Five years ago, science fiction writer Cory Doctorow published a short story whose plot might seem eerily similar to those who have been reading the news over the past few weeks.
In “Radicalized,” one of four novellas based on the science fiction novel of the same name, Doctorow follows a woman whose partner and children are denied medical coverage by their insurance company after his wife is diagnosed with breast cancer. It depicts the journey of a man who joins an online forum for fathers. Because I have cancer, I was denied insurance coverage for an experimental treatment. As the story progresses, the forum participants gradually become radicalized out of grief and begin planning and carrying out the murders of health insurance executives and politicians who voted against universal health care.
Doctorow’s novella has been hailed as prescient in the wake of the Dec. 4 shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, which sent a wave of anger through the U.S. health care system. When America’s Prospect magazine republished the article last week, it wrote, “Reprinted with permission for reasons that will become clear upon reading.” But Doctorow doesn’t think he understands anything that no one else in America understands.
When Doctorow learned of the shooting, his first thought was fear (“I grew up in the anti-proliferation movement and I never want anyone to shoot me again”), then fear. (“I hope he doesn’t”). Keep a copy of my book with him. ) However, according to the alleged gunman’s Goodreads account, Luigi Mangione, who is currently facing terrorism murder charges in New York, appears to have never read Doctorow. “I think the most important thing about this is that this is not a unique insight,” Doctorow said, adding, “The questions that I had are questions that other people have asked as well. ” he said.
When Doctorow began writing short stories in 2018, he was processing his own traumatic experiences with the U.S. health care system. The British-Canadian author of more than 20 fiction and nonfiction books had just immigrated to the United States, with his parents flying in from their hometown of Toronto. It was a fun trip, but one night his mother woke him up and told him that his father was sick. The family rushed to the nearest emergency room, where Doctorow’s father was treated for an infectious kidney stone. After the stone was removed, Doctorow’s father crashed and spent the next several days in a coma.
“My brother flew down from Toronto and we thought he was going to die,” Doctorow recalled.
As Doctorow’s family waited at her father’s bedside, she remembers someone from the hospital’s billing department coming into the room and asking her mother: “Who will pay the bill?”
Fortunately, Doctorow’s father recovered, and since he is a former teacher, Canada’s Public Service Health Program covered the $176,000 bill. But Doctorow ended up being asked question after question about the country he had chosen to live in, especially as he noticed the abundance of firearms around him.
“Even though so many Americans own so many guns and so many people use them indiscriminately if someone is offended, 4 out of 10 American adults have medical debt. “Why?” he said. He had heard stories of people not approaching people texting or crossing the road at movie theaters because they thought they might have weapons. “Why are the people who took the wheel in such trivial situations so calm, responsible and calm about something like this that the thought of it makes them go crazy?”
The incident, coupled with his experience participating in active shooter drills at his daughter’s elementary school and Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign for Medicare for All, led Doctorow to write Radical. was forced to start.
In one part of the story, a man who loses his young daughter because the insurance company refuses to pay for brain surgery blows up the insurance company’s headquarters. “It’s not revenge. I don’t have a revenge bone in my body. Nothing I do will bring Lisa back, so why take revenge? This is a public service. I There’s another father just like him,” he said in a video message on the forum. “And now that father is talking to someone from Cigna, Humana, or BlueCross BlueShield, and the person on the other end of the phone is telling that father that his little girl is pregnant. To. Die. That building. Someone made the decision to kill my little girl and everyone else in that building went along with it. No one is innocent and no one is afraid after this. It will be.”
“They should know it in their hearts,” he continues. “They, their lobbyists, the people in Congress who enabled them. They are parents. They know that anyone who hurt their precious child will be hunted down like a dog. There is only one thing about any of this. The amazing thing is that no one has done it yet. I’m going to predict now, but even if I’m the first, I definitely won’t be the last. There’s more to come.”
In the story, this was certainly just the beginning of the violence. But in real life, Doctorow envisions a very different solution to America’s health care crisis.
“We have historically fought against oppressive corporate systems that are destroying people’s lives, and if we don’t remember, at least not that long ago,” Trust said. He says of the crushing demolition movement. Standard Oil and other monopolies in the late 1800s and early 1900s. “Corporate power was much more dystopian than it is today, and we figured out how to deal with it. The political campaigns and organizing that corporations engaged in to make that happen were the result of a corrupt civilization. It wasn’t a lost art.”
Doctorow believes the move to bring single-payer health care to the United States would crush trust. “People don’t realize that everyone is angry about the same thing right now,” he says, pointing to rising costs for grocery stores and tech monopolies. “In fact, they’re all angry about the same thing. And once they understand that, the Coalition will be unstoppable.”
