- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- reddit@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
- reddit@lemmy.world
Summary
Reddit’s r/medicine moderators deleted a thread where doctors and users harshly criticized murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
Comments, including satirical rejections of insurance claims for gunshot wounds, targeted UHC’s reputation for denying care to boost profits.
Despite the removal, similar discussions continue, with medical professionals condemning UHC’s business practices under Thompson’s leadership, which a Senate report recently criticized for denying post-acute care.
Thompson, shot in what appears to be a targeted attack, led a company notorious for its high claim denial rates, fueling ongoing debates about corporate ethics in healthcare.
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Is it hypocritical that the “suits” in the LinkedIn posts using the “laugh” emoji are probably some of the same ones making decisions as to which minimum of health care they can get by with to least impact the bottom line of their company? How much cost should be pushed to the employee? The ones that fire an ill employee for missing too much work?
Good choice by the mods to lock that first thread.
Got a problem with my commentary? Redditard is the offense? Well FUCK YOU and your fucking snowflake mentality, you emotionally charged bitch!
It isn’t just scammer CEO’s that are worried.
I have been following the news about Brian Thompson’s assassination in New York, and I am astounded by the flood of sympathy the media has poured out for him. Why? This man spent his entire career working tirelessly to deny healthcare to millions of Americans, all in the name of lining his own pockets and enriching shareholders. Yet the media praises him for his “kindness” and “generosity.” Let me be clear: pushing your company’s claim denial rate to nearly double that of your most cold-hearted competitors, bankrupting families through deceptive fine print and delay tactics, is not kindness, and it is not generosity. No, setting up boiler-room style offices with denial scoreboards is one of the most inhuman things I can imagine.
I spent nearly a decade writing software to help hospital systems fight insurance claim denials, and I can tell you, these insurers are getting better at it every year. They deny even the most justified claims, banking on the fact that most people won’t have the energy, resources, or will to fight back. And for the majority, they’re right. We had a team of a dozen nurses and PAs working alongside twice as many analysts. These were people who knew the system inside and out. We knew the deadlines, the bureaucratic jargon, the documentation required, and we tracked every claim meticulously. But even armed with all that knowledge and experience, we couldn’t win them all. On a good month, we might win two-thirds of the denials. That was considered a success.
What’s even worse is that for every claim we fought, there were countless others that never even made it that far, we only got denials on services that actually happened. A patient’s doctor tells them they need surgery, but an insurer like UnitedHealth says no and that’s it. The patient gives up and it is difficult to imagine they get better.
If you’ve ever had a serious medical condition—and I pray you haven’t—you know how much it drains you, how it strips you of your will to do anything. When every moment is agony, you don’t have the strength to sit on hold for hours, fill out endless forms, or chase down a bureaucratic system designed to wear you down. All you want is to sleep, because that’s the only place that pain can’t find you. How many people have simply lacked the strength to fight back, and ultimately succumbed to their conditions? How many families have been driven into poverty, their lives torn apart by a single emergency, all because of these executives’ policies?
We all know someone who has been through a health insurance nightmare and we also know that while political changes could probably help this problem the reality now is that these people are making a choice to run their companies this way, knowing full well the impact of their greed and indifference.
Where are your tears, your headlines, for the thousands of people and families whose lives have been destroyed and whose loved ones have died because of these same executives?
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I’m with you.
Never have I needed to work so hard to advocate for myself to get the care I needed as when I was with UHC.
By comparison, this year has held two major surgeries for me, neither expected, and my current insurer just shrugged, asked ONCE for proof of medical necessity, and paid the bill.
Also, let’s not forget the breach at a UHC subsidiary in recent months that brought down pharma payment systems for weeks…
This reminds me of Grisham’s The Rainmaker
I have been following the news about Brian Thompson’s assassination in New York, and I am astounded by the flood of sympathy the media has poured out for him. Why?
Who do you think owns the media? Who’s interests do they try to serve? It is not surprising at all that they would sympathize with him. We’re not talking some punk zine put out by some gritty journalist. These are highly consolidated corporate news outlets, many of whom have boards of directors that share some strong similarity to UHC. It’s profoundly unsurprising to me that they would sympathize with him, as they are a lot closer to a multi-million dollar CEO than your average Joe that gets their claims denied.
Insurance is irrelevant to the people that own and control much of our mass media, because they can easily pay out of pocket for any problems they have. All they see during this shooting is one of their own gunned down for “no reason”.
