One story that we couldn’t keep out of the press and that contributed most to my decision to walk away from my career in 2008 involved Nataline Sarkisyan, a 17-year-old leukemia patient in California whose scheduled liver transplant was postponed at the last minute when Cigna told her surgeons it wouldn’t pay. Cigna’s medical director, 2,500 miles away from Ms. Sarkisyan, said she was too sick for the procedure. Her family stirred up so much media attention that Cigna relented, but it was too late. She died a few hours after Cigna’s change of heart.
Ms. Sarkisyan’s death affected me personally and deeply. As a father, I couldn’t imagine the depth of despair her parents were facing. I turned in my notice a few weeks later. I could not in good conscience continue being a spokesman for an industry that was making it increasingly difficult for Americans to get often lifesaving care.
One of my last acts before resigning was helping to plan a meeting for investors and Wall Street financial analysts — similar to the one that UnitedHealthcare canceled after Mr. Thompson’s horrific killing. These annual investor days, like the consumerism idea I helped spread, reveal an uncomfortable truth about our health insurance system: that shareholders, not patient outcomes, tend to drive decisions at for-profit health insurance companies.
Oh I’ve read his book he’s great. I see a lot of people here debating his morality but the important aspect of his book is that he describes the actual tactics in detail.
Maybe it should be illegal for certain industries to be publicly traded companies. The pursuit of profit to please faceless investors is a recipe for blind and insatiable pursuit of profit. The stock market is basically a ponzi scheme at this point with so many layers separating humans on one end from the humans on the other end of the profit/product dynamic, that it becomes a system that blindly drives itself.
What a frustrating article. We have an author that admits to being part of an effort to decrease access to healthcare and refers to the death of a monster in a human suit as a tragedy. He also admits he fucked up and has gone on to work with organizations that advocate for the right to healthcare.
I think I’m frustrated with this piece because it feels so lukewarm. Maybe that’s by design so that it reaches a wider audience. I’m just tired of seeing the insurance industry and its executives handled with kid gloves. It is unambiguously evil to make the kind of money they make off of healthcare.
In his own example his company literally killed a child with leukemia and the tone is still so weak.
He cannot escape in his narrative that he got his. He did the damned work and was able to move on with his conscious. He quit, the company replaced him, nothing fundamentally changed. He feels better, kids still dead.
The article isn’t a tale of redemption: it is about deflecting blame from executives to shareholders.
Which is just a subtle way of portraying a publicly traded company as less desireable than a fully privatized company that apparently would make different decisions about how to profit off dying people.
And yet he still calls the death of Brian Thompson “tragic.”
The death of a mass murderer is cause for celebration.
I hate this “He had a family that loved him!”
Because while I’m sure that’s true… ya know who else had families that loved them?
The various people who died of treatable illness because this assclown denied the healthcare THAT THEY PAID INTO in order to save a couple of dollars despite wiping his ass with Benjamins on the regular.
To his co-workers, Brian Thompson was just another suit and tie who punched out at 5 and met up with the boys for drinks before seeing the Mrs.
To his customers, he was the man responsible for the deaths of fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters.
Ban For-Profit healthcare
His wife lived separated since 2017.
He got DUI last year.
He wasn’t a saint, he was an asshole in private, like we all knew. The media lied about him.
It kind of meets classical definition of tragic in that his downfall was the result of his own actions.
Stalin and Hitler had families too, doesn’t mean I’m gonna stop being happy they dead
It’s an unfortunate reality of our condition that a few rich people have to die so that the rest of the biosphere may be saved
To be fair, Hitler did have some admirable traits. I mean he did kill Hitler after all.
I wish more fascists would follow the example Hitler left for them in that bunker of his…
It is tragic that it takes an assassination to bring the deplorable condition of our healthcare system to the front of the public consciousness, and also tragic if that’s what it takes to effect change. The karmic justice itself doesn’t have to be tragic for the event to be “tragic”.
it took an impromptu visit to a free medical clinic, held near where I grew up in the mountains of East Tennessee, to come face to face with the true consequences of our consumerism strategy.
At a county fairground in Wise, Va., I witnessed people standing in lines that stretched out of view, waiting to see physicians who were stationed in animal stalls. The event’s organizers, from a nonprofit called Remote Area Medical, told me that of the thousands of people who came to this three-day clinic every year, some had health insurance but did not have enough money in the bank to cover their out-of-pocket obligations.
