Cory Doctorow's Prescient Novella About Health Insurance and Murder

Five years ago, journalist and sci-fi author Cory Doctorow published a short story that explored the radicalization of individuals denied healthcare coverage. As The Guardian notes in a recent article, the story 'might seem eerily similar' to the recent shooting of UnitedHealthcare's CEO. While it appears that the alleged shooter never read the story, Doctorow said: 'I feel like the most important thing about that is that it tells you that this is not a unique insight.' Doctorow continued: 'that the question that I had is a question other people have had.' As an activist in favor of liberalizing copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, it's important to note that Doctorow advocates for systemic reform through collective action rather than violence. Here's an excerpt from the The Guardian's article: In Radicalized, one of four novellas comprising a science fiction novel of the same name, Doctorow charts the journey of a man who joins an online forum for fathers whose partners or children have been denied healthcare coverage by their insurers after his wife is diagnosed with breast cancer and denied coverage for an experimental treatment. Slowly, over the course of the story, the men of the forum become radicalized by their grief and begin plotting -- and executing -- murders of health insurance executives and politicians who vote against universal healthcare.

In the wake of the December 4 shooting of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, which unleashed a wave of outrage at the U.S. health system, Doctorow's novella has been called prescient. When the American Prospect magazine republished the story last week, it wrote: 'It is being republished with permission for reasons that will become clear if you read it.' But Doctorow doesn't think he was on to something that no one else in the U.S. understood.

In one part of the story, a man whose young daughter died after an insurance company refused to pay for brain surgery bombs the insurer's headquarters. 'It's not vengeance. I don't have a vengeful bone in my body. Nothing I do will bring Lisa back, so why would I want revenge? This is a public service. There's another dad just like me,' he shares in a video message on the forum. 'And right now, that dad is talking to someone at Cigna, or Humana, or BlueCross BlueShield, and the person on the phone is telling that dad that his little girl has. To. Die. Someone in that building made the decision to kill my little girl, and everyone else in that building went along with it. Not one of them is innocent, and not one of them is afraid. They're going to be afraid, after this.'

'Because they must know in their hearts,' he goes on. 'Them, their lobbyists, the men in Congress who enabled them. They're parents. They know. Anyone who hurt their precious children, they'd hunt that person down like a dog. The only amazing thing about any of this is that no one has done it yet. I'm going to make a prediction right now, that even though I'm the first, I sure as hell will not be the last. There's more to come.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.