Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) blamed the murder of a health care CEO on “people’s anger” about unfair insurance practices.
During a Sunday interview on Meet the Press, host Kristen Welker noted that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) suggested that Luigi Mangione allegedly shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson because “you can only push people so far and then they start to take matters into their own hands.”
“I should have been much clearer that there is never a justification for murder,” Warren later clarified.
Sanders insisted that “Elizabeth Warren obviously understands killing and murder and shooting somebody in the back is totally unacceptable.”
“But what I think has happened in the last few months is that what you have seen rising up is people’s anger at a health insurance industry which denies people the health care that they desperately need while they make billions and billions of dollars in profit,” he added.
Sanders argued that Warren “did not” applaud Thompson’s killing.
“But I think what we need to ask ourselves when we talk about health care is why we are the only major country on earth not to guarantee health care to all people, why we have a life expectancy which is significantly lower than in other countries, why working-class people die five to ten years shorter than the people on top,” he remarked. “I think the time is long overdue for us to guarantee health care to every man, woman, and child, especially at a time when we’re spending twice as much per capita on health care as the people of every other nation.”
