.

Luigi Mangione pleaded guilty. Twenty months after his killing was celebrated as a rupture, a reckoning, and a catalyst for healthcare reform, it is finally time to check the scoreboard.

What was the demand? What was the mechanism? Who built the coalition? What was the result?

The answer is brutal: the movement generated celebrity, merchandise, courtroom fan culture, and a seven-figure legal defense fund—but no measurable improvement for sick Americans.

Chad examines the difference between a legitimate grievance and an effective movement, why political spectacle feels like change even when it produces nothing, and the bipartisan healthcare legislation quietly doing more than the entire Mangione phenomenon.

The grievance is real. The fury is earned. But fury without construction is merely rage with better branding.

Plus, in the After Hours Q&A:

• Why healthcare still relies on fax machines
• What Mangione actually pleaded guilty to
• Why telling patients to appeal isn’t excusing insurers
• Whether covering Mangione gives him the fame he wanted
• Why insurance denials deserve their own full investigation

TEXT THE SHOW: 252-CHAD-LAW
Visit ChadParkerLaw.com for the books, editorials, The Gaily News, and the free Common Sense Conservative Manifesto.

CHAPTERS

00:00 The Scoreboard of Healthcare Reform
02:04 Personal vs. Political Vengeance
04:57 The Marketing of a Movement
07:48 The Absence of a Clear Demand
10:23 The Role of Social Media in Activism
12:47 The Failure to Create Real Change
15:00 Analyzing the Results of the Movement
18:49 The Illusion of Change in Healthcare
22:07 Real Change vs. Spectacle
23:48 Relief vs. Reform
26:55 Public Sentiment and Political Violence
29:36 Constructive Anger: The Path Forward
31:59 The Consequences of Inaction
33:30 Grievance, Action, and the Reagan Reminder

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

America Luigi Mangioni did not lower your premium. He didn't get one claim approved. He didn't change one line of the law. He didn't get a single sixth person in this country, a single MRI. Twenty months. That's the scoreboard. Zero. What he did do was give a whole lot of people the best week they'd had in years. Friday morning he sat down in a federal courtroom in Manhattan and pleaded guilty. Said it flat off a page with no drama. On the morning of December fourth, 2024, I, Luigi Mangioni, shot Mr. Thompson in Manhattan and he died. I knew what I was doing was illegal. Brian Thompson's wife was sitting in the front row. And in the first full year after the killing they told us was a rupture, a spark, a reckoning, a catalyst. United Healthcare denied 17% of standard prior authorization requests in Medicare Advantage. Highest denial rate of any major insurer in America. Not lowest, highest. So the revolution's box score reads one dead executive, zero policy changes, and the company got worse at the thing everyone was mad about. Hey America! Chad Law here, the last gay conservative. This is common sense, the show that reads the fine print, so you don't have to. And if you've got something to add while we're doing this or think I've got it dead wrong, text me. 252 Chad Law. I read them during the after hours at the end of the main show. All right, let's get back to this scoreboard. The grievance is real. I'm putting that on the record early because in about 10 minutes someone's gonna clip this and tell you I'm defending insurance companies. I'm not. The denials are real, the appeals are real. The letter that comes back three weeks later with a code on it that no human being can explain, very real. And it happens to people who are already sick, already scared, already out of energy. So here's what happened to that grievance. A 28-year-old man printed part of a gun on a 3D printer, screwed a silencer onto it, traveled to New York City, waited outside of a hotel in the dark, and shot a father of two in the back on a public sidewalk. He said every one of those steps out loud on this last Friday, in order, just like a guy reading a receipt. And a couple million people looked at that and called it health care reform. That's my whole argument today, and here it is in one sentence. America took one man's private vengeance, hung a halo on it, and then mistook the celebrity it manufactured for healthcare reform. It was not a movement. It's a mood with merch. So today we're gonna do the rudest possible thing you can do to a revolution. We're gonna ask for its numbers. That's what I want to know. What did it demand? How was it supposed to happen? Who organized to do it, and what actually changed for the sick people in this country? Four questions. I'll give you the answers as we go, and I'll warn you now three of them are the same answer. And one more thing before we start, because it's the strangest fact in this whole story. The single most damning piece of evidence against the American health insurance industry produced in the last 20 months came out on Friday. From him at his