How can people support Luigi Mangione but vote in droves to deny health care to others?

Last week was a bizarre time to be queer on social media: Many cishet people voiced enthusiastic support for Luigi Mangione, the man accused of shooting and killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, arguing that the health insurer’s denial of claims led to so many deaths that the murder was justified as retaliation. Meanwhile, Congress was passing a bill that would require an insurer (Tricare) to deny claims, and it was hard to get anyone to even pay attention to that.

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Part of the issue is probably that a lot of people don’t see gender-affirming health care as real health care, despite how all major medical associations in the U.S. support it as a safe and effective treatment for gender dysphoria. It’s been shown to save lives, and cisgender people can access the same treatments for similar reasons. In fact, cisgender boys get gender-affirming surgeries more often than trans minors.

Still, people think about trans health care as siloed off as a separate issue from health care coverage, even though many of the battles around trans access to health care are about insurance companies’ and government insurance programs’ refusal to cover it.

This may be why universal healthcare initiatives will be doomed in the U.S., at least in the foreseeable future. We just saw the GOP use the health care needs of a very small minority — undocumented transgender inmates — to gain political power, power that they will use to deny health care coverage to the wider population.

Until people accept that others are going to make decisions for their own bodies that they wouldn’t personally make for themselves – and that’s ok – building support for universal health care is going to be an uphill battle.

Related:

US senate passes defence bill that strips trans healthcare from kids of military personnel

Rachel Branaman, the association’s executive director, said: “This federal prohibition puts countless already-vulnerable families in precarious legal, financial and logistical positions. While the NDAA includes benefits like pay raises and access to childcare, these will be negated for families forced to pay out-of-pocket for essential care or travel to access it.

“The state-by-state approach to basic human rights and healthcare access is fundamentally incompatible with the realities of military life. Unlike other Americans, military families do not have the luxury of choosing where they live.”