Summary
The killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson has reignited debates over the U.S. healthcare system, with Americans sharing stories of denial, delays, and exorbitant costs despite having insurance.
Many report fighting insurers for coverage of essential treatments, facing hidden costs, and taking drastic steps like career changes to secure health insurance.
Critics blame corporate greed for worsening access and affordability, while others note the system’s complexity discourages seeking care.
Though some find employer-provided plans satisfactory, the overall system is described as profit-driven and increasingly inaccessible, leaving many financially strained or avoiding medical help altogether.
It’s one of those systems which is only “great” if you never need to actually get the money to pay for a significant healthcare bill.
If they deny you. Deny their existence. That is all.
It’s been terrible forever, but it’s gotten bad enough that many more of those consequences have leaked up into the middle class. A lot of people now suddenly realizing it’s terrible grew up in middle class families that are now priced out of usable healthcare services. This is what it’s been like for many people below the poverty line, they just don’t get any news coverage when they die from a lack of insulin.
Let’s be honest. Agree with it or not, it is difficult to argue against the effectiveness of that assassination. Three bullets have brought true discussion about the cluster fuck that is American healthcare further than over a decade of Bernie screaming about it every chance he got. Will something come of it? We shall see.
Discussion doesn’t help much when everything is controlled by the billionaires. To be honest I don’t think anything will, corruption in the system has gone way too deep.
Damn, I expected your account to have been created in the last month.
The OG guerilla marketing tactic…
If anything tangible and lasting actually does come of it you might be right, but so far the “discussion” seems to center around either cheering for Mangione or raging against him, intellectualizing about morality, louder unfocused wealth hatred, and tons of overgeneralized memes. We’ve had anecdotal reports of more insurance claims being approved, but that’s at corporate whim and can change back any time. Are any Congressional bills in the works? Granted, I’ve mostly been ignoring the news since the fucking election and it’s very possible that I’ve missed something.
Way to prematurely overstate this while shitting on Bernie
They are not necessarily shitting on Bernie, it’s just that the US is at a point where opposition from within the system (Bernie) can safely be ignored by the rich.
The rich need to be reminded, that seeking a compromise with the working class through the system is preferable to the alternative. That it is - in fact - unsafe to ignore that the working class is increasingly fed up with a system that always screws them over.
The language “he has been screaming about…” seems pretty critical and dismissive typically.
That’s your own interpretation…
And yours is that it was flattering to Bernie (or anyone else) to claim they “scream” about [vague concept]?
It’s almost as if a parasitic organization, within a capitalist system that utilizes mottos like “you’re ether growing or dying,” would devolve into an ever more repugnant system that resorts to more and more denials of “service” as it can’t innovative to create more value, because they don’t create anything. These “services” just try to retain as much money given to them as possible and need to retain more and more to be “growing” as Lord God The Shareholder and the Holy Son Board Of Directors demands.
It’s almost like that.
It is so quintessentially American that they would base their entire healthcare system around the good will of for-profit companies and be shocked when they see how that turns out.
No, it was always like this.
You just got older and found out how bad it is.
It really wasn’t. I am 51 years old and I noticed a big shift when HMOs became a thing. Also, ask any doctor in or near retirement age and they will also tell you that it is very different now. Hell, twenty years ago it’s when I started hearing about doctors closing private practices because of medical malpractice insurance costs exploding.
I think this is the end result of a deregulation perfect storm across multiple aspects of American healthcare.
20+ years ago I was told I’d have a $20 co pay by the Dr, and was billed almost $300. Because I didn’t get pre approved to see an ear Dr. Insurance has been shit my entire life.
Sure, it goes back to the Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973. Technically it wasn’t always like this.
But this has always been a nightmare shithole country where healthcare is for profit. It should be fucking free.
One of the things that FDR did that wasn’t great was allowing health care to be organized into HMO’s. Nixon then switched those HMOs from not for profit, to for profit in 1973 with the HMO act.
Prior to FDR, you paid the doctor with what you could. Not necessarily cash, but many towns provided a free house for their doctors and they were frequently paid in fresh produce.
