- 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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Rest in piss
Corporate Ethics
My fucking sides.
Is that another word for Money?
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.
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
Ken Lay who tooooootally died before being sentenced and toooootally didn’t disappear into a foreign country
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.
one of the primary motivators for a woman to be with and stay with a man
I think you meant “female” lol.
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.
Absolutely; I agree. I appreciate your thoughtful response. There are always going to be selfish people and users in every gender, and they do give the whole group a bad rap. I’m never going to say that all women are above the description the poster I replied to gave. And, like you said, we can call these specific people out while still uplifting others who don’t engage in such behavior.
The poster that I was replying to seemed like they had been burned by a person like that, and while I understand that it must be awful to experience being with someone who uses you only for what you can provide and that it can easily make you jaded, this particular post comes off like they have extended that bitterness to the entirety of women, whether or not those women have chosen (or seek) a partner with wealth. It’s frustrating to watch so many great women be reduced to greedy users, and I don’t want to allow the continuation of someone spouting blanket assumptions toward my gender without addressing it. That’s how I ended up with a multi-paragraph response to a simple statement.
But I absolutely agree with your assessment and really appreciate the thought and effort you put into it. It’s incredibly refreshing to be able to have an actual discussion about a topic.
Not a great decision from the moderators.
Hopefully, it encourages more platform attrition.
Watch people join Lemmy, Doxx people and make death threats then grab their pearls when they realize you can’t do that here either lol.
Depends on the instance. Lemmy.world, yeah ok. Some of the others? Ehhhhhh
Happens on Lemmy too.
At least one of the mods here was going heavy censorship in the initial thread here yesterday. I get it, we aren’t supposed to celebrate the death or suffering of other human beings. I’m not sure that rule applied to this individual though.
People always forget the second part of that rule.
We shouldn’t celebrate the death or suffering of other human beings… Unless that human being is a billionaire.
Don’t like people celebrating your suffering? Give up your wealth. Easy as.
Anyone that doesn’t want themselces to experience the event of “winning capitalism,” and them dying should donate every single penny of their wealth over, and I’m being generous here, $100,000,000 to The Sovereign Fund for Humanity’s Poor, and ensure that they are always below the $100,000,000 threshold each quarter. Anything less is admitting that you want to be a charicature of a dragon. Dragons don’t amass more than $1,200,000,000 in wealth in any of High Fantasy. Other than Smaug. He might have hoarded as much as $5,000,000,000 to $10,000,000,000 in gold, and he’s literally the only outlier in all of High Fantasy.
Shadowrun isn’t high fantasy, that is Science Fantasy, just like Star Wars.
The thing is, if you don’t want to be a billionaire then that still leaves you - assuming normal rounding - with ~500 MILLION of wealth. If you can’t snort all the cocaine you’d ever want in your life from that amount, I don’t know…
It’s ok. They’re not human.
They’re parasites. And should be [redacted]
It still should. The paradox of tolerance just means you have to not tolerate the intolerant, not actively mock them. I mean sometimes that can be fun, but let’s be honest, they even took out the wrong guy (they’ll just get a new CEO who’ll hardline the stance even more and waste money on a ton of bodyguards, hopefully at least Gaddafi-style). Should have gone after the shareholders, that’ll really hurt the business model after all. The CEO is just a representative figure who puts his name under decisions that are 99,5% not driven by him.
Was is still the correct choice to take him out because he is a billionaire and a murderous asshole? I’ll say no, because I don’t believe in death penalty on account of it being too lenient. Should have thrown him down a well and let him starve slowly, or at least delivered death by immurement or something. Something slow, ideally decades slow. But that’s besides the point, overall he also deserves fuck all sympathy because he was still a) a billionaire and b) the CEO of one of the most cruel companies around, rivaling black ops stuff and far outdoing them in the lives lost to their practices.
Speaking of the pradoxof tolerance, Karl Popper realized that intolerance often involves violence.
I, for one would argue that health insurance denying claims arbitrarily asserts violence in some way - even worse to especially vulnerable people.So how do you imagine not tolerating this kind of intolerance?
Writing stern letters and emails? That seems to have happened.
Starting a legal battle that might be decided in your favour after you’ve died from not receiving health care due to denied claims?
What would you suggest?Popper also draws attention to the fact that intolerance is often asserted through the use of violence […]
Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance#Proposed_solutions
Remember if you see this guy… I mean… No you didn’t. No officer I didn’t see him at all…
Edit Addendum: Deny. Defend. Depose.
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.
“…fueling ongoing debates about corporate ethics in healthcare.”
Don’t make me fucking laugh ‘corporate ethics’
Corporate ethics are centered around not getting bad press. Now that the press is controlled and for sale to whoever wants to pay for an outcome, we dont need corporate ethics anymore. Its ancient history.
Absence of ethics is still on the spectrum of ethics.
From a mod of /r/medicine:
People - Please don’t make the life of your mods a living hell.
Anything that is celebrating violence is going to get taken down - if not from us, then from reddit. I think all the mods understand that there is a high level of frustration and antipathy towards insurance and insurance execs, but we also understand that murdering people in the streets is not good.
We are a public group of medical professionals, we still need to act like that.
And on a practical note, this man did not create or control the fucked up insurance industry by himself. Other people will take his place and continue to do what he was doing. It’s a systemic issue.
And on a practical note, this man did not create or control the fucked up insurance industry by himself. Other people will take his place and continue to do what he was doing. It’s a systemic issue.
No, but he certainly profited of it, and made it worse for people who had the misfortune of being trapped with united.
Fuck him, and fuck that hangwringing excuse bullshit. Maybe it wont be so systemic if more heads continue to be popped.
Considering that BCBS just halted their anesthesia plans… I’d say someone is taking notice.
I