So, the date is set. Mark your calendars for September 8th. That is when the American legal machine will finally start picking a jury for Luigi Mangione. He is the young man accused of killing the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson. The judge in Manhattan, Margaret Garnett, sat in a room full of people and said this trial will be the main event after the summer ends. It is all very dramatic, isn't it? It is like watching a play where everyone already knows the ending, but we all pretend to be surprised by the plot twists.

From my perspective over here in Europe, watching the American healthcare system is like watching a slow-motion car crash that never actually ends. You just keep hitting the same wall over and over. Then, when something truly violent happens, everyone acts shocked. They act like a CEO of a massive insurance company getting shot in the street is some kind of impossible mystery. It is not a mystery. It is the natural result of a system that treats human life like a math problem that needs to be deleted to save money.

Let us look at the trial itself. The court was packed. People are obsessed with this case. Why? Because it is the ultimate American story. On one side, you have a giant company that makes billions of dollars by telling sick people 'no.' On the other side, you have a young man with a backpack who apparently decided to take the 'no' personally. It is a tragic comedy of the highest order. The legal system now has to pretend that this is just a regular murder trial. They have to act like the last twenty years of people losing their homes to pay for medical bills do not exist. They want to talk about evidence and dates. They do not want to talk about why millions of people are secretly, or not so secretly, cheering for the person in the handcuffs.

Judge Garnett is doing her job. She is setting the schedule. She is looking at the papers. But the trial will not fix the fact that insurance companies are the most hated things in America. You can put a man in a cell, but you cannot lock up the anger that created him. That is the part the politicians and the lawyers always miss. They think that if they follow the rules of the court, the world will make sense again. It won't. The world stopped making sense a long time ago when we decided that 'health care' should be a way to make stock prices go up instead of a way to keep people from dying.

Think about the jury selection. How do you find twelve people in New York who do not have a reason to hate an insurance company? It is a hilarious challenge. Almost everyone has a story about a denied claim, a huge bill, or a phone call that lasted four hours only to end in a busy signal. The lawyers will have to find people who live under rocks. They will need jurors who have never seen a doctor or paid a premium. It is a theater of the absurd. They will ask, 'Can you be fair?' and the jurors will say 'Yes' while thinking about the three thousand dollars they owe for an ER visit that lasted twenty minutes.

I find a certain grim joy in deconstructing this mess. The trial starts in September, right when the air gets cold and the kids go back to school. It is the perfect time for a public execution of the truth. We will spend months talking about ballistics and security cameras. We will talk about what was written on the shell casings. We will ignore the fact that the entire country is a pressure cooker. This trial is just a safety valve. It lets the steam out so the machine can keep running.

In the end, Brian Thompson is gone, and Luigi Mangione will likely spend his life in a room with no windows. And UnitedHealthcare? They will still be there. They will have a new CEO. They will have the same policies. Your insurance will still cost too much, and it will still cover too little. The trial is just a distraction from the reality that the house is on fire. But please, enjoy the show. Get your popcorn ready for September. It is the most expensive play in the world, and you are already paying for the tickets through your monthly premiums. It would be funny if it weren't so predictable. But as I always say, that is the beauty of a collapsing empire. The entertainment is always top-tier even when the services are bottom-shelf.