I spent 37.5 hours (I document EVERYTHING) on hold with Wellcare trying to get them to pay for Narcolepsy medication I’ve been on since 2021… “Has the patient tried this ADHD medication, as an alternate?” “No. I prescribed my patient the only FDA approved medication, in the United States that treats Narcolepsy and Cataplexy, and she needs to stay on it”. Luckily my doctor is wonderful.
It’s draining, but I’ve learned that the trick is to tell each of the outsourced customer service reps that you have no problem staying on hold for however long it takes. I’m disabled and have that ability. My partner works from home, so I do the same for their Blue Cross. When the insurance companies realize you’re willing to fill out ALL their paperwork, appeal higher and higher up, so that well-paid people get involved, clog their phone lines, and keep documenting every step of the way, they’ll give you what you want… but it is a full time job. 😮💨
I was reading an article that quoted his wife about what a great guy he was. It reminded me of Ken Lay’s wife talking about her families liquidity problems after the Enron collapse. Hundreds of employees lost everything and she’s griping about liquidity.
Ken Lay who tooooootally died before being sentenced and toooootally didn’t disappear into a foreign country
We had that last year in Ohio when Householder was sentanced to 20 years prison for his roll in the bribery scandal. He cried about hard that was going to be on his family and the judge told him “you should have thought about that before accepting those bribes.”
Of course he is. It’ll only happen if he’s of some value to Trump. Everything with Donald Trump is transctional.
Fuck that guy. The worst part, we’re still paying for his fucking corrupt bullshit.
He may have been nice in some ways. She probably just wasn’t aware or chose not to think about the darker aspects of health insurance corporations and what it takes to make billions at the expense of people’s health care.
Also people tend to whine when their gravy train runs out of gravy.
His wife is a physical therapist so she has an intimate understanding of the health care system. I’m sure it’s turning a blind eye. The article I read described their home as a $1.5 million home in an exclusive Minneapolis suburb. She knew. Cognitive dissonance can be very powerful.
I see that a lot with out-of-touch folks, boomers especially.
I’m sure he was a swell guy, a lot of fun at barbecues, dog lover and good with kids yada yada. Plenty of awful folks in history are like that. I hear Hitler was a fun guy who liked dogs and kids too.
…well not ALL kids but still
Lets be real, one of the primary motivators for a woman to be with and stay with a man is if he can provide adequately for her offspring. I’m sure he was doing a great job at that.
Okay, I’ll bite. The reason women end up choosing to be with a man of means, and I am in no way saying that all or even most women want this, is because we often don’t/didn’t have the opportunity to gain those means ourselves which thereby impacted our ability to survive and control our own lives. This is due to the oppression of the very men that you think we seek. Over the course of thousands of years, men cultivated a world where they steadily sought, gained, and ever increasingly obtained as much power as possible. In order to gain more power for yourself or your group, you have to take away power from someone else.
One of the people or groups whose power was regularly stolen is women. I’m sure this was a slow transition over a long period of time, but it ended with a world where women were rarely allowed to gain the skills or implement what skills they had in order to earn money. If you don’t have the ability to earn money yourself, you are forced to be reliant on someone else who is allowed to earn money. My point being, if you want enough money for you and your children to survive, you basically had to marry as rich as you possibly could.
Enter the modern women’s rights movement. This is where financial freedom became incredibly important to women. We collectively realized that we, much like any other human beings in existence ever, wanted to be able to have some control of our lives, our families, and our fates. This is why we entered the workforce in droves. Women who were suffering under the control of men who beat them and their children, potentially raped them, or demeaned them regularly with the full acceptance and support of society, wanted a way out. The available options were pretty bleak, so we worked in solidarity to find another way to survive with both our physical safety and dignity intact. Now, as an obligatory caveat, not every man was/is oppressive to women. But, since men as a whole created these arbitrary restrictions on women’s lives, they are the ones who have to suffer the aftermath of this system of control that was developed, especially since they are the ones who continue to experience advantages and benefits because of those exact lingering effects.
Most women would prefer to be able to support themselves and their family while having their partner contribute equally, either through earning money or doing an equivalent share of the household/family tasks. But, since something that becomes systemic is difficult to remove, we are still trying to shake the ramifications of this exertion of control. I assure you, most women would rather have less money and more autonomy when given the option.
This brings me to the point you’re trying to make. If the “primary motivator” of a woman is to choose a man who can provide adequately for her offspring, it is only because of the lingering effects of historical oppression that men created in order to exert control over women. It’s very frustrating to be in a world that constantly tells you that you should be pursuing a partner with money so you can have a stable future, but then simultaneously reprimands you for actually making that choice. Just as it’s difficult, but required, to acquiesce to the control of the man who holds your money.
