#private healthcare is murder

[rejectingrepublicans]

[socialjusticeinamerica]

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The C.E.O. of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, was murdered on the street in midtown Manhattan, on Wednesday morning, 20 minutes before sunrise. He was in town for an investors’ convention, and had worked for UnitedHealthcare for more than two decades—a company that is part of UnitedHealth Group, a health-insurance conglomerate valued at $560 billion.

The particulars of this murder are strange and remarkable: it occurred in public; the suspected shooter went to Starbucks beforehand; he got away from the scene via bicycle; he has not yet been found. But the public reaction has been even wilder, even more lawless. “I’m sorry, prior authorization is required for thoughts and prayers,” someone commented on TikTok, a response that got more than 15,000 likes. “Does he have a history of shootings? Denied coverage,” another person wrote, under an Instagram post from CNN.

To most Americans, a company like UnitedHealthcare represents less the provision of medical care than an active obstacle to receiving it, Jia Tolentino writes. UnitedHealthcare has the highest claim-denial rate of any private insurance company: at 32 per cent, it is double the industry average. “Thompson’s murder is one symptom of the American appetite for violence; his line of work is another. . . . For people who do not have money or social connections at hospitals or the ability to spend weeks at a time on the phone, a denied health-insurance claim can instantly bend the trajectory of a life toward bankruptcy and misery and death.”

“The only way to end up in a situation where a C.E.O. of a health-insurance company is reflexively viewed as a dictatorial purveyor of suffering is through a history of socially sanctioned death,” Tolentino continues. “Can the C.E.O. class drop its indifference to the suffering and death of ordinary people? Is it possible to do so while achieving record quarterly profits for your stakeholders, in perpetuity?” Read about the reaction to Thompson’s murder.

(The New Yorker)

[danieyells]

They shot the UHC CEO????

[bluewarf]

I feel like a lot of the UHC Discourse™ can be.... maybe not resolved, but at least lessened with the simple acknowledgement that multiple things can in fact be true at once.

[pixeljade]

I am going to commit crimes what the actual FUCK is this number????

[seo-m-e]

idk it just annoys me that people will say "eat the rich" and the like but then say "but he had a family!!! murder is always wrong!!" why say things that you dont mean

[puppppppppy]

dont leave it on healthcare workers to pick up the pieces bc u couldnt be bothered to wear a mask or stay home. dont wait for an immunocompromised person to remind you to sneeze into your elbow. i dont want to hear u whine about having a little cold and that i should get over it because i glared at u for coughing without covering your mouth. why dont u feel shame letting people around u get sick knowing u can do smth abt it. hello

Why are ppl scared to call it what it is and say we’re still going thru covid on top of seasonal illness. Like. That’s pretty important right. I was watching the news and they were like oh yeah we have an unprecedented number of flu cases “as well as other sicknesses” without actually saying Covid. No announcement abt vaccinations or masking or anything. Also if I hear someone joking abt “war flashbacks” for mentioning covid I fucking hate u

[fellthemarvelous]

Deny. Defend. Depose.

It is clear to those of us that live in America, the only people we truly have on our side are ourselves. The ruling class has made it clear we don't matter to them.

Luigi Mangione was arrested and happened to have every single piece of evidence on him that law enforcement was looking for, including the parts for the ghost gun, inside his backpack (that he also got rid of in Central Park containing the Monopoly money???). Either he was trying to get caught or that evidence was planted. And when he was being forcefully pushed into the jail, he hollered back to the press about "injustice" and "being an insult to the intelligence of American citizens and our lived experiences."

The people have now turned against corporate America and the CEOs and billionaires are fucking terrified. Nothing the news stations are saying to us are changing our minds. The American people have finally united over this issue and there is no going back for us. Whoever did kill Brian Thompson (and theories abound on the game The Adjuster is playing because no one plays Monopoly alone) exposed the very real divide that exists between every day citizens and the extremely wealthy. Things were easier for them to control when they were able to divide us, but now that we are aware of how uncertain our future is in America and seeing just how little we matter to the people who take our money, we have realized that we have more in common with each other than the people who control every aspect of our lives. We are waking up.

There isn't one person in this country who hasn't been a victim to the predatory scam that is private health insurance. Medical debt is the leading cause of bankruptcy in America, and many of us are one ambulance ride or hospital stay away from homelessness. We all know people who have died because the insurance company denied them the treatment they needed or waited until it was too late for an approval of a medical claim to matter anymore.

