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Summary
Rising frustrations with the U.S. healthcare system have been amplified by increasing insurance claim denials and mounting costs.
Patients report prolonged battles to access doctor-recommended care, with surveys showing one in five privately insured Americans faced denial in 2022.
Anger has intensified following the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, spotlighting issues like AI-based claim reviews and profit-driven practices.
While Trump’s upcoming administration proposes deregulation and privatization, critics warn this could worsen access.
Public distrust persists, but significant reforms appear unlikely as partisan debates stall progress in Washington.
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What the fuck do they mean privatization, it’s already fucking private! Did we suddenly get a socialized healthcare system when I wasn’t looking?
Could have saved a lot of time by just saying Trump plans to make one of the worlds worst healthcare systems even worse in whatever way he can. We’re well on track for a healthcare system collapse in the US if Trump actually implements the things he’s said he will. It will make a matched set with the economic collapse he’s also working on.
The US already spends more per person on socialized healthcare than most countries that have universal socialized medicine. Our current system just inserts grifty billionaires into the money stream before the money gets to actual healthcare.
Yes, we’ve had socialized healthcare for ages. You just aren’t allowed to have it unless you’re old, very poor, disabled, or a vet. So they mean privatizing Medicare, Medicaid, and the VA
Also active military get universal healthcare, too. Damn communist service members…
Isn’t that just…Cobra insurance?
No. COBRA is continuation of benefits. For example, when you lose a job, you have the option to continue that same plan but paying for it yourself.
Most people don’t even bother because it’s typically far more expensive than anything else you can get.
Thank you. I’ve never used it so I had no idea.
Cobra is just the right to pay the employer portion of your health insurance after you leave your job so you don’t lose health insurance. Most americans skip it because they’re shocked to see just how much their employer subsidizes their health insurance
This is part of why there is such a push to decouple insurance from employment. Especially as corporations increasingly recognize they can both escape the tax demand of socialized health care and also escape the social contract of providing health insurance by moving more and more jobs to 1099/contractor positions
So remember when you are eyeing up that contractor job at amazon/doordash/uber/zocdoc/etc that is probably never going to unionize (if they have their say anyway): the 30-40k you earn there is really like 6-12k less (more if you want good insurance or support a family) because you will have to supply your own health/vision/dental (or you can just let yourself ignore all preventive care and/or keep your fingers crossed that you never have an inevitable health issue that will bankrupt you with your meager salary). Also keep in mind you get no retirement benefits. Good luck relying on social security/the national pension with musk and co continuing their assault on it. I don’t blame you if you take the job, we all gotta make ends meet, but try to get out asap because they will literally work you to death for a pittance
It’s also retroactive. There’s a deadline but I can wait and if I get another job before I get sick, I’m good. If I get sick and haven’t found another job, I can decide to pay for COBRA and I’m covered
Thank you for the explanation. I’ve never had to use it so I had no idea. I thought it was just some super cheap plan that barely covered anything.
Privatization means getting rid of Obamacare/ACA. Trump and GOP see that as socialised health care and have “concepts” to replace them.
Just imagine if we brought the efficiency of the insurance that tries to keep you from getting healthcare to the systems that want to give you healthcare but are grossly underfunded, like medicare or the VA! Why, we could ensure that almost no one gets a covered doctor’s visit while doubling prices.
The only part they won’t gut is the part that mandates that everyone must have insurance.
Nothing better than being legally required to pay for a service that exists to fight to provide no value to you whatsoever in return for the money.The only part they won’t gut is the part that mandates that everyone must have insurance.
Uh, that’s the part that already got axed during Trump’s last term, in 2019.
Well, goes to show how fucked my memory is recently. 🤦
Even more expensive, even more denials.
Sounds like a problem for a green plumber.
When your sink is trouble, you call them on the double! They’re faster than the others, you’ll be hooked on the plumbers!
Can you imagine the timeline where Luigi gets off through jury nullification, and then he does it again? That would be something to see.
I don’t think we’ll have to wait that long. You know the guy in the footage of the shooting? The one without a monobrow? He’s still out there.
And I really hope his name is Mario.