own guilty plea. We'll get there. Hold on to it. First of all, folks, I understand the grievance is real, and I'm putting that on record early because in about 10 minutes someone's gonna clip this and tell you Chad's defending insurance companies. I am not. These denials are real. The appeals are real. That letter that comes back three weeks later with a code on it that no human being can explain, that's real. And it happens to people who are already sick, already scared, and already out of energy. But here's what happened to Luigi Mangioni's grievance. Basically, a 28-year-old man printed part of a gun on a 3D printer, screwed a silencer onto it, traveled to New York, waited outside a hotel in the dark, and shot a father of two in the back on a public sidewalk. He said every one of those steps out loud just this last Friday in order, like a guy reading a CVS receipt. And a couple million people looked at that and called it healthcare reform, yay! That's my whole argument today, and here it is in one sentence. America took one man's private vengeance, hung a halo on it, and then mistook the celebrity it manufactured for health care reform. Not a movement, a mood with merch. So today, I'm gonna do the rudest possible thing you can do to a revolution. I'm gonna ask for its numbers. That's what I want to know. What did it demand? How was it supposed to happen, this social murder? Who organized to do it? And what actually changed for the sick people in America? Four questions. I'll give you the answers as we go, and I'll warn you now three of them are the same answer. But one more thing before we start, because it's the strangest fact in this whole story. The single most damning piece of evidence against the American health insurance industry produced in the last 20 months came out just this last Friday, from him at his own guilty plea. We'll get there. But before we do, let's start with what he actually said Friday because almost nobody has read it, and it's not what either side has been telling you it is. He begins with the pain, years of severe pain from a broken back, navigating the obstacles of the health insurance system, watching other people go through the same thing. Then one sentence later, he says he learned United Healthcare would be holding its annual investor conference in New York City on December fourth. Then the ruse, the email, the fifty billion dollars, the hour. Then his 3D printer, he created part of a gun, bought a silencer, a magazine, and traveled to New York with the intent to shoot Brian Thompson on the morning of December 4th. He shot him in Manhattan and he died on the sidewalk. He understood his actions would place Thompson in fear of death or serious bodily injury. And then the flattest sentence in the whole document. I knew what I was doing was illegal. Those were his words, quote unquote. Now, read all of that again and tell me what's missing. There's a wound in there, there's a plan in there, there is nothing in between them. No ask, not one. Not a bill, not a rule, not a rate, not a policy, not a number, not a demand, not one sentence that begins with the words what should happen instead is. He described a problem, then he described a route, a weapon, and a target. He never once described his remedy. Folks, that's not a manifesto. That's a hate list with a travel itinerary stapled to it. Now, this is where people start yelling at their phones, so let me get ahead of it. I'm not telling you he had no politics. He did. It's in the federal complaint, the notebook, where he wrote that the insurance industry was the target, that it, quote, checks every box, and that an investor conference, quote, the message becomes self-evident. That's political, that's an ideology, nobody's disputing it. But a message is not a program. A message tells you how the person feels. A program tells you what's supposed to happen Tuesday morning. And every serious thing that ever improved anyone's life in this country was a program. Boring, specific, negotiated, dated, and usually named after two senators nobody can pick out of a lineup. He wrote, quote, The message becomes self-evident. That's a marketing note. That's a guy's briefing campaign. I know I used to write them for a living. Before politics, I ran a marketing agency, and I was good at one specific thing. Building a feeling that behaves like an argument. I did a campaign once for an anti-aging cream, hands and neck. And the whole campaign was one question we asked women with photographs. Do you have a face like Kim Kardashian and a neck and hands like Chris? That's it. That was the campaign. No claim about the product, no ingredient, no study, no result, no promise. We never argued anything. We found the thing you already hated when you looked down. We pointed at it, then we stood next to a bottle. It worked. It worked incredibly well. I got paid a lot for it, and I'd do it again. So when a guy writes, the message becomes self-evident. I don't hear a