Recently, I decided to be tested for autism and ADHD. Not life-threatening or anything, but my life is still in shambles and I want to know if I'm going untreated for something else. Before being tested though, I was informed that the insurance company (Aetna) has said that they were going to cover the full cost of the testing I was having (which was six hours of testing by the way). She even made sure several times that they were, in fact, going to cover it in full and they said yes.

The same day that Brian Thompson, CEO of another horrible healthcare company, was murdered in broad daylight, I received a call from that doctor's office with the woman telling me that Aetna was now telling her they never agreed to cover my testing and that they are going to bill me for $1600 (where the hell am I supposed to get that?) and she is fighting them, but considering our lives don't matter to the people who tell us what healthcare we are and are not allowed to receive, I don't think they will feel compelled to change their minds because they are bloodsucking parasites who only care about lining their pockets while I don't even have $6 lying around, let alone $1600!!

Corporate America leeches off our taxes. They take and take and take and we see nothing in return. They raise prices on insurance coverage and then deny us the very coverage that we pay for. They poison our food, price gouge our poisoned food, and then force us to pay for the treatment we get when the food makes us sick. Corporate America profits off of our hard work, our taxes, our health, our lives, our deaths.

I don't know if this will reach a larger audience or not, but I wanted to talk about it on Tumblr because this platform seems to be a crossroads for every type of creative soul. I initially brought up this idea on TikTok earlier, but I want to see if it can get traction in other places as well since I have fewer than 3,000 followers on TikTok (and I have seen a small few express interest in my idea in the hours since I posted the video.)

We're busy being lectured by politicians and the news media because while they are clutching their pearls at what happened to Brian Thompson, the rest of us do not give one single flying fuck about what happened to him. As CEO of a for-profit health insurance company, he signed off on denied claims and death for those of us who struggle to make it from one day to the next. The sicker you are, the poorer you are, the more they force you to struggle and pay. The love to deny coverage because regardless of whether we live or die, they already have the money we are forced to pay them.

I don't condone murder at all, but I also don't care that he was murdered because he was guilty of murdering so many more people in this country through legal means because it's profitable. The CEOs are scared and there are wanted posters with their names and faces popping up in places. Every CEO of every healthcare company is guilty of murdering Americans and they continue to go unpunished for it because "it's just business".

So (if you've read this far) all of this previous rambling is to say that I keep thinking about how I want to make an impression. I want to continue upsetting the billionaires and the CEOs because corporate America is full of murderers who are legally allowed to decide whether we live or die based on which outcome will give them more money.

I have thought about the idea of creating a wall/constructing a wall somewhere as an art piece or something (making a statement) that will somehow honor the memory of people who died because insurance denied them care.

I know I definitely want it to say something along the lines of "In memory of those murdered by for-profit healthcare systems in corporate America". Something blatant. Loud. Something they are forced to look at every single day. Somehow. The wall could have images of those who are gone, or names of the person who died with the name of the insurance company responsible for their death underneath. Just something to make it clear that we see them for what they are. Something to avenge those who were sacrificed so billionaires and CEOS and shareholders could brag about record profits. Something that shows the whole world that American citizens are waking up to who the real monsters are.

The Adjuster (whoever he is or is not) has fanned the flames of revolution in America. He managed to unite us in a way I can't even recall before. It's not over. We know what happened to Brian Thompson was just the beginning, and corporate America only just now realized how much we actually hate them. A single shooter has sparked an awakening in America that is starting to snowball into something much bigger.

So if there is anyone out there who might be interested in collaborating on something like this, please let me know. I know we are all tired and demoralized and we have no money. I want to make a statement though, and I love doing that through art or writing. Collaborating with other people who have been through this same shit will also probably help us unite even more.

This is a watershed moment in American history.

In the words of Kanan Jarrus, Jedi Knight,

"There is a future for us. One where we're all free. But it's up to us to make it happen."

[nando161mando]

A human right

Nobody remind them about SEC Filings

Facebook reactions to the death of Brian Thompson

Internet Takes Lack of Sympathy Further, Thirsts Over Suspect in Health Insurance CEO Shooting

Just a friendly reminder

Just a reminder that you are being screwed over by private health providers in the US.

Remembering the legacy of Brian Thompson

The UHC shooter set something in motion.