Yeah I agree, I’m not even convinced it is Luigi. The killer deliberately dressed in a way that hundreds of people in NY are dressed as at any given time. I’m skeptical of the trail they’ve pieced together from video camera footage. It’s unlikely they have continuous shots of him going from one side of the city to the other.
And the thing is, I’m extremely skeptical of anything the NYPD says. They just recently had a case thrown out when they were caught on camera planting evidence. How many times do you have to plant evidence before you get caught on camera doing it?
I don’t know if Luigi did it or not. But if he didn’t do it, here’s one plausible scenario for how he didn’t do it that would still account for all the evidence we’ve seen publicly:
He’s reportedly bisexual and from a wealthy and likely conservative family. And he hadn’t talked to his family in months; they were actively looking for him. He got some severe back injury, and maybe he decides to just get away from unaccepting and overbearing family, perhaps for awhile, perhaps permanently. He wants to get away and find himself, just walk the Earth for awhile. So he’s been living out of various hostels and homeless shelters for awhile in various cities. To keep his family from tracking him down, he gets a fake ID and travels under an assumed name. He wears a hoodie and mask almost everywhere, as he doesn’t want his family to track him down. And he is genuinely worried about covid living in a hostel.
He’s staying in NYC. A few days after the shooting, to his horror, he sees his own picture on the news listed as the killer. He freaks out and flees the city. He eventually gets picked up by the cops in Pennsylvania.
Unbeknownst to him, he was struck with the combination of terrible luck and a corrupt police department. Luigi happened to be dressed like the killer, and he happened to be near the scene of the crime within a few hours of the killing. A camera catches him placing a wrapper or bottle in a trash can. And his DNA is on it. The cops falsely conclude the killer is the one that put the wrapper in the trash, and they now are certain they have the DNA of the killer. (Another possibility is that the actual killer stood by a public trash can and waited until someone dressed like him happened to drop a wrapper in the trash, and then deliberately planted it near the scene.) They do some detective work, and find that Luigi has been living in an assumed name with a fake ID in a hostel.
So the cops are 90% certain they have the guy. They have a guy that vaguely looks like the killer, is using a fake ID, and whose DNA was found near the scene. In their minds, that’s an airtight case, and they convince themselves that this makes it OK to fake further evidence to seal the deal. When they arrest Luigi, they plant the untraceable gun on him along with that manifesto, that was conveniently had written, and not published electronically like you would expect a software engineer to do.
And moreover, if the cops were going to just pick a convenient scapegoat, who better than Luigi? He’s a young kid, estranged from his family, living in hostels and homeless shelters. He was basically living as a drifter. That’s the exact kind of low social status person that cops would be tempted to foist something like this on.
I can’t prove any of this obviously. But the one thing that sticks with me is Luigi’s only public statement. He hasn’t issued any public statement. But there was that one time, before he started working with his lawyer, where he shouted to the crowd of reporters. He didn’t shout, “this was for the the innocent victims of Brian Thompson!” Or “I apologize for nothing!” Or some other statement that you would expect a proud martyr for a cause to make. Instead, he shouted, “this is an insult to the intelligence of the American people!”
That’s the kind of thing an innocent man would shout. That’s the kind of thing one would shout if you had just been framed by the NYPD. That is the cry of a young man who knows he is being framed and faces literal execution for a crime he didn’t commit. I would be enraged too.
And again, this isn’t outlandish, the NYPD has been caught faking evidence many times before. If they already had a decently strong case due to the DNA at the scene, I could absolutely see them trying to wrap it up quickly by planting the gun and manifesto on him.
People like to share these “Saint Luigi” memes. But if he actually is innocent, literally not the man who pulled the trigger? If he were to be still convicted, executed, and later the truth come to light? He would be a completely innocent martyr. That’s the kind of thing that actually could get some one canonized as literal official Saint of the Catholic Church.
I of course can’t prove any of this, and it is possible that Luigi really did do it. Cameras and lighting can make people look very different. Or maybe the cops have a lot stronger evidence that they just haven’t released yet. But this is the kind of theory of the case I could see the defense making. And ultimately, they don’t have to prove Luigi didn’t do it. They just have to show reasonable doubt. And based on the entirely circumstantial evidence we have, combined with the NYPD’s predilection for fabricating evidence, at least right now with the publicly available evidence, I think reasonable doubt absolutely exists.
along with that manifesto
How did they write a manifesto in his handwriting?
