Tangle - My response to your criticisms.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

There's a trope in the media that you should "never look at the comments."

I get why the sentiment exists. Comments sections are generally a bitter place, where people fight with each other and offer biting criticisms they only would from behind a screen. For whatever reason, I’ve always found that people replying to our emails do so in much more measured, thoughtful ways than they do in the comments section (my hypothesis is that when there isn’t a public audience, people don’t feel the need to perform for likes and replies). But that doesn’t mean the comments aren’t worth reading. I think the comments section is a valuable way for me to take the temperature of my audience and engage with them. So, sometimes, you might see me responding to Tangle readers in the comments sections of articles or on social media.

Still — I have to be honest — it's not my favorite thing to do. Last week, I was shocked by some of the responses to an Instagram post summarizing "my take" on the murder of Brian Thompson, the UnitedHealthcare CEO. Many people totally misconstrued my argument, attacking strawman arguments I wasn't making. Others made vast, sweeping assumptions about my views on war, policing, race, and civil rights because I had an opinion about a story mostly confined to healthcare and vigilante justice.

I tried to engage some of those comments, but I didn't get very far. Instead of hearing my rebuttals, people accused me of being defensive or out of touch. After talking to my wife about the difficulty of interacting with people on social media, I had an idea that I thought was the embodiment of the Tangle spirit: I was going to offer several of my critics in the comments section (who I thought were being particularly harsh) to come on the Tangle podcast and talk out our disagreements. My suspicion was that if I could get them to talk to me in a different medium, we could have more productive conversations. But none took my offer.

There were some glimmers of hope, though. One thing I noticed was that people who left nasty or demeaning comments about my writing immediately changed their tone when I showed up and replied. Mostly, they'd go from angry and accusatory to thoughtful, critical, and respectful. I think this reflects the reality that a lot of people say things on social media they wouldn't say in person, or if they knew the subject of their comment was actually reading it (which I often am!). For me, it was another reminder to keep openly addressing people’s comments, even (and perhaps especially) when they don’t agree with mine. 

So, I addressed some of the general feedback we got in Tuesday’s newsletter — you can read that here if you missed it — but there was a lot more I wanted to get to.

Also, as those of you who have been around for a while know, I love elevating readers’ criticisms and feedback. I do not assume I am right about everything, nor do I think my opinion is the best, smartest, most accurate, or most valuable. We have close to 300,000 people on our mailing list, a lot of whom are very smart, thoughtful readers with various expertises. Today, I am going to share comments from some of those readers who were critical of my take on the shooting, to best ensure that Tangle subscribers can get a wide range of perspectives on this issue. 

Below, I've let many of these criticisms stand on their own without my responses, so you can take or leave them as you like. However, there were a few that I couldn’t help but reply to. To delineate between my writing and the writing of our readers, I've put criticisms in bold and I've responded with my writing in plain text.

I've enjoyed the pragmatism generally found in your content since a friend hooked me in a few weeks ago. As of today though, I'm out.

Isaac's gross defense of the status quo seems to show a substantial misunderstanding of the entire problem. 

He writes, “Improving our healthcare system, and our society more broadly, is not going to start by shooting corporate leaders in the back. It's going to take fastidious work from consumer advocates, legislators, and corporations. It'll require grassroots movements and political pressure. It will happen slowly, deliberately, with a checkered history of wins and losses. That is always how this goes, and anyone trying to convince you otherwise is selling snake oil.”

Improving our healthcare system isn't happening in terms of benefits provided or costs incurred. Putting your faith in the idea that corporations would even pay lip service to the idea of  'fastidious work' against their own fiduciary goals would suggest you don't understand their role in the mess we have allowed ourselves to end up in. Your take seems to echo the long held trope about 1 death being a tragedy and 1 million, a statistic. 

There is no political pressure coming for the free market healthcare status quo. Legislators who attempt to hold them accountable or reduce dependence on a broken system are branded socialists or communists and their positions treated as noise. Meaning your appeal for people to focus on slow, incremental improvement suggests you're entirely comfortable with propping up the status quo as an industry siphons money upwards and ensures the bodies flowing into the burgeoning funeral industry will remain a constant, all the while our first world counterparts enjoy longer lives, obtained with lower personal expense, to maintain their lives. 

Your content has some value with your curated media takes, but I think you're out of touch with the needs and frustration of the people.

First of all, I’ll offer my standard response to people who approach their dialogue this way: Deciding to cancel your subscription because you encountered an argument you didn’t like means you are pretty much missing the entire point of this newsletter and this community. If you’re seeking a safe space where you will always read arguments from me or the commentators we feature that fit your worldview, then — yes — Tangle is not the place for you. But we are a big-tent news organization built for people who are interested in being challenged, exploring arguments out of their comfort zone, and learning. No, not everyone agrees with me on this issue, but my view on this issue is held by millions of other Americans, so it’s odd to me that you are so blithely intolerant of it.