UHC CEO was separated from his wife — maybe this story isn’t quite so simple

This goes hard

[unsolicited-opinions]

I used to run a doctor's office. If your doctor's office hasn't explained this to you, let me do it for them.

You probably don't know how much time your doctor and their staff spend fighting with insurance companies for routine, ordinary things. The stories you see online might leave you thinking that these fights are, if not rare, maybe occasional. A sometimes sort of challenge.

Nope.

It's every day. It's all day. Your doctor's office has employees who fight with insurance companies as a full time job.

This isn't an accident or a side effect of other market forces at work - this is the deliberate, calculated plan the insurance companies have chosen to implement. They know very well it is hurting patients and providers, and they're okay with that because their priority is to maximize ROI for investors and other stakeholders. They're in the business of business, and they don't give a single fuck about human beings or health care.

They've lowered reimbursements in primary care so effectively that primary care has only survived in many parts of the US by becoming a loss leader for larger health systems. You know how the local retail store gets you in the building by selling something at slightly below cost because they know you're likely to buy more once you're inside? It's like that, a loss leader.

The health system where you get your primary care often loses money when you see your PCP, but since your PCP refers you to speciality care inside their own organization, the system makes up the money when your doctor sends you to see their own systems' surgeons, endocrinologists, dermatologists, etc.

Smaller primary care practices literally can't survive. That's why there are almost no independent family doctors any longer. That's why it is so hard to see the same provider with consistency, someone with whom you can develop trust over time, who knows you and knows your challenges. United Healthcare and it's private healthcare insurance competitors have nearly finished killing off that kind of primary care.

Larger primary care practices (30-40 providers) might still be able to make ends meet independently through economies of scale and/or what they earn by doing their own lab/testing/imaging services in-house, but that won't work much longer if current trends continue. We're headed in the direction of just a handful of vertically integrated businesses running healthcare, and they are in the business of business, not health care.

The insurance companies deliberately create administrative barriers which make it expensive for your doctor's office to advocate for you because it moves administrative costs away from the insurance company and onto your doctor's office. This results in fewer paid claims when your doctor's office can't afford to hire another full time position whose only job is to argue with insurance companies and jump through their deliberately obstructive hoops. They want your PCP to be struggling to stay open. They want your PCP unable to afford the cost of overcoming the administrative burdens they have deliberately created for the purpose of denying you the health care your doctor thinks you need.

There are other words for this, but the most appropriate one is "evil."

I don't want to glorify murder or lionize Luigi Mangione, but Brian Thompson was a ghoul, his senior team are ghouls, and the for-profit health insurance industry is a disaster for Americans, even those Americans who don't yet see the problem affecting themselves. They will.

We need universal, single-payer health coverage, just like every other wealthy nation.

We're not going to get it any time soon, and things are about to get worse for healthcare in the US.

Set aside the damage RFK Jr is likely to do to an already patchwork public health system by attacking regulations and spreading misinformation. Let's look at other ways Trump and the GOP plan to worsen health care.

1. They're going to go after Medicare and Medicaid benefits. They'll seek to lower them and raise the bar which must be cleared to receive them.

2. They're going to seek to raise the age for social security benefits (above 70!), and reduce benefits paid, so the most financially vulnerable seniors will have greater out-of-pocket costs. Those seniors are going to struggle harder with out-of-pocket costs.

3. They're going to attempt to cripple the Affordable Care Act (AKA 'Obamacare'), despite the fact that the ACA has been a HUGE money maker for the private insurance companies.

4. This administration will be run by hyper capitalist billionaires. It will seek to deregulate wherever possible and promote supply-side economics (tax breaks for the rich and large corporations) at every opportunity. United Healthcare and its competitors, which already weild an obscene, horrific amount of control over US Healthcare, are about to get substantially more power.

It's bad, folks. It's a very bad time to be sick and it's going to get worse.

Alan Grayson was right in 2009. The Republican health care plan has been and remains:

* Don't get sick

* If you do get sick, die quickly.

[light-the-spark-of-dawn]

Bruce Wayne being the owner of the Daily Planet is just about the only reason I can believe Clark Kent would still have a career as a news reporter. And to be clear, this isn't a joke about his salary (which would probably be decent anyway since he's a senior reporter), but rather a commentary on the compromised integrity of American journalism.