And if it’s not in his handwriting, why bother to plant something that would actually hurt the prosecution? No cop wants to cause an “OJ glove” moment, where defense lawyers easily convince the jury that evidence was planted.
As long as they had a sample of his hand writing, which wouldn’t be too hard to get, it would be easy enough to take. Discrepancies could be blamed on his back injury. Any police officer can pull up drivers license records, and those usually have a signature in them. You could extrapolate a handwriting style just from a signature. Or maybe it’s just in block lettering so hand writing is less distinctive.
And again, we’re dealing with a department that has literally been caught on camera planting evidence on people. They’re not exactly the sharpest knives in the drawer.
No, a handwriting sample is not easy to get. It generally requires a search warrant, which means you can name the suspect before they are arrested, which didn’t happen here.
A driver’s license signature is not a handwriting sample, unless the manifesto consists only of Mangione signing his name over and over again all over the page. There are plenty of other letters, capitals, etc that they cannot reproduce.
Yes, cops are sometimes dumb enough to plant evidence. But they generally do this to the defenseless, not people from wealthy families who can hire someone like Johnny Cochrane.
Which is another major hole in this theory: if the NYPD were looking for someone to frame, why not frame someone who cannot afford to defend himself?
Why wait days for a phone call from an Altoona McDonald’s, when there are plenty of people they could frame right then and there in NYC?
Why finally choose someone located 300 miles from NYC, considering that a randomly chosen person in that McDonald’s was likely in central PA during the murder and thus would have an airtight alibi?
Why forge a handwritten manifesto when they could easily avoid suspicion by using a typewriter?
I mean, instead of spending days in Central Park, they could have spent 10 minutes searching the Fediverse for “guillotines” and “my medical debt” to find at least a dozen defenseless New Yorkers with a legit written history of advocating death to the wealthy and genuine animus against health insurance.
But no, instead they chose to frame some random guy. And because cops love extra work, they chose a random white, wealthy guy instead of a poor POC like they usually do. For an extra challenge, they even chose a young, attractive guy instead of someone less sympathetic like Ted Kaczynski.
Your theory requires the NYPD to spend a lot of effort making a lot of risky bets that could backfire and destroy their case, for no reason at all.
You can’t see the killer’s eyebrows in the shooting video. Or even his face.
It’s possible there are eyewitnesses or unreleased video of the shooting. Otherwise the case against Mangione will likely depend on DNA and ballistics evidence. Either way, the photos in the coffee shop and hostel are irrelevant.
Never going to happen. They will fill the jury with people who hate Luigi.
When will you all learn that the rich always win? They have the money, power, and influence to ALWAYS get what they want.
Nothing is ever going to change.
Every civil right you enjoy was fought and died for. The world can change and it has changed. I don’t remember the last time I had to swear an oath of fealty to my local Lord.
Except water levels
Become a Luigi. That’s really what needs to happen. A Luigi every week until this shit is fixed
They’re only talking about this because of Luigi, they’re scared, and billionaires only think about sharing when they’re scared, Sadly they’re only THINKING about it
Deregulation and privatization? For something that’s already a racket that can kill to save money? Might as well start pulling a Canada and pass around the Vault-Tec Plan D’s
Well, we got a group of Trumpers that are so hell bent on making sure other people’s lives are worse. So they are taking us all down with them. These guys have managed to put a professional anti-vaxxer in our federal healthcare system. Then they wonder why their healthcare is shit, costs much money, and don’t work good.
Indeed.
I’ve heard MAGA explained to me as a “Reverse Cargo Cult” of sorts.
If you’re not familiar with Cargo Cults, there are isolated places all over the world with no real contact with the outside world. I understand “Isolated” and “No real contact” are saying the same thing, but I wanna drive the point home that these are places that have had no interaction with anyone but themselves.
Sometimes that’s for a damn good reason as quite a few of them are outright hostile to visitors.