1973? Shit. Seems to line up with the time period of 1969-1977 when a whole bunch of shit got fucked for the common man.
The worsening of this and a lot of other things which are now reaching unbearable abuse levels all align neatly with Neoliberalism, starting with Reagan.
Take the State from the job of Regulation and you naturally end up with lots of feedback cycles were all the natural uneveness in real markets (effects totally unaknowledged in Free Market Theory and which make most Markets there very opposite of competitive) snowballs into monopolies, cartels, networking effects and other means of market locking, feeding into becoming ever more so, and when entrenched enough being abused to the max, from enshittification to health insurers knowingly fraudulently refusing to pay the bills for life saving treatment because they know those people are too poor to sue them or will die before any lawsuit ends up in a judgment.
When it’s all self-“regulation” and there’s no “big government” smacking down on abuses, the objectives of the actors still left in the market with the most power are the ones which the system de facto is optimized to achieve, and without “big government” the most powerful actors in the market by far are Big Money, who will optimizing things so that they become even bigger money.
Start of transition from FDR style governing which culminated with raygoon. What we are seeing today is a parasite utopia.
53 here. Healthcare in America has never been worse in my lifetime.
Practices closing start at least by late 2000s, most of the 2010s there was a lot of consolidation, esp targeting provider firms with ownership shifting to PE firms. While health insurance newly hopped up on ACA regulations turn into mega corpos in their own right along with vertical integration.
Long story short, this is how the frog got cooked folks.
Kasier Permanente is a non profit so prolly has the best bones. All these parasites need to be nationalized under Kasier and then over a decade turned into a single payer, government ran organization model on of the successful templates across the world. Daddy pick which one he likes but this shot has to work.
This will never happen, i have better chance of exiting work class 🤡
Well yes and no. Healthcare has always been restricted in the US, especially through racism and sexism, but the dystopian insurance shit didn’t really come into force until the mid 90s.
I had a “crazy aunt” who could never get off her soapbox about how HMOs were going to ruin healthcare in the US. Looking back, she was a true “walk the walk” sort of hippy and I wish everyone in the family had taken her more seriously about various things. We’re out of touch these days, but I often remember how right she was.
If you drop her a note telling her that, it’ll almost certainly be very appreciated.
The truth tellers often get stoned, must be something about human condition. Normies larp talking points they hear on teevee so the truth teller sounds either retarded or a lunatic.
Then years later some of us realize they were actually on point and it hits like a brick wall.
One of “Obamacare’s” selling points was to outlaw effectively-fake health insurance plans that were written upfront not to cover any actual care. Those policies had been around a lot longer than the mid-90s, but most employers were smart enough to avoid them, so they were really only a problem for poorer people buying individual insurance, and who cares about them?
My guess is that the old fake-insurance providers are the ones who figured out how to get around the ACA coverage requirements in ways that aren’t technically violations. Or figured out that no one was going to enforce penalties for those violations. Those practices have now crept into ‘mainstream’ providers, but it sure looks like no one cared until a CEO died.
My guess is that the old fake-insurance providers are the ones who figured out how to get around the ACA coverage requirements in ways that aren’t technically violations. Or figured out that no one was going to enforce penalties for those violations. Those practices have now crept into ‘mainstream’ providers
This is the core business model for any sufficiently large legal for profit entity. They know they get benefit of the doubt from the state regulators and law enforcement so they will push that line until it become common practice and then push it again. Enshitification is how looks on consumer side.
I worked for maybe a decade in Investment Banking back in the 2000s and early 2010s and one thing I realized after a couple of years in the Industry was that fines for lawbreaking were really just another business risk and calculated into the Profit & Loss estimations.
Looking around I would say that, at least amongst large companies, that practice is now the general rule in just about all industries - if the only penalties are monetary and paid by the company, individuals controlling budgets within companies will treat fines for regulatory non-compliance or even crime just like they treat any other business risk.