revolutionary, I hear a colleague, another marketer, a copywriter. And look who he knew was in that room, he said it Friday. The conference would be attended by company executives, the board of directors, and hundreds of investors. Not doctors, nurses, and patients. That's a man who knew exactly what the room was. That's called targeting. Which is still not a program. It's part of marketing, again. And one more inconvenient thing. The NYPD said there was no indication he was ever a United Healthcare customer. United Healthcare never denied him anything. He didn't pick the company that hurt him. He picked the biggest one. He picked the one with the best conference. So what we have, in his own words, on the record, is a man with a real injury, a real grievance, an ideological read on who should pay for it, and an enormous amount of preparation. What we don't have anywhere is a request. And that empty space is where all these other people came pouring in. Hassan Piker picks it up and fills in with Frederick Ingalls. Says Brian Thompson was engaged in a tremendous amount of social murder, and that Americans understood why the killing happened. I'm going to be exact here because I don't do sloppy. He did not say the man was justified. He said people understood. Those are different sentences, and I'll hold him to the one he said. But watch what social murder does. It doesn't argue that killing an executive is good. It quietly moves the executive onto a list of people who were already killing. And once he's on that list, nobody has to defend the murder anymore. It's just accounting, if you will. A permission slip with footnotes. Somebody else picks it up outside the courthouse Friday, after the plea, after the 3D printer and the silencer, and I knew what I was doing was illegal, and calls it, and I'm quoting, a revolutionary act of protest. Not a tragedy, not a symptom, not even a crime he sympathizes with. A revolutionary act of protest, present tense, ongoing. And about a million and a half dollars picks it up in an official legal defense fund, one donation at a time. I'm not gonna sit here and tell you every dollar in that fund is a person applauding a murder. It isn't. I can't prove that, neither can you. Some of those people gave because they think the death penalty is wrong. Some gave because they think everyone deserves a real lawyer, which happens to be a load bearing belief of mine as well. I'm not assigning one motive to thousands of strangers. I can't do that. I'm doing something narrower and a lot more damning. What I'm noting, and pay attention, this is important, is that this movement proved conclusively that it can raise a million and a half dollars in a hurry. Remember that, we're gonna need it in about ten minutes. Just hang tight. The strongest argument against everything I just said goes like this. Chad, you're pretending this was private when the man told you it was political. He named an industry, he picked a symbolic venue, he wanted a message understood. You don't get to call that personal vengeance just because you don't like the politics. Yeah, sure, that's kind of a real objection. Here's my answer. I'm not saying he had no cause. I'm saying he had no mandate. Nobody elected him, nobody delegated to him, nobody in that countless others he mentioned Friday, the one whose experience he says he witnessed, nobody asked him to do this on their behalf. He decided his pain plus their pain added up to authorization. Then he went and made a gun on a printer. He brought the gun. Everybody else brought the halo for him. And the tell, the thing that gives the whole game away, is what this movement built first. Fan cams, a merchandise line, courtroom outfit analysis, which is a real genre now with reviewers, a seven-figure legal fund inside of a month. It got all the way to a merch drop before it got into one policy discussion at all. You cannot name me the demand. Twenty months, and I'll take one sentence. What was the ask? What law? What agency? What rule? Who was going to carry it? What did anyone actually want done? And the answer, as far as the public record goes, is nothing specific. A feeling. A very intense, very justified, very marketable feeling with a face on it. And a feeling doesn't get anyone's new chemo treatment approved. All right, fine. Message received, message delivered, message self-evident. It's been 20 months. So let's go find what the murder bought these people, these fans. What changed about insurance now because of Luigi Mangioni? Four questions. I use these on everything now, and I want you to steal them because by Thursday, somebody on your feed is going to call something else a catalyst, and you're gonna need them. What was the demand? What was the mechanism? Who was the coalition and what was the result? Okay? Demand, mechanism, coalition, result. Anything that calls itself a movement and can't answer all four is a mood with a hashtag. So let's run it. Demand. What specifically was supposed to