Anyway, a phenomenon has happened where people in these areas will see planes in the sky and believe them to be Gods. Sometimes for one reason or another these planes crash or drop their cargo. The people in these areas will then examine these and try to recreate or restore radios they find, believing they can fly or contact the Gods, if only they build these devices correctly and pray to them enough. This never happens of course because they’re trying to build complicated machinery out of sticks and stones, but you get the idea.
There’s actually one that believes the King of England is a God simply because they found photos of him, and actively worship them.
They don’t know why their version of technology doesn’t work and the ones they find from above do, but they believe that if they keep trying and praying surely it will happen one day.
Well MAGA is a Reverse Cargo Cult; They know they’re taking us down with them.
Essentially, MAGA looks at the planes in the sky and says. “When we built our own it didn’t work, so the ones in the air don’t work either. It’s some kind of illusion and we should punish them for lying to us!”
It’s why they rejected Biden and Kamala for saying they’ve been fixing the economy, even though it’s obvious from prior behavior that Trump will outright wreck it. They’ve given up on anything getting better, and just want to use Trump as the brick they wanna throw at the man behind the curtain pretending that planes can fly.
I don’t know if I believe this explanation, but I figured I’d voice it in the hopes of creating a discourse.
You honestly think they would approve a paying customer’s claim for euthanasia?
I mean, they’re already chosing to let people die.
Letting someone die because they don’t get care doesn’t cost the insurance company anything.
It boggles my mind that any American can look at their healthcare system and look at the rest of the world and think more privatization and deregulation is the way to go.
If ANTHYING absolutely must be regulated it’s healthcare.
“If you take government bureaucrats out of the healthcare equation and you have doctor-patient relationships, it’s better for everybody,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said in a video obtained by NBC News last month. “More efficient, more effective,” he said. “That’s the free market. Trump’s going to be for the free market.”
The myopathy here is mind boggling.
I bet things would change if Mike Johnson ever had a claim denied.
“Whether the murder will strengthen appetite for reform remains to be seen.”
Yes, this is actually a sentence in a current article about the American health insurance industry.
these free thinking line toeing dickheads don’t seem to realize that america has paper pushing dickheads AND death panels standing in the way of us ever getting the treatment we need. their arguments against soviet style healthcare are the problem with hypercapitalist healthcare. all we want, the left, is healthcare without linking it to power. we should recieve treatment because we are worthy of it because we have dignity as people and as beings who are loved. that we do not is an indictment that this system that kills us is a sham
That’s your problem. You didn’t work hard enough to earn your allotment of love.
Well we just voted in probably the worst person to “fix” our healthcare and who only has a “concept of a plan” regarding it. Sooo what can really happen?
If you were hoping to vote on healthcare reform, neither candidate supported a real change. Biden campaigned in 2020 on wanting to lower medicare to 60… mostly everyone supported healthcare for all from 2016-20’, and they all stepped back from that quickly.
Yeah but trump is unarguably worse on healthcare than anyone else on the ballot. We’re turbo fucked.
Well, I could split hairs and point at the libertarian party but I assume we’re only talking about harris/trump lol. Honestly Trump’s position on healthcare was probably better for his demographics than Harris’s stance for her democratic constituents. She didn’t appease anyone’s concern besides “Trump is worse” but couldn’t actually say how he would be worse since he didn’t have a plan. You couldn’t have gone back 4 months ago and talked about healthcare without someone distracting the conversation with fascism. It was a complete political flop that people are still blaming Trump voters for.
I could split hairs and point at the libertarian party
Are you suggesting that libertarians would have any interest in strengthening regulation and oversight of medical insurance?
They’re the party of lower regulation and less enforcement.
oh lol definitely not, it was a response to “trump is unaguably worse on healthcare than anyone else on the ballot”. Meaning the Libertarian healthcare platform is abysmal and I believe they were on mostly all the national ballots so he had at least some competition for being the “worse”.
edit: a word
This is one of the many downsides of the current way of politics. Since apparently you can say anything without accountability, declaring a platform only creates a target. You’d be foolish to say more than you have to.