I don’t think it should be presented as though this woman is shallow or terrible for making such a choice. Who wouldn’t choose a life of stability over one of chaos or continual financial stress? I know many men who would make the same choice if offered it. Like you said, I’m sure he was doing a good job of providing for their family financially, but let’s not be too reductive about her choice to have him as a partner. You say it in such a way that you are not only chastising her for her choice of husbands but are chastising all women for prioritizing their and their children’s survival and safety. That is something that comes across as offensive to the entirety of my gender because it implies that we shouldn’t consider ourselves of value or of having worth.
You may be right that this woman chose the CEO of UHC as her husband because of his wealth and ability to support their children and family lifestyle. Most likely, she knew what her husband actually did for a living and it’s effect on the lives of others and chose to ignore or not look into the deaths, horrors, and financial destruction that were created by the company her husband controlled.
But, one way or another, let’s not reduce the struggle that women go through at the hands of historical, and often modern, men to blanketly imply that we are all naturally money hungry and that we are obviously all using men for our own gain. I’m going to go ahead and assume that women, including myself, disagree with such an unfair assumption.
I agree with everything you said - it was worded well and you inserted the exceptions and qualifiers to make your point in a generalization that allows outliers. I do, however, wonder about the women who consider financial stability as a (if not the) major factor when choosing a partner, because we tend to hear only the stories of gold diggers, etc. and not the stories of women who married for love and simply had the fortune of having a partner that was able to acquire significant means. I’m guessing that’s why the commenter you replied to said what they said. I’m sure the percentage is small, but those type of women give the rest of us a bad name.
The following is anecdotal, but I think still relevant: Speaking from personal experience, my husband is well educated, I love him to death, and he chooses to work in a job that is stable (meaning it’s hard for them to get rid of him unless he makes some serious errors) rather than working for some private firm where he can easily be paid double if not more. He makes enough for us to get by while I’m finishing up grad school. I’m proud of his moral compass; he always tries to do the right thing.
His cousin, gem that she is, has always openly bragged about how she only goes on dates if the man is paying, yada yada, and she ended up finding some desperate sap 15 years her senior with money to burn; the culture they are from values marriage, so a single man in his 40’s gets a lot of questions. Mind you, this is a woman who was fired from her job because she got caught breaking security protocol, blamed it on her cousin’s husband (saying he snitched on her because they worked for the same firm), caused a feud, and refused to take responsibility. She hasn’t held a job since, nor do I think she plans to, because they are now slum lords in Florida. Most of the family doesn’t like interacting with her, but she’s not the only one who has decided it’s easier for her to behave this way rather than work herself.
People change, and when someone marries for love and one of the partners begins to change for the worse, it usually causes strain in a marriage as the values each partner holds no longer line up. Some people seek help and try to fix things. I read somewhere that the CEO’s wife was a physical therapist? If so, she definitely knows how the medical industry works, and she should be very aware of the harm insurance companies are responsible for. If she chose to turn a blind eye instead of trying to aid him in seeing the error of his ways, it’s because she herself lost sight of what the value of a human life is. She can blindly talk about how great of a guy he was because she was benefitting from all the perceived good it brought to her personally. I would wager she married him before he became CEO, but the fact that she stayed married to someone who led a company directly responsible for so much suffering is an indication of her character.
Another example: Mackenzie left Bozo because she saw who he turned into. I’m sure she’d speak well of him, but I imagine she would acknowledge all of his poor qualities. It’s not unfair to judge anyone married to someone of high means (regardless of gender), because there’s always a choice, especially when those means are directly gained by punishing others. There is a risk in financial instability through divorce, but at the level of assets in the millions it’s not a really dire concern - courts can award alimony, split assets, etc. Or, you know, they could get a job.
The question becomes, “who are you as a person; do you value money above all else, or positively contributing to a society where the give and take is balanced?”
We can all work to uplift each other together but still criticize those who are working against us, even other women. I guess my point is that we shouldn’t judge her for marrying into money, but we absolutely can judge her for her character if she chose to continue down this path.
one of the primary motivators for a woman to be with and stay with a man
I think you meant “female” lol.
I saw one that had a different relative say he was an honest person and hard worker.
This honest person’s company had $290 billion in insurance premium revenue in 2023 and they had $22 billion in profit. I always knew insurance was a grift but holy fuck.
And the company rewarded him with a $10 million compensation package in 2023. No living person works hard enough in a single year to earn multiple lifetime’s of average worker wages.