change based on Luigi's actions? I've looked. Twenty months of coverage, rallies, threads, a documentary's worth of footage outside that courthouse. I cannot find one sentence anywhere that finishes the thought. Not a bill number, not a rule, not a rate cap, not a claim standard, not an appeals deadline, not one agency that was supposed to do one thing by one date. Healthcare is broken. It's not a demand that's a diagnosis, and about 80% of this country already agreed with it before anyone had to get murdered. All right, one down. Next mechanism. Okay, forget the demand. How was it supposed to happen? By what machinery does shooting an executive on a sidewalk turn into your mom's knee replacement getting approved? I don't know, nobody ever said. And I know why nobody ever said, because when you write it down, it sounds insane. Step one, kill an executive. Step two, the remaining executives, in fear for their lives, voluntarily approve more claims, reducing their own revenue in perpetuity out of terror. When does that happen? That's a hostage negotiation with a company that has 900 more vice presidents waiting to take their spot. Number two down. Three is result. This is the one where I have actual numbers, so buckle up. Two days ago, KFF published the first real look at prior authorization inside these companies. And the reason we have it is the whole episode in one fact. Insurers are now required to publicly post those numbers every year, and that requirement comes from a federal rule the government finalized in 2024 before the killing. Every embarrassing number you're about to hear, every denial rate, the entire ability of a private citizen to check up on these companies at all, exists because people nobody can name wrote a regulation in a building nobody visits. Not one of them is on a t-shirt next to Luigi Mangioni. So in 2025, the first year after December 4th, the year of the reckoning, the Magioni Reckoning, insurancers denied 12% of standard prior authorization requests in Medicare Advantage, 14% in Medicaid managed care, 18% in the Obamacare marketplaces, and United Health, the company at the center of all of it, denied 17% in Medicare Advantage, highest of the six big insurances in the country. Elevance was at five. Now this show is receipts and not vibes, so I'd rather hand you the weakness myself than let somebody else find it. That's a snapshot, not a trend. It's the first year the data has ever existed, so I can't show you a before and after, and I'm not gonna pretend I can. Most requests do get approved, somewhere between 82 and 90%, depending on the plan. And a denial that gets reversed later isn't automatically a crime. Sometimes the doctor's office left a page out of the facts. I said facts in 2026. That's a different episode, and I'm gonna need a drink before I do that one. But anyways, here's the number that really got me, and it's from Congress, not from me, so buckle up. In Medicare Advantage in 2024, insurancers got 53 million prior authorization requests. They fully or partially denied about 4 million of them. Only 11.5% of those denials were ever appealed. And the ones that were appealed? Nearly 81% got overturned. Read that again. Four out of five times somebody pushed back, they won. And nine out of ten people never pushed in the first place. That's the actual scandal. It was sitting right there the whole time. It doesn't require a gun, it doesn't require a manifesto, it doesn't require anybody to die. It requires a form, a phone call, and somebody telling you that the letter you got is a first offer. If the fan community had spent one percent of its energy teaching people to appeal, we could count lives it saved. Instead, we got a merch line with Luigi's face on t-shirts and tote bags. Premiums, while we're keeping score, family coverage through work went up six percent last year to just under $27,000, single coverage 5% to about $9,300. And no, I'm not blaming him for that. One man cannot move a national premium, and it's stupid to pretend otherwise. But folks, that's exactly my point. You see, if nothing he could have possibly have done would have changed that number, then whoever told you this was going to fix healthcare was lying to you at the beginning, not just in hindsight. The scoreboard doesn't say he made it worse. The scoreboard says the thing was never plugged into anything in the first place. Now, what did change? Something did, and I promised you I wouldn't tell you nothing happened. Executive photographs came off corporate websites, ooh, big win for health insurance. Bios came down, leadership pages went dark, security budgets went up, way up, bodyguards got hired, conferences went virtual. That's it, that's the flinch. The system reacted by getting harder to see and harder to reach. Congratulations. Mangioni's revolution installed better locks. Coalition, last question, and this is the one that decides whether I'm being fair. Did anybody even organize? Yes, actually, yes they did, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. There's a group in New York called People Over Profit that held rallies with healthcare demands attached. Those are people who took the anger and tried to point it at something. There was also a California ballot initiative about insurance delays and denials originally filed with Luigi Mangioni's name in the title. Then his name came off of it in amended filing. Then it failed to qualify for the ballot, figure. Which is a whole story in nine seconds, if you think about it. The movement's one attempted actual policy started by borrowing his fame, then decided the fame was a liability, took it off the label, and still never made it onto a ballot. Meanwhile, the number I told you to hang on to, the legal defense fund, raised about a million and a half dollars. Now, I said I'm not going to claim every one of those donors was applauding a murder, and I meant it. Some of that is due process money, some of it is people who oppose the death penalty on principle, which is a serious position held by serious people, including myself. But look at what that fund proves about capability. When this thing wanted to move money, it moved seven figures in about a month. When it wanted to move a law, it couldn't get a signature page past the California Secretary of State. It's not that they couldn't organize, it's that they only organized around Luigi. That's it. And the murder. And now let me show you the boring version because it's happening right now and almost none of you have heard it. There's a bill right now. HR 3514, the Improving Seniors Timely Access to Care Act. It puts prior authorization decisions on a clock. Seven days for a standard request, 72 hours for an urgent one, makes insurancers say why they denied you instead of mailing you a code, puts it all electronic and requires them to publish the numbers. On July 15th, it passed the Ways and Means Committee. 42 to 0. 42 members of Congress from both parties in this environment in this decade, unanimous, nearly 300 co-sponsors on the actual bill. Six days later, Energy and Commerce moved. Moved it too. And over in the Senate, the Finance Committee opened a formal request in July asking anyone in America with a serious proposal on denials, appeals, and insurance or accountability to send it in. That window is open until October 2nd. Right now, as you're watching this, 42 to nothing, and there was not one fan camera. Nobody analyzed what Mike Kelly wore to the markup. There's no tote bag, there's no jawline analysis. There's a room with bad carpet and a committee clerk calling names and a bill that would put a legally enforceable clock on the exact machine everyone spent 20 months screaming justifying murder about. That's what it looks like when it's real. It's slow, it's partial, it's Medicare advantage only. It's got a dozen loopholes lobbyists are working on tonight. And if it passes, the win is that your mother gets an answer in seven days instead of thirty. That's the whole prize. Seven days instead of thirty. Which, by Washington standards, is huge. But nobody's printing that on a shirt. And it'll help more human beings than everything that happened on that sidewalk times 10,000. So, demand, mechanism, coalition, and result. Nothing, nothing, only around him, and the executives got bodyguards. That's not a catalyst. That's the most expensive nothing in modern American politics. So if it accomplished nothing, why did it feel like so much? Because America, it wasn't reform, it was relief. Somebody simply scratched the itch. And scratching works. That's the part nobody says out loud, so I will. It works. Feels fantastic to scratch. For about 90 seconds, you're not suffering. Then the skin's broken, the rash comes back angrier, and a fingernail doesn't buy you 90 seconds of relief anymore. Nothing was treated. 17%, 27,000 a year, nine out of ten people never appealing. But the country now has the memory of relief. And that isn't a figure of speech. It's a mechanism. It has numbers attached. Emerson polled this a week after the killing. 68% of Americans said what happened was unacceptable. Good. That's the country I think we still live in. However, 41% of voters aged 18 to 29 said it was at least somewhat acceptable. Four in ten. Not on a message board, not in a comment section, in an Emerson poll. Now, be careful with that number, though. Subgroups and polls carry bigger error bars, and I'm not telling you half of young Americans want blood. It doesn't say that. It says a killing on a sidewalk on video of a man crossing to a meeting crossed a moral line, and four in ten people under 30 looked at that line and said, Eh, I guess it depends. Now put it next to the other poll. APNORC found roughly seven in ten adults assigned at least moderate responsibility for that death to insurance denials and industry profits. Seven in ten. That's not the fringe. That's your mother, your mechanic, and probably half the people you sat next