https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/20/cory-doctorow-radicalized-novella-healthcare-ceo-killing
Cory Doctorow's prescient novella about health insurance and murder: 'They're going to be afraid'
The parallels between the science fiction writer's five-year-old story and present-day events are startling
Cecilia Nowell
Fri 20 Dec 2024 11.00 EST
Five years ago, the science fiction writer Cory Doctorow published a short story whose plot might seem eerily similar to followers of the past few weeks' news.
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.
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Fortunately, Doctorow's father recovered - and, because he was a former teacher, Canada's public service healthcare program footed the $176,000 bill. But Doctorow was left asking question after question about the country he'd decided to live in - especially as he noticed the abundance of firearms around him.
"How is it that there are so many Americans who own so many guns who are so indiscriminate about using them when someone makes them upset, and yet you've got four in 10 American adults carrying medical debt?" he said. He'd heard of people who wouldn't approach someone who was texting at a movie theater or swerving across traffic because they might have a weapon. "How is it that people who fly off the handle under such trivial circumstances are so sober and responsible and even-keeled when it comes to these things that when I imagine them, all I can think is I would lose my mind?"
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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."
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The movement that brings single-payer healthcare to the US, Doctorow believes, will be a trust-busting one. "People don't know that they're all angry about the same stuff right now," he says, noting higher costs at grocery stores and tech monopolies. "They're actually all angry about the same thing. And when they figure it out the coalition will be unstoppable."
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