The answer to the tagline is: no. The CEO, Andrew Witty, of UHC Group (owner of UHC) wrote an article saying the healthcare system is broken and needs to be fixed. It was all PR garbage. No identification of WHAT people are frustrated with or how they will work to fix it. He also said that no employee should have to live in fear but the examples he gave of employees were RNs and call center employees. Last I checked, people were not angry enough at those groups to kill them in the street.
If you go on the subreddit for nurses there’s actually a pinned post reminding people that they’ll be banned for advocating for murder because the very day that headline first broke their were multiple posts and numerous comments to the effect of “good” and “who do we hope they get next?” A significant portion of the compassion fatigue (read: PTSD for people with empathy) affecting nurses these days is watching our patients suffer and die due to various health problems that they cannot afford to treat. ER nurses in particular are constantly bogged down with treating chronic conditions that have only become emergencies by being grossly undertreated. They got into this to save people from heart attacks and instead they’re getting wave after wave of demented nursing home residents with pressure ulcers full of maggots.
The fact that Healthcare executives are trying to lump themselves in with nurses is even more disgusting when you realize that most of the reason we get our asses beat is because we’re usually physically standing the closest when the health insurance system fucks people over the hardest. They don’t know what to do, they don’t know who to turn to, and their life is at stake so they start swinging at whoever is closest and 9/10 times that’s a nurse (or nursing assistant). Healthcare executives are hands down the #1 root cause of the physical abuse of nurses; they ARE the ones getting us hit, and they don’t get to claim they’re one of us now that somebody finally came after the real culprit.
rising frustrations
How long do these frustrations have to rise? I remember reading about this shit over two decades ago.
When is it enough, exactly?
Literally expressed in a kid’s movie 20 years ago
As long as rich people give enough food and basic necessities to the poor you all will never be uncomfortable enough to fight back. That is the whole point.
That’s the problem, there’s no such thing as “enough” to the people who already have all the power
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It’s really an ingenious plan from the upper echelons. How do you absorb the rest of the money people have in retirement savings or possible inheritance? Make medical so fucking expensive that you spend every last dime on it so no one else can get it. Their children go further into debt trying to help out, nothing is passed down as even properties become collateral.
I would bet money that they will make medical debt a “nondischargeable debt” with bankruptcy before we get any type of real healthcare for all.
there are 40 countries that fit the developed criteria, you may look at any of them for references
Anger has intensified following the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, spotlighting issues like AI-based claim reviews and profit-driven practices.
Really? Americans are surprised that a for profit healthcare system, has profit driven practices?
They can’t be THAT supid?
But some Americans refuse to accept a socialized healthcare system that is not profit driven, and could cost about half what they pay now, if implemented at the average efficiency of other countries that have it.Americans voted for Trump, and he will probably give them the deregulation the ignorant asked for, and the healthcare hellhole they are living in will get even worse. Deregulation will make it even easier for insurance companies to legally cheat their customers, and increase their profits.
Hurray for deregulation. /sAmericans have got to learn how to vote for their own interests.
When one candidate as actively campaigning on the basis of ripping apart a healthcare system put in place by the previous one (Trump with Affordable Care Act) and then wins, twice, it’s hard to understand why they’re surprised that they’re in this situation.
Maybe if people weren’t still going bankrupt because of medical bills despite the ACA they wouldn’t be so excited to blow up the entire system.
No American presidential candidate ever represents Americans’ best interests. It is not possible to vote in your best interests here.
Really? None. I suspect one or two of the literally 100s of non partisan candidates were actually there to do good? I think the point being made (and this goes for all democratic systems), is that 99% of the population could not name more than 5 names on the ballot. Let alone consider voting for them.
People vote for parties and ALL of the parties are funded by someone. Ultimately, we do it to ourselves.
That’s BS. We believe too much of the muck-taking they do to each other, but most importantly residents do a lot of good. Even Trump did some good for people …. I think. Can’t name it but certainly there are a lot of people who believe he did
Don’t they mean “who’s” next?
Monthly fees will go up, because the security details for the CEO’s won’t be paid out of their own pockets. That would be ludicrous, those poor CEO’s having to cut into their profits to keep themselves safe from those barbaric peasants.