to at church on Sunday. So the grievance isn't marginal. The willingness to excuse isn't marginal either. And those two things are living in the same country at the same time, with nothing built in between them to turn one into the other. I mean, that's just a pile of dry grass waiting on the weather. And the cruel joke on top of it is that the spectacle doesn't even work on its own terms. There's a body of research on this. Six separate experiments. What it finds is that extreme tactics generally reduce public support for the cause attached to them because people stop identifying with a movement the second the movement scares them. So the killing didn't just fail to deliver reform. It made reform harder by handing every insurance lobbyist in Washington a permanent, unanswerable talking point about who they're negotiating against. Great work, everybody. Really got that insurance company better. Now, the part that made me want to do this episode, and it isn't about him at all. He's going to jail. That's settled. There's a judge and a sentence and a system, and he stood up and said he did it. Bye-bye. I want to talk about the people who never touched a gun. Because there's an entire class of person in this country who did something very specific over the last 20 months. They never said go do it. They were too careful for that. What they did was take a killing and slowly, very professionally, move it out of the category of murder and into the category of response. You call it social murder. And now the man on the sidewalk isn't a victim, he's a participant. You say people understand why it happened, and now the killing isn't an act, it's a weather event. You call it a revolutionary act of protest outside a courthouse after the guy has confessed to the printer and the silencer, and now it isn't a crime at all, it's a category of politics. Nobody in that chain ever told anyone to do anything. That is by design. And watch what happens if it happens again. Let's say in eight months somebody else with a real grievance and a bad plan decides he's the next one. Every single one of those people has an exit already built. I never told anyone to do anything. I was describing a system. I was explaining public anger, not endorsing it. You're blaming me for a lone actor. And technically, legally, they'll be right. Nobody gets a subpoena for a framework. So here's what I'd ask them instead. And I'd ask it on camera and I'd wait for the answer. You spent 20 months telling people the killing was comprehensible. Fine, it's a free country and some of it was interesting. What did you spend the other 20 months on? Where's your bill? Where's your organization? Where's the appeals clinic? Where's your comment to the Senate Finance Committee, which is open right now until October 2nd and takes about an afternoon? Because if you built the permission and somebody else built nothing, you didn't run a movement. You ran a mood professionally or engagement, and you kept the receipts for none of it. And the next guy is watching all of this. The next guy is watching what this one got. That's my fear. He got a fan base, he got merchandise, he got courtroom outfit reviews, he got a million and a half dollars from strangers and people outside a federal courthouse calling him revolutionary after he confessed. And he got nothing changed, which means the itch is still there and the relief already got used up once. Now, I'm not predicting anybody. There's no copycat I know about, and I'm not gonna do the thing where a host darkly hints at a future crime to make his episode feel important. That is not what I'm doing. I'm telling you what the market looks like. The next person who wants that feeling has to do more than this one did, because this one already happened. That's how tolerance works. That's how it always works. The first scratch was free. So what's the alternative? And it is not, and this is the flabbiest answer in American commentary, it is not to be more civil. I don't care if you're civil, be furious. The grievance earned fury. If your kid got denied and you're polite about it, you're doing it wrong. Period. The opposite of violence isn't politeness. The opposite of violence is construction. And construction is unglamorous in a way I think is hard for people raised on this internet to accept. It's a demand somebody wrote down. It's an argument you have to win in front of people who don't already agree with you. It's a coalition, which means allies you find annoying. It's a compromise that gets you 70% and makes you feel like a sellout. It's a mechanism, a bill, a rule, a clock, a number, a law, and then it's measurement. The part everybody skips, where you go back a year later and check whether the thing you passed did anything, and admit it if it didn't. Once again, demand, mechanism, coalition, and result. Nobody's making a documentary about that. There's no fan cam for a committee markup, and there never will be. But here's what it produces seven