Jia Tolentino
Appearances
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
And the last two had basically nothing. And 92% of respondents chose the second option. And we are so far from it. And so I'm always like, there is so much populist economic energy that is not being harnessed by any person that I can see. Again, it's presented as this sort of leftist plank, but the energy exists everywhere. Anyway, I think economically...
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
It makes no sense for there to be a class of people making tens of billion dollars a year off of the backs of people who are struggling. And in this case, very, very directly. And in a case where the company is itself causing the struggling. or failing to address it in the way that they could. There is money out there to give everybody health care. We have the wealth in this country.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
We have the technology. We have the ability. There's no reason. There's no reason why people should be dying because they can't pay for insulin. There's no reason that that should happen in this country. And I think most people agree that the situation we're in is unjust.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
I think now would be a really wonderful time if this country's political process functioned enough that we could have sort of like a nationwide referendum on single payer health care. I do think the numbers might be quite different right now than they were two weeks ago.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
And I do think that the Democrats in general would be profoundly foolish to not push public universal health care as a primary plank in 2028. I don't think they will. But I think that's, I mean... What does this show us if not that that's a layup, you know?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
Of course, the solution in the end can't be indifference, not indifference to the death of the CEO and not the celebration of it either. But who's going to drop their indifference first? At this point, it's not going to be the people who have a lifetime of evidence that health insurance CEOs do not care about their well-being.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
Can the CEO class drop its indifference to the suffering and death of ordinary people? Is it possible to do so while achieving record quarterly profits for your stakeholders in perpetuity?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
I think this has been an incredibly interesting story in part because I don't know if you have felt this within your own sort of group chats versus professional networks, but there's a big difference in the way people are talking about this in private and the way that they're talking about it in public. And that always strikes me as the right situation for someone to try to step in and merge them.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
I mean, I remember I was covering sexual assault, like, the couple of years pre-Me Too and afterwards, because that felt like, you know, another thing where there was this large social understanding of something being the way that it is, and then with the sort of public discourse lagging behind it, and then an explosive event that tried to merge the two.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
And I was interested in that, you know, the mainstream media, of which I am a part, and politicians, everyone was giving these very sort of performatively somber and reverent sort of like, this is an appalling, inexplicable, devastating loss of human life. And then, you know, social media is just full of, you know, the UnitedHealthcare had to close comments on Facebook.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
And there were thousands and thousands of like, ha ha, cry laugh emoji. It just struck me as really interesting that the reaction was so sharp. Were there any of the sort of memes or...
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
I would say the most common joke, you know, and it's, you know, even talking to you about this, it's nuts that we're having this conversation. Like, oh, well, the most common joke that was being made about this man that was murdered in Midtown at 6.45 a.m. or whatever. Like, it's wild. We're living in... wild, wild times, but an incredibly common joke and comment that was everywhere.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
And I was checking, like I was checking conservative media outlets, comments. I was checking sort of like a down the road CNN. I was checking the New York Post. I was checking the Times. I was checking TikTok. I was really trying to make sure that I was not locked in my own bubble of maybe like disaffected DSA, Brooklyner, you know, people. And everywhere people were using the cold language
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
That the private health insurance industry uses to deny people medication and lifesaving procedures like thoughts and prayers were not prior authorized and denied. And it was a real reminder that of the way most of us have experienced these companies as individuals.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
cold and uninterested in not only our quality of life, but if we haven't experienced it ourselves, probably most of us know someone whose entire existence medically, if not their existence financially, and certainly their existence spiritually, egg freezing, whatever it is, right? IVF, endometriosis, whatever it may be.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
The vast majority of Americans have experienced health insurance as more or less cold-blooded,
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
you don't have to have any sort of ideology at all to, to think like, why, why is this happening to, you know, to get a bill from urgent care and say like, why, why, why, why, why do I pay thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars for private healthcare? Why do I determine my entire employment life around how to get healthcare for myself and my family? And,
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
And I'm getting billed $700 for taking a child with 105 degree fever to the ER, you know? Like, why is my bill before insurance discounted at $150,000 for, you know, an entirely normal labor and delivery, right?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
