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Bluesky @lemmy.world
ByteOnBikes @slrpnk.net

Well that's quite an opinion

Can't access it from his profile, interesting.

https://web.archive.org/web/20241212234420/https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/12/04/opinion/thepoint#brian-thompson-luigi-mangione

As for the suggestion that Thompson’s murder should be an occasion to discuss America’s supposed rage at private health insurers, it’s worth pointing out that a 2023 survey from the nonpartisan health policy research institute KFF found that 81 percent of insured adults gave their health insurance plans a rating of “excellent” or “good.” Even a majority of those who say their health is “fair” or “poor” still broadly like their health insurance. No industry is perfect — nor is any health care model — and insurance companies make terrible calls all the time in the interest of cost savings. But the idea that those companies represent a unique evil in American life is divorced from the experience of most of their customers.

27 comments

  • I hate how the last quoted sentence phrases people as “customers” rather than people…

    “Unique evil” is also ironic…we’re surrounded by unique evil in so many directions, and compared to every other civilized country, yes, this system is uniquely evil. It’s the banality of evil Hannah Arendt described.

    Which is more barbaric: a lone vigilante killing 1 human or a system which kills roughly 70 people per day due to lack of care? If we had a serial killer who took 70 lives every day, would the news be trained on them?

    A single death is a tragedy. Multiple deaths is “business as usual” in America. We’ve lost our humanity.

    • we’re surrounded by unique evil in so many directions

      No, we're not.

      It's one issue: unregulated capitalism.

      And I know there are technically regulations, but they're written by lobbyists and not even read by politicians anymore.

      What's worse is the deregulation of campaign finance law. In a similar fashion it would be illegal for me to donate $3,000 to Kamala directly.

      But Elon Musk gave $275,000,000 to trump and that's cool because it was thru a PAC.

      Similarly I could have donated the max to Kamala, and then used the "victory fund" to use the max donation to each of the 50 state parties, but instead of going to them, it would first go to the DNC and that's a literal black hole of accounting because it's a private organization.

      We don't know how 2020 or 2024 went, but in 2016 this was the result of the victory fund:

      Right around the time of the convention, the leaked emails revealed Hillary’s campaign was grabbing money from the state parties for its own purposes, leaving the states with very little to support down-ballot races. A Politico story published on May 2, 2016, described the big fund-raising vehicle she had launched through the states the summer before, quoting a vow she had made to rebuild “the party from the ground up … when our state parties are strong, we win. That’s what will happen.”

      Yet the states kept less than half of 1 percent of the $82 million they had amassed from the extravagant fund-raisers Hillary’s campaign was holding, just as Gary had described to me when he and I talked in August. When the Politico story described this arrangement as “essentially … money laundering” for the Clinton campaign, Hillary’s people were outraged at being accused of doing something shady. Bernie’s people were angry for their own reasons, saying this was part of a calculated strategy to throw the nomination to Hillary.

      https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/02/clinton-brazile-hacks-2016-215774/

      With Jaimie Harrison resigning, I hope someone with the integrity to open the books up gets DNC chair.

      A shit ton of people didn't vote because they believe both parties are corrupt. The best way to get their votes is to root out the corruption we already know has been there since 2015.

    • The establishment is blind to structural violence as usual.

    • the news would be trained on them, for a month, maybe two. after that it's no longer surprising or shocking, so it gets ignored, maybe they make a yearly special.

  • The piece mentions Thompsons humble rural upbring quoting another NYT article. He somehow fails to cite this.

    But during Mr. Thompson’s tenure, UnitedHealthcare and its parent company were accused by lawmakers and regulators of systematically rejecting health claims.

    UnitedHealth Group was the subject of a blistering report by a Senate panel this year that documented insurers’ refusal to pay for the care of older people recovering from falls or strokes. Mr. Thompson’s company was cited for a surge in denial rates of post-acute care for people on private Medicare Advantage plans, which increased to 22.7 percent in 2022 from 10.9 percent in 2020.

    Earlier this year, Mr. Thompson and two other UnitedHealth Group executives were accused of insider trading and fraud in a lawsuit filed by the Hollywood Firefighters’ Pension Fund.

    The lawsuit claimed Mr. Thompson sold $15 million in personally held company stock while the Justice Department was starting an antitrust investigation into UnitedHealth Group, an inquiry that he and other executives had failed to disclose. When news of the investigation became public, the price of the company’s stock plunged, erasing nearly $25 billion in shareholder value, according to the lawsuit. On Tuesday, officials from UnitedHealth Group declined to comment on the matter.

27 comments