I saw one that had a different relative say he was an honest person and hard worker.
CEO
Which one was it now?!
cEoS wOrK tHe HaRdEsT!
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i wonder what job the hardest working person they ever met does? gotta be something like alaskan crab fisher or deep sea welder. definitely not some bullshit email job.
“Hardest working” at pulling their own dick
I love reading Melon Husk’s claim that he works 100 hours a week. He’s the CEO of five companies, which means even if his claim is true, being a CEO is a 20-hour-a-week job.
Being honest and a hard worker could be used to describe a hit man. Working hard at something unethical isn’t a virtue.
Honestly 10M is pretty small for a CEO of a company that size (especially on 22B in profit).
United health group listed 5 executives in their def14a filing which details executive compensation of 5 executives. Brian was the 4th executive, the ceo of the united health group was awarded 23 million and then there were two others who got 16 million. Overall it came out to about 75 million. Which i agree is less than i was expecting for 22B profit but it is still multiple lifetime’s of wages for an average worker
Fuck censorship.
I just got banned on r/technology because someone was ranting about Trump in a tech sub, completely unrelated to the topic, and I said “Rent. Free.” and the mods immediately permbanned me. It’s amazing how little it takes.
I made a large collection of screenshots from Facebook of people who had their claims denied by United Healthcare today if you want to really see how bad it is.
Life is short and filled with potential that sometimes met and other times robbed.
Having lost many members of my family, I don’t wish it on others.
Edit--------
So I would suggest that anyone actually learn to read what is written. It’s like taking to 5 year old that jump to conclusions… Seriously people, I don’t care about this Billionaire, I won’t be someone who will sya that murder is good and let’s purge all rich people. That is not constructive and I value life, not death. So many of you suffered from health insurance but when you come to vote you vote like most Americans do, not in my backyard. I don’t want socialism, governments not coming to take my money or guns…
No offence but private health care didn’t happen over night. You live in one of the greatest democratic institutions but simy chose not to use your tools. That is why corruption runs amok, none of you want to stand up and unite yourself with other Americans because you are all so bloody individualist. All other countries with universal healthcare didn’t just get it by miracle, it was work and commitment to the greater good which means not getting into hissy fights for every little thing.
How about listening to George Carlin to. Illuminate your minds… Seriously America, everyone in the world has been telling you that you have a problem, stop gaslighting us.
So you’re insured with Blue Cross?
And yet he not only wished it, but CAUSED it, for thousands upon thousands in the name of shareholder profits.
Agreed and his company and all like him should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
Imagine if millions of people walked the streets to stop the healthcare scam of America? Blue and red United…
Whenever we have big protests, we get tear gassed, shot with rubber bullets, beaten with nightsticks, and arrested. Why do you think this time would be different?
Vietnam ended because of protest.
The police cannot stop millions of people that match because most of them would agree with you.
The US needs to stop giving the microphone to extreme left and right speakers and go back to being a centrist country…
Protest isn’t easy but it gains traction when everyone is united which at the moment the United States is not… The longer it’s citizens are not united, the longer corporations will fill its coffers and pig out on your hard earned cash…
The media keeps you distracted so that none of you see how similar you are with the other side. They have even convinced people to no longer speak to Trump people… Who does that benefit? Motherfucking Corporations. They want you to be divided in every cause possible as it remove the eye on them…
They brutally attacked protesters during the Vietnam war protests, what are you talking about?
They did in fact stop millions of people in more recent protests, once again by using violence against the protesters.
As I said, it is not easy. When the elites believes they have no resistance, they pig out…
There is only so much that cops can prevent in a protest, especially in a day and age of technology where everything is recorded
I agree with the other things you said about solidarity.
But your implied view of protests, where the protesters have to suffer violence at the hands of the oppressors, is just insane to me.
And cops have been recorded commiting war crimes against the American people, and guess what the recordings did? Fucking. Nothing.
Yeah man, your heart bleeds for the millions of people who die every month. But your actions and words speak for the one CEO…
Nope I don’t glorify murder, have fun promoting your death cult
Rest in piss
“Rot in poverty” -UHC policy
I think he should have and we shouldn’t be afraid to praise him for it.
Rich people and the culture they perpetuate results in way more death and suffering than we give them credit for. It’s about time they get a little bit of payback for the generations of woe they benefit from.
Remember, they expect our children to serve their children. Fuck that shit.
Meddit is pretty high quality so it doesn’t surprise me. They don’t like too much shit posting by people without flair.
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That’s gonna Streisand Effect like crazy.