days instead of thirty, a denial letter that has to say why, fifty-three million requests a year running through a machine that finally has to show its work. And it produces one more thing, which is why I'll take it every single time over the sidewalk murder. It doesn't require anybody's wife to be sitting in a federal courtroom on a Friday morning listening to an stranger explain in order how he found her husband. So, what did it change, Mangioni? A man is dead, two boys don't have a father, another man is going to prison for most or all of the rest of his life, and a state trial is still waiting for him in September, maybe. Denials are up, premiums are up, the executives have security details now, and nine out of ten Americans who get told no still never filed the appeal that wins four out of five times. That's the whole ledger. In twenty months. Was it worth it, folks? Was it worth it? Here's the reflex I want you walking out of here with, because next month it'll be something else. A different industry, a different sidewalk, a different guy people decide to make into a saint. Four questions. One, what's the demand? Two, what's the mechanism? Three, who's the coalition? And four, what was the result? You can run it in about eleven seconds, and it'll save you from every single person currently selling you a feeling and calling it a fight. And if you get told no by an insurance company this month, appeal it. That's the assignment. It's the single most effective thing available to an American with a denial letter, and it works four times out of five, and nobody's ever going to make you famous for it. I'd rather you win quietly than lose loudly like you are, anyways. All right, housekeeping quickly. Chadparkerlaw.com is home base. My books are there. The Gaeli News is there, my editorials, the Common Sense Conservative Manifesto is still free, which continues to be the worst business decision I've ever made, but I stand by it. And if you've got something out of this one, share it. Somebody in your life is about to repost something about this case with a lot of feeling and no scoreboard. You'd be doing them a favor. Remember our whole marketing ask. If you see us anywhere, share us. And the number one more time because I read these at the end. 252 Chadlaw. I went looking for something Reagan said about this, and I didn't expect to find it in the first week of his first job. January 5th, 1967, his inaugural address as governor of California. He's brand new. The state is on fire politically. Campuses are erupting, cities are tense, everyone's furious about something, and most of them have a good reason. And he says people with a grievance can take it to the courts. They can take it to the legislator, but not in our public streets. Sixty years ago, same argument, man had the whole thing in one sentence and then went and had lunch. Notice what he didn't say. He didn't say the grievances were fake. He didn't tell anyone to calm down, get over it, or be grateful. He took the anger completely seriously. And then told people exactly where to take it. Because there are only two places it can go, and one of them ends with somebody's wife in a courtroom. That's the shelter I keep talking about on this show. It isn't a party. It's a room where you can be as angry as you actually are and still be expected to point it at something that works. Furious is allowed here. Furious is welcome here. Effective is the price of admission. That's all we ask. Brian Thompson isn't coming back. Luigi Mangioni isn't getting out. Neither of those facts approved a single claim for a single sick person in this country. But the Senate Finance Committee is taking comments until October 2nd. It takes an afternoon. And I promise you, not one lobbyist in Washington is hoping you find out about it. America? That was common sense. Stick around for about 10 seconds while I collect all the text that came in and answer the questions in the after hours QA. All right, first one, Marcus 3092. He says, Chad, there's no way they still use fax machines. You made that up for the joke. Actually, I wish. That's real. Did you know a huge amount of prior authorization still move on fax, phone, and paper and is one of the dumbest bottlenecks in American medicine? Your doctor's office has somebody whose job is partly standing at a fax machine on your behalf. There's a federal rule pushing this onto electronic systems over the next couple of years, which will help. But think about what that means. A meaningful chunk of the delay everyone's furious about isn't a villain in a room deciding your fate. It's a fax that went to the wrong queue and sat there for eleven days. Somehow that makes me even angrier. Next one, Danielle seven seven one five. If the murder charges got thrown out, how is he facing life? Good question. It confuses everyone. I'll give you my quick version. The federal murder count got dismissed back in January. The judge ruled it didn't fit the statute it was