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.
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.
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
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.
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.
53 here. Healthcare in America has never been worse in my lifetime.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