That shook me to my core. I was forced to come to terms with the fact that I was playing a leading role in a system that made desperate people wait months or longer to get care in animal stalls or go deep into medical debt.
I’m gunna go out on a limb and predict this guy doesn’t get shot unless he goes hunting with the Cheneys regularly.
The only good exec is an ex-exec.
Thankfully, since this one retired of his own volition, it is no longer necessary to retire him.
TBF he is still an exec. Just not an insurance exec.
Wendell Potter, a former vice president for corporate communications at Cigna, is the president of the Center for Health and Democracy and writes the newsletter “Health Care Un-Covered.”
The Center for Health and Democracy(CHD) is a non-profit organization led by renowned healthcare expert and insurance industry whistleblower Wendell Potter that works to transform America’s system of health coverage. The organization’s core belief is that healthcare should be driven not by industry profits and greed, but by the needs and rights of every American to get the quality care they need without concern for cost.
hm. yeah. i’m still cool with him being exempted from Claims Adjustment.
We call it playing Mario Party over here
oh man i love that
when luigi wins by doing nothing XD
Your whole argument that every execs deserve to die got disproved as you can not generalize like everyone as part of this group and your response that this Individuum is like the one to get an exception? How does killing executives change anything? In the current system its a post that needs to be filled and in don’t think its an outrageous statement to say self-justice and murder shouldn’t be used unless they’re last resort and its not like a CEO is the owner of a company that can do whatever they want to steer it. Although they have quite a bit of leeway
Of course killing CEOs like that evil f*** head are matters of last resort. It’s long past last resort, many people have already died and many more will because of their actions. When is the last resort if not now?
You asked how killing executives changes anything, but we saw effects the day after that evil f*** face died. Another insurance company was trying to do something really s***** and they walked back their policy because of it. So you can pretend that violence doesn’t solve any problem, but only if you, to paraphrase the Onion, ignore all of human history.
I think it’s tragic. I really wish that what happened wasn’t so good for the lulz. I wish people weren’t as evil as that f***** up CEO. But we live in f***** up times.
Hi, I think you underestimate how much extra effort it takes to read your comment with that excessive level of self censorship.
all generalizations are false, including this one
it is normal to refine a position over time
technically non-profit organizations have executives too
also hyperbole is a thing that exists - a shortcut to loosely sketch out one’s vibe before getting lost in the nitty gritty details. Because we are mortal and do not have perfect recall or perfect communication. My perception of even the color “red” might differ from yours. At some point we all have to either accept that we’re working with sloppy and imprecise tools and have to improvise with what we have or just not do anything at all.
you COULD chill. that IS an option. just in case nobody ever informed you.
It is exactly as I expected.
The conclusion of this essay should be neither surprising nor outrageous. A corporation is a machine specifically designed for the sole purpose of maximizing shareholder value. If that’s not what it’s doing, it’s malfunctioning.
We the people have, via our elected representatives, chosen to have a system where corporations control what healthcare we can receive. If you want to blame someone (which isn’t productive) then blame the fellow Americans whose votes have supported and continue to support the current system. They’re the ones whose job is to make decisions guided by morality.
Blaming corporations is particularly unproductive because they can’t make decisions guided by morality. If they appear to do so, it’s because creating that appearance is expected to maximize shareholder value and the appearance will be maintained only as long as it continues to maximize shareholder value.
People laugh at the products with warnings on them against doing something that should obviously be a bad idea. Well this thing says “aim away from face” and the public keeps aiming the thing at its face. Whose fault is that?
How can you blame millions of people and feel content to leave it at that?
I cannot help but ask why a bear steps into a bear trap. And when I learn why the bear steps into the bear trap, I cannot help but stop blaming the bear.
I think it’s ironic and even darkly funny that people maintain a system that most of them hate, and that they blame the part of that system that has the least ability to do anything other than what it does, but I don’t blame anyone. As I said, blame isn’t productive in this situation. (What would it even mean to blame “fellow Americans”?)
Blame doesn’t even provide the satisfaction of knowing who to hate, despite what some confused people think. The responsibility is so diffuse that it isn’t even responsibility anymore. Each person is just a snowflake in an avalanche.
I do support attempts to improve the system, although so far that has meant only that I voted for Democrats. I’m just a single snowflake too.