charged under. That's what took the death penalty off the table. What he pleaded guilty to Friday was stalking, resulting in death, two counts, still carries up to life. And here's the part people keep getting wrong. There was no deal. He didn't trade anything for anything. Prosecutors are asking for life. The judge noted the guidelines land somewhere around 24 to 30 years, and it's the judge's call. Then he's still got a state murder trial waiting in September. His lawyers are going to argue double jeopardy, and Manhattan's going to fight it. So this isn't over. It's just no longer in doubt. He admitted it all. Great question. Ruben 4408. Easy to be principled when it's not your kid getting denied. You'd feel different. Yeah, I said that. And yeah, it's fair. I'm not going to pretend I'm made of marble, but look, you're describing why people snap. And that was never my question. I know why people are snapping. Half this episode was me saying, these grievances are real. Something's got to give here. The question isn't whether I'd feel it. Of course I'd feel it. The question is what I'd want somebody to do with the feeling. And I promise you the answer isn't shooting a stranger and accomplishing nothing. If it were my family, I'd want the thing that gets the treatment approved. That's all. That's the whole test. Rage that doesn't get the treatment approved is just rage with better branding. All right, Priya 816. Hey Priya, she's always great. Isn't doing a whole episode about him exactly the fame he wanted? You're feeding him. I am now since Friday. Not before, not once, not in 20 months. Go look. There's no episode on Luigi Mangioni. While this was a live case with an open question and a guy the internet was busy turning into a poster, I didn't give it a minute. Anything anyone said back then was fuel, including the takedowns, especially the takedowns. Friday, he stood up and said he did it. That's the whole difference. You can't build a folk hero out of a confession. There's no mess mystery left to the feed. All that's left is arithmetic, and arithmetic never made anybody famous. So yeah, I'm feeding it. I waited until the only thing on the menu was the scoreboard. Tanner, 5527. Just appeal it is a cop-out. You're telling sick people to do more paperwork instead of blaming the company that made them do it. Okay, this is a great text. And you're right, I don't get to say that. I haven't read the rest, but it is unjust, okay? A system where the correct answer gets reversed four out of five times on appeal is a system that's wrong on purpose. Because if they were wrong by accident, they'd have fixed it, right? Accidents cost money. This one just happens to make money. So yes, blame the company, blame the design, but appeal it anyway. Those two things are not in competition, and I refuse to do the thing where we're so committed to the injustice being somebody else's fault that we let a sick person eat a denial they could have overturned this month. Be furious at the fax machine, then use the fax machine. Awesome. All right, Colleen 9034. One guy killed one person and you gave him an hour. The industry's denials have a body count, nobody's counting. Where's that episode? I half agree, and then I'll fight you on the other half. I agree. The harm from denials is enormous, diffuse, boring, and underexamined precisely because there's no video of it. Nobody's ever making a fan cam about a woman who stopped taking a medication because the appeal took 11 weeks. Where I fight you is on body count. Nobody has an honest number. Anybody who hands you one on either side of this made it up because the counterfactual is unprovable. I'm not building a case on a statistic I can't defend. The second one number falls apart, the whole hour goes with it. That's the difference between us and cable. Oh, and that episode's coming. It's just gonna have receipts in it, which takes longer than being angry. That's why I did this for a special Tuesday. All right. Owen 2286. Does it ever scare you doing one like this? A little, but not the way you think. I'm not worried about the people who disagree with me. That's Tuesday. What gets in my head is the clip. Someone's gonna pull 40 seconds of this, cut off everything before and after, and hand you a version of me defending an insurance company, which is roughly the opposite of what I just spent an hour doing. It just happens. And there's nothing I can do about that except say the whole thing, anyways, and trust you've watched it. Which you did. So thank you. That's not nothing. It's huge. All right, folks. That's it for tonight. Go appeal something. This is Chadlaw, the last gay conservative America's binary brother, saying, God bless you, President Reagan, and may God save America.

SPEAKER_00 40:38

It's marvelous that you should care for me. Yes, you've made my life so glamorous. You can't blame me for failing. It's so marvelous that you should get the for me. It's one marble that's story as it's glance.