According to a Wall Street Journal article on the case against Luigi Mangione, suspected of murdering the UnitedHealthcare CEO outside a Manhattan hotel, potential arguments in his defense will be his “mental state at the time of the murder.”

“Two defenses in New York State – a plea of ​​not guilty by reason of insanity and a claim of extreme emotional disturbance – could be relevant,” according to the coverage.

According to another report, in a handwritten note from Mangione discovered by police, he wrote: “The United States has the most expensive health care system in the world, and yet we rank about 42nd in expectancy of life. »

Indeed, Mangione is absolutely right.

According to KFF Health System Tracker, in 2022, the United States had the highest annual per capita health care spending in the world – $12,555. Number two was Switzerland with $8,049, about two-thirds that of the United States.

A look at life expectancy by country, published by the UN and posted on Wikipedia, shows that the United States ranks 55th in the world.

It seems clear that Mangione’s thinking is clear and acute. This appears to be the same young man who was valedictorian at his elite high school and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Pennsylvania’s Ivy League university.

The problem is not his ability to think and analyze but what he chose to do with the information he produced. After the notes on the American health care system mentioned above, he wrote: “These parasites simply had it coming. »

Now, if that defines insanity, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez should be kicked out of Congress as crazy. Their observations, both of which involved justification for the killing of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO, weren’t much different from what Mangione said:

Warren: “The visceral response of people across the country who feel cheated…by the despicable practices of their insurance companies…Violence is never the answer, but people can only be pushed so far ‘at a certain point.’

Ocasio-Cortez called our healthcare system “depraved,” adding that “people interpret, feel and experience denied requests as an act of violence against them.”

Warren and AOC are the queens of the American left and are leading architects in building a mindset and culture in our country where the idea of ​​personal responsibility does not exist. It’s a worldview that says if you’re suffering, if you don’t have what you want, there must be someone or something to blame that is the source of your problems.

Hopefully this horrific incident will cause as much soul searching in our nation as it will cause bewilderment and shock.

A young man who can analyze data to say accurate and meaningful things about America’s healthcare system is also capable of understanding right and wrong, if he believes they exist.

But what if he doesn’t believe, or hasn’t learned, that they exist? What if he believed he could ultimately decide what is right, what is wrong, who should live and who should die?

What if there was no wrongdoing but only the result of “extreme emotional turmoil”?

How this works in a society that claims to value freedom, I don’t know. What does freedom mean in a society without right or wrong, without personal responsibility, where the refusal of a request for health care can be considered “an act of violence”?

It remains to be seen what demons drove a talented young man who, by most’s standards, had everything, to destroy another life and his own.

But if we want to reduce these kinds of incidents, which we see all too often, and if we want to repair our health care system, we must restore the quality of freedom in our country.

This means putting personal responsibility back at the center of our culture, which means restoring the appreciation that right and wrong (i.e. thou shalt not kill) exist.