Second, to respond to your actual argument (which I would have gladly done if you simply wrote in with your criticism, too!): It wasn’t so long ago that people in our country who had pre-existing conditions or were barely above the poverty level couldn’t get health insurance. That major hurdle was overcome by fastidious work from consumer advocates, legislators, and grassroots political movements and pressure. It didn’t happen fast, but it happened. That’s my point. Changing this system in meaningful and permanent ways is not going to come about through murdering people in cold blood. If you can’t see that, I really don’t know what to tell you.

Even if I accepted that violence is necessary to effect change, I haven’t heard many clear answers about what this change would look like. Instead, I’ve heard a lot of arguments that boil down to, “The shooting was effective because it got people talking and put a spotlight on this issue.” I hear this refrain a lot from activists who put a lot of stock in “raising awareness” with little thought to what they want to do once their issue gains attention. Personally, I think it’s far more likely that further violence against health insurance executives would just result in those executives going out in public less often and having their information scrubbed from the internet. Less plausible, to me, is that these companies would be “scared” into making significant changes in short order. I’m open to arguments to the contrary, but if there truly are changes as a result of this, I think they’d be more PR bandaids than true reforms.

Third, I’ll add that some things about the system have been getting better. More people are being insured today than ever before. The Affordable Care Act is steadily growing in popularity. 71% of adults consider the quality of the healthcare they receive to be excellent or good, and 65% say the same about their insurance coverage. Older Americans who often need healthcare the most tend to be the most satisfied. Biden made major moves in office negotiating lower prices for drugs, something Trump might (and should) build on. Just recently, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Josh Hawley (R-NC) — two of the most opposed people you’ll find on Capitol Hill — cosponsored a bill to require Pharmacy Benefit Managers and insurers to divest from pharmacies they own. Despite the infuriating and broken elements of the system (that I have experienced!), it is always changing in ways big and small. Meanwhile, we have some of the best doctors and facilities in the world. Perhaps more to the point, you seem to believe healthcare insurance companies are the main villain in this plot; I think there is a very good argument they actually play a minor role in why things are so broken. 

Finally, I’ll just say that I resent the accusation that I am “out of touch” simply because I don’t believe murdering healthcare CEOs is going to get us what we want (the proverbial “we” being any Americans who want better, more affordable, more accessible care). Indeed, I suspect this will be an albatross around the neck of activists doing the real work to make change, who will now be labeled and lumped in as extremist radicals because of people like this shooter. As I wrote in my piece, I’ve had numerous healthcare problems of my own that I’ve had to address in this broken system. My mom is a three-time breast cancer survivor; my father receives Social Security and government-provided health insurance; numerous friends, family members, and people I care for are fighting to survive in the system as it exists now, some with debilitating disabilities or disease. 

You seem to think we need a revolution, while I think there are more pragmatic ways to accomplish a more affordable and accessible healthcare system. We can disagree about that without you pretending I lack the empathy or experience to care about my loved ones and my fellow Americans. 

I heard this recently: Why is it we only recognize murder when it comes in the form of a bullet? Hundreds are murdered by paperwork every day, and we don't bat an eye. Denying healthcare based on arbitrary criteria is violence all the same. Allowing people to die in order to protect profits is murder all the same. I think that your take on this lacks critical class analysis, but you know that, don't you?

To really think about this critically, I think you have to make it personal. How many people do you know who might work in jobs many people in our country deem morally tenuous?  Lobbyists? Politicians? Cops? Oil executives? Weapons manufacturers or prison wardens? Or selling products that don’t do what they are billed to do? What about journalists who regularly get things wrong — maybe even mis-reporting life-or-death issues like vaccines or natural disasters? What about drug dealers who sell drugs to feed their families?

How many of them do you think deserve to be killed?

The moment that you start identifying powerful people operating in systems that could be deemed negligent for certain deaths, the list of people “deserving” to be executed on the street starts to grow alarmingly fast. And there is an obvious difference between negligence and intent, one that is spelled out in pretty much every developed justice system on the planet.

Speaking of systems: We have all sorts of systems in our country that are designed to do one thing and fail to do it — and in a country of hundreds of millions, you unfortunately have to expect some degree of failure in those massive systems. For instance, we have a system of laws and regulations to make driving a car safe, yet tens of thousands of people die every year in car accidents. Even very, very good systems that operate on that scale (like the number of people with health insurance in America) will be fraught with numerous horror stories, tragedies, and, yes, death. Our healthcare system is not well designed, and I agree with you there. Systematic issues, or even gross inefficiencies, in a system of its size can often be tragic, but those kinds of failures are simply not the same as intentionally inflicting harm on an individual person. 

The idea that deaths caused by things like treatment delays or denials are functionally similar to walking up to a person and shooting them to death is self-evidently silly, and the idea that believing so or viewing those things differently “lacks critical class analysis” is snarky and absurd to the point of being irritating. I think if you asked your “average Joe” about the moral equivalence between, say, a vigilante shooting a rich CEO in the back and a corporate CEO in a system that causes a lot of harm, that person would judge the vigilante more harshly. 

30% of all claims. That’s how many Brian [Thompson] denies. More than any other major health insurance provider actually, and United is the biggest one. Think of how many lives that is a day… not every claim is life threatening but enough are… how many people did Brian kill a day you think? 100? 1000?