Consider the news surrounding the United Healthcare shooting. The murder of a healthcare company CEO was immediately met with universal public support for the killer. Pretty much everyone in America despises the predatory healthcare system so much that they celebrated Brian Thompson's getting gunned down in the streets of Manhattan as being well-deserved, in spite of major news media trying to paint the bastard as an innocent victim and family man

Literally, the best defense of Thompson's character that they could come up with was that he was a father, husband, and a successful CEO who expanded the company. None of the articles mention that he had been separated from his wife for years. They conveniently leave out that under his leadership, UHC was criticized by the American Hospital Association and used AI to automate claim denials, forcing thousands of people to go without medical care.

The dead are lionized all the time. But this was a man whose life's work was built off the suffering of others and had virtually no good deeds to speak of. And yet the narrative that news reporting is trying to push is that the public joy at his murder is "disturbing" and "ghoulish" and even "un-American" (genuinely the most tone-deaf take I've seen thus far).

And now that Luigi Mangione has been arrested as a suspect in the case, the news have shifted to dissecting his whole life and laying it bare for people to see. He's a well-read and intelligent guy who graduated from an Ivy League college. He's a 26 year old tech bro from a wealthy family and was the valedictorian of his private school. He wrote a review of the Unabomber's book and gave it 4 stars. He had a traumatic back surgery and afterward became depressed and withdrawn. He wrote a manifesto condemning corporate America. He played Among Us (the fact that a major news company published a whole ass article about this is both hilarious and depressing).

Whether Mangione was the killer or not, the media is airing out any and all details of his personal history. But most of the articles I've seen aren't trying to analyze what would have led to an otherwise normal guy to assassinate a healthcare CEO. Because it's obvious to anyone who knows anything about American healthcare. Instead it's all talk about how he was "yelling at the press" and not about what he was yelling ("This is completely unjust and an insult to the intelligence of the American people and their lived experience").

90% of American media is owned by 6 conglomerates. It's in their best interest to diminish sympathy for someone like Mangione, who spoke out against the corporate robber barons. It's in their best interest to make people think he's a radical nutjob, a privileged college snob, a violent right-winger- anything that makes him less relatable to the people who are supporting him. And it's working.

Already we're seeing people across the political spectrum getting hung up on whether Mangione is a hero or not because his cousin is a Republican, his family was wealthy, he was college-educated, he's a cis straight white male, etc. It's worth noting that he hasn't even been extradited from Pennsylvania to New York yet, much less been put on trial or found guilty. And even if he was, his identity is not the point.

We must stop looking at the trees and take a step back to see that the entire forest was planted to prevent us from seeing the palace behind it.

[football-in-tuxedos]

On Wednesday, December 4th 2024, an as-yet unknown man shot and killed CEO of United Healthcare, Brian Thompson. Now, many people have been celebrating this, for reasons that don't really bear much parsing out. They're obvious; Even in the field of private healthcare, an arena filled with the kind of corporate ghouls who are comfortable withholding healthcare for profit, United Healthcare stand out as particularly vile. No one is mourning the wicked in this case.

But some among us are admonishing the others for their celebration. Sure they don't like United Healthcare, they say, unshed tears shining in their eyes, but they just can't condone this act of violence. Killing, they remind us sagely, is never justified.

Obviously our society doesn't actually think killing is never justified, 27 states still have capital punishment. What people actually mean when they say "Killing is never justified" in response to a murder people are celebrating is "I don't think it's justified in this case."

Context is, perhaps, everything.

Now, maybe you agree that this murder wasn't justified. Maybe you disagree. But let's not pretend retributive violence is beyond the pale in American society. It is, in fact, a huge part of the American social fabric. Well. Until the powerless enact it on the powerful.

Context, as we've established, is everything.

A little under three miles from where Brian Thompson was shot, Daniel Penny held his arm around Jordan Neely's throat until Neely perished, and many of the people admonishing those celebrating the former are the same people who claim the latter was justified.

Context, it seems, is everything.

The actions of Thompson's company, withholding medicine to those who need it, was violence, a point I'm completely unwilling to budge on. Thompson's company hoarded the resources necessary to provide medical care and did everything in their power to prevent vulnerable people, their customers, from accessing that medical help. That's violence. Constant, unceasing violence perpetuated against innocent people in the name of profit. But that sort of violence is normal. Legal.

Context, it seems, is still everything.

