I suppose one question would be whether "executives of health insurance companies" falls within the definition of "civilian population," or, more generally, what criteria could be used to determine whether any given subset of a civilian population is itself a civilian population. Because I am fairly sure that the subset of the civilian population defined by "my neighbor who parks blocking my driveway" probably doesn't count.

@phoog It isn't just the definition of civilian population, but also if the statements/actions by the accused constitute a threat to or influences a government unit. So there are two avenues in which to attempt to define this as terrorism.

"This is the theory by which it is intimidation or coercion of a civilian population." Why, then, aren't mobsters and members of drug cartels who intimidate local residents charged with (domestic) terrorism?

For anyone else who might have assumed, like me, that the example in the second paragraph was exaggerated or fake, please see edition.cnn.com/2024/12/05/health/….

"One health insurance company promptly stopped denying claims for providing anesthesia for the entire duration of surgeries as a direct result of that murder" - while I still can't really endorse the method chosen, this makes me feel a whole lot more sympathetic towards the guy.

Re: the Anthem anesthesia thing: Anthem's plan was to pay flat rates for anesthesia for given procedures, similar to auto mechanics using "book rate" for labor charges. It was not, as news reports tried to make it out, a situation where they would force anesthesiologists to stop providing services after a certain time. Instead, doctors might have to provide extra coding to be paid for all their services. Anesthesiologists argued, probably rightly, that there is sufficient variability in patient requirements to make this unfeasible.

@DavidS Because they are charged with RICO which has penalties comparably severe and is easier to prove. The terrorism charges are only viable in this case due to the abundance of written evidence from the accused of the motive.

@JimmyJames the person blocking the driveway isn't the terrorist in this thought experiment -- the terrorist (or not) is the person whose driveway was blocked, who committed murder because of the driveway being blocked. Similarly to Mangione, because of behavior he doesn't like. If he intends the murder to dissuade others from blocking his driveway, is he a terrorist?

@DavidS United Healthcare is not a government unit, and there is no indication that Mangione had any desire to influence any government unit. He was angry at corporate health insurers.

ohwilleke, I think you meant to tag @RonJohn in your most recent comment.

@CrashGordon Regardless of the exact nature of the policy, it is clear that the murder was a key causal factor in that policy being reversed.

@phoog My bad. But too late to edit.

"it is one thing to bring the charge and to get it by a grand jury that will indict a ham sandwich in a presentation brought by the prosecutors alone, ex parte, and quite another to convince a petit jury following an adversarial trial of that theory." Step one is convincing them its the same person rather than someone completely unrelated. "If the eyebrows don't fit you must acquit"

@nick012000 Not a challenging task in this case.

FWIW, the old "Grand Jury will indict a ham sandwich" tale has a contrapositive. I know of one case (back in the 80's) where the crime happened in broad daylight in front of witnesses, but the perp was very sympathetic (grieving family member murdered his daughter's convicted murderer during a prison transfer), and a Grand Jury refused to indict. In that case, I can't see why the DA even bothered with the GJ, except to give them a chance to do just that, and one suspects he didn't push his case super hard either.

I would be skeptical about the statement that begins "indeed, it had the intended effect." What happened is that an entirely different company decided to not make a planned change to coverage for a narrow category of procedure, so even they are still basically doing business as usual. It's also not immediately clear to me that internauts didn't just look around for the temporally closest change from a company in the same industry and assume that it must have been related. E.g. some state comptrollers and other politicians credit their efforts to advocate against the proposed change instead.

A scenario where the PR team said "Oh, we are getting some negative attention now, what's something we were already planning to do that we can mention for some good press?" also seems equally plausible.

@CrashGordon - And indeed, regardless of what might have motivated them to discard the proposed change, the company has as much of a vested interest as some members of the public in portraying it as a major pro-patient decision. "We will make procedures available to more people because we care" obviously provides better public relations than "We will not make some controversial but relatively limited planned changes to coding, but your experience will stay just as bad as it is now."

@phoog Yes, UHC is a private company. There are government units involved in regulating healthcare though. I don't claim to agree with the charges of terrorism. However, the government charged him with it. There are multiple methods in which they can argue their case. If the manifesto contains information that can be argued as a threat or attempt to influence a government unit then that's one avenue.

@phoog "the terrorist (or not) is the person whose driveway was blocked, who committed murder because of the driveway being blocked" Ah, OK. But for the analogy to align, the perp would need to kill a person other than the person who blocked their driveway, perhaps a prolific driveway blocker. This isn't a case of direct retribution. And even if he was a client of United at some point, killing the CEO doesn't destroy the company or change their policies; someone else will step up. The clear mechanism by which this crime can affect change is through fear A.K.A 'terror'.