Make people personally liable for crime committed for the company (including using criminal association laws against companies) and fines a percentage of a company’s revenue (like the EU does for certain modern pan-European legislation) and most of these things would stop - there would be no need of Luigi doing what he did if Brian Thompson and those like him would’ve gotten jail time for Manslaughter if even just a single case of people being fraudulently denied life-saving treatment and dying could be shown to have been the result of his policies in the company.
Deff neee criminal liability to be attached to some of these “business” decisions but even the fines were actually enforced it would be a step in the right direction.
Currently most of stuff just doesn’t even get enforced by any government body. From corporate perspective government are limp dock idiots. Why bother follow the law.
I dont think it was always bene this bad but surely during all of my working life and getting worse.
A lot of consolidation and stripping of functions from hospitals to third parties has made it so much worse. It really wasn’t this bad a couple decades ago.
Big part of this is PE firms being able to structure this entities where they cut out lucrative portions of the service chain, and then loot it like that. IE tests is one example, make it out of network too whole at it;)
Nixon basically legalised for-profit healthcare in 73.
You keep thinking maybe… maybe… conservatives who defend corporate healthcare to the death - sometimes literally so - would figure out that making it a public service like fire and police just makes sense and is not a threat to Freedom. How stupid would it be if the fire department refused to hose down your house without preapproval from an insurance company?
All your comment did was convince conservatives we need to privatize police and fire.
We might bring back pouring molten gold down the rich assholes throats, if the fire department did that again.
Edit: I’m aware that probably is just a legend and the Parthians probably killed Crassus in battle/ negotiations.
exposed
lolwut? is there anyone who wasn’t aware of the US health scare system? America has been a global laughing stock for my entire life.
It’s one of the things the US is famous for with the rest of the world, which doesn’t even care. That’s how exposed it is. It’s notorious. The default is, “Oh, that’s that place with the insanely poor health system.”
“Exposed” lol
at the same time though i know a lot of foreigners who think it’s all an exaggeration until they get here
Even with insurance, the average out of cost for a vaginal birth with no complications is over $2000. It jumps up to about $12,000 if you need a C-section. Those prices aren’t what the insurance pays, that is what you pay while your insurance company tries to avoid paying the hospital anything. If your newborn has complications and needs to go to the NICU, you will easily be on the hook for six figures
i don’t think there’s any set of numbers that can wake people up. i think the terror of american healthcare is so specific, visceral, and unfathomable to someone who’s received care as a dignity, that the only wakeup call is something specific, visceral, and unfathomable
I am aware, it’s like student debt where the fogures are so astronomical that they have become abstract. I’m trying to let our non-American counterparts know that however expensive they think basic healthcare is here, it’s way worse than they think.
Shit, just an ER visit, with no complications, no injuries, and no other issues, would have set me back $5k after I had a car accident. What I received:
- 2 x-rays, chest and knee
- 1 CT scan, abdomen
- Ibuprofen
The ambulance company also tried to bill me $1300 for a ride that took me a grand total of 3 miles, and tried to bill me twice AFTER my insurance had already paid them out.
The good news is that my workplace at the time was extremely large, and the accident happened during work hours, so I got covered by worker’s comp and didn’t have to pay a dime.
I knew it was bad but never thought it could be as bad as it is
People in the known knee… But regular people are busy talking about how great ACA is or how it is straight communism.
Eitherway, cost are high, no body at fault, nothing to be done, the poors deserve it 🤡
sadly the sytem was not better before. The aca stopped pre-existing conditions and bidens no surprise billing was a big add. Unfortunately they will always find a way to make it worse and we need it nationalized.
The media and a lot of social media painted the killing of the CEO as a kind of revenge by a victim of the health care system. But to be honest carefully looking at how it was planned and execute I got a very different impression. It looked like a contract killing executed by a professional.
I don’t think that this event can be seen as a signal of the status of the system. If that interpretation were true we should see a lot more executives in the health care sectors being killed.
The event itself might not be a signal of the status of the system… But the nearly unanimous reaction of the peasant working class certainly was