It is notorious, even within the sort of notoriously awful American healthcare system, it is is kind of known as the most rapacious, and it has gotten these profits, these record profits. It has grown to this size, not in spite of the fact that it denies so much care to so many people, but because of that fact.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
So one of the things that I was writing about in this New Yorker piece is that when we think about violence and when we sort of decry violence, it's a very particular kind of violence. It's direct physical violence caused by a person with an intention to harm. But there are a lot of other ways that people's lives are taken prematurely.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
There's a lot of ways that people's lives are taken away from them. And structural violence, you could also call that social injustice, but structural violence, like the denial of health care and denial of safe housing. It's like these are a lot of ways that people's lives are taken away from them.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
I think those of us who are not subject to it on a daily basis still kind of understand the major things through which people's quality of life or life itself is given, like health, housing, school. the environment. All of these things are structured by deeply unjust systems that spare some people and treat almost everyone like very, very, very badly.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
And yeah, and I do think people are talking about that more now.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
And obviously it's clear which side I fall on, right? It's like, why wouldn't you look upstream? And you're right. It's like, even where people are like, The sort of heartlessness, right? What heartlessness are we appalled by? You know, and even in the case of the, you know, there's a strange parallel. Daniel Penny just got acquitted for strangling Jordan Neely on the subway, right?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
And that ideologically lines up with my priors. Like, I am appalled that this man strangled Jordan. Like someone in the middle of a crisis and, you know, instantly became a folk hero among some conservatives. And I think this was something that like the protests in 2020, like they tried really hard to redirect us.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
Like, yes, this sort of murder that occurred in public is, you know, it's egregious, committed by one man, one police officer, one vigilante ex-Marine, whatever it is. But the real problem, you know, like the real problem is upstream.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
The real thing to be outraged about is the system, you know, which is not just like the New York City mental health care system, but it's part of it, that makes it possible for people to be so unsafe and feel so unsafe and thus then make other people feel unsafe, you know? Yeah.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
I do understand the tendency to fixate at the end point, but it doesn't make sense if you think about it for any longer than that.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
It kind of reminds me of the Sacco and Vanzetti case. Like, there were these two... young men that were part of this violent, overtly violent Italian anarchist sort of collective group in New York in the 20s. And they were wrongfully convicted for an armed robbery and all these things. But they became these sort of folk heroes and they became this sort of famous cause.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
I just think it's interesting whenever there's a clear reason to talk about something like the health care system where we all know, like, this doesn't make sense. This doesn't happen in places other than America. It's like school shootings, right? It's like these things that we know are so... are so profoundly hideous and so profoundly American.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
And we feel kind of powerless to do anything about it and like it'll never, ever change. And maybe it will never, ever change. But these moments where everyone suddenly is talking about the morality of private health insurance and the immorality of it, you know, it would be a lot better if someone hadn't had to be murdered to make this happen.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
But, you know, and of course, like this is exactly what presumably, I mean, you know, who knows what the shooter wanted. And you hate to sort of think like, oh, like I'm happy about the thing happening that he wanted to happen aside from the murder. But I do think we ought to be talking about all these things more.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
And this energy belongs in other places other than group texts where we're, you know, like literally I'm two of my friends being like, oh yeah, I'm having endosurgery and my insurance won't cover it. And like, oh, I can't freeze my eggs until 2025 because the pre-approval has to come in three days before my period. And I was one day too early. You know, like it's,
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
When we're like, oh, you know, these assholes, like, oh, my prescription just went up to 500. And, you know, the people I'm talking to are all people like, we'll be fine. It's not going to drive us into bankruptcy. And the way a lot of people cope with this is just to not get the medical care or start a GoFundMe. And I hope that the conversation about this is alive for longer.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
I think there are many sort of populist economic issues that are presented as leftist when they're not. I read this book last year called Limitarianism, and it talks about this study from 2011 where researchers asked people to choose between three different models for wealth distribution in the country. And the first choice was perfect equality, that every quintile had 20% of the wealth.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
The Killing of Brian Thompson and the Human Cost of Healthcare with Jia Tolentino
The second choice was each quintile receiving successively, like the top 20% has 36% of the wealth. Next has 21%. Next has 18%. Next has 15%. Next has 11%. And the last option was the actual wealth distribution of America in 2005, which meant that the first quintile, the top 20%, had 84% of the wealth. The second quintile had 11% of the wealth. The third quintile had four.