The premise that America is a peaceful nation, a nation where this sort of action is unthinkable, is an elaborate fiction. Even outside of the systemic violence Thompson's company was absolutely guilty of, we permit literal violence, action taken with the intent causing immediate bodily harm, to happen en masse every day. Think of the description of the event, if we do indeed discover the shooter acted out of anger at United Healthcare's actions; A man with a gun saw a threat and he shot him in the back. Would this even be news if the shooter was a cop and the victim not a CEO?

Context, it seems, will always be everything.

You'll perhaps note that I haven't endorsed or condemned the shooting of Brian Thompson, and I won't (although I don't imagine my opinion is hard to parse). I simply want to point out that if you condemn it, you aren't actually condemning violence. We, in this country, endure and participate in violence every day.

You just don't like the context.

[sophie-frm-mars]

I just had a long convo with someone about the UHC ceo being shot and how he felt it's wrong in the long time term to celebrate the shooting of Anyone in broad daylight. Claims vigilanteism is not the answer bc bad actors can justify violence against minorities and something about this argument feels off to me? Even if he agrees that billionaires/corporations are responsible for untold amounts of systemic violence

There's a bunch here I could get into about trying to determine the morality of past events but it might come across as quite up my own ass so I'll save it for now

Look, fascists don't need a justification to do violence to minorities and if they do the justification is in a guy they like being in power saying they should do it, not in anti-millionaire political violence.

If we're asking a practical question about what effects this will have politically, there are a few reasonable assertions we could make and some whacky conjecture

It would be reasonable to say that this will not have a chilling or marginalizing effect on political struggle against private healthcare, because if being shot dead in the street is the new most radical option facing healthcare CEOs, the previous most radical options are more moderate by comparison. They would rather cede ground to single payer healthcare than literally die

It's reasonable to assume that this will inspire more political violence against the rich, as political violence tends to beget political violence of the same kind. There have for example been a whole spate of self immolations in the wake of Aaron Bushnell's, which itself came after someone in Atlanta did it a few months prior.

I could conjecture that the ruling class might push for tighter gun control, as they have done in response to working class armed resistance in the past. I think it's an often repeated fact that gun control only really gained any ground in American politics after the black Panthers started arming themselves

But no, I don't think it's reasonable to say or even to conjecture that this creates a higher temperature for violence in general, and while I agree with the assertion that "vigilantism is not THE answer", it simply will put the fear of God into some of these murderous fucking scumbags in a way that we are already seeing is making them walk back some of their worst impulses, as with the reversal of a cap on surgical anesthesia

[opencommunion]

"While largely toothless as a democratic body—shorn of true legislative capacities and having never developed a genuine transnational dynamic—the European Parliament is nonetheless an important bellwether to track the continent’s political winds. As the results of the parliament’s June 6-9 elections confirm, those winds are blowing in a bleakly reactionary direction.

... There are two principal causes for this. First, the fact that for many decades now European national governments and federal European institutions have legitimized — through emergency measures, moral panics and murderous border policies that have led to thousands of migrant deaths in the Mediterranean — the far Right’s defining claim that migration threatens the material and cultural survival of white European civilization. The far Right’s obsessive talk of borders and births, and its promotion of the myth of the Great Replacement, were enabled by the EU’s political center. Governments across the continent advanced anti-migrant policies on the grounds that stricter regulations would sap the foundations of extremism. But it turns out voters often prefer the original brand, choosing bellicose nativism over technocratic repression when it comes to the ​'migration crisis.'

The second engine of Europe’s turn towards authoritarianism is the EU’s promotion of fiscal austerity policies that have particularly impacted Southern Europe and Ireland, but which have led to welfare state retrenchment across the board. Beyond eroding livelihoods and exacerbating inequality, austerity also led to the rise of multiple movements to reclaim national sovereignty, almost all of which (after the punishment and capitulation of Syriza’s left-wing government in Greece) are now monopolized by reactionaries. While all of Europe’s far-right parties have played on this supposedly populist register, none have challenged the hegemony of markets and the rating agencies that dictate cuts to social programs. ... The real social malaise that plagues so much of Europe — overburdened and privatized healthcare, labor precarity, anemic social security, accelerating climate-related emergencies — is projected onto the far Right’s favorite scapegoats: primarily migrants, but also ​'gender ideology' and its alleged assault on the family as Europe’s moral and material core."

[30coyotesstuckinhole]

So uh for an essay in my college class we were allowed to choose any problem in America to write about and I choose the problems of privatization healthcare. And then a CEO of health insurance company get murder in broad day light.

Any ways I’m going to write about Elon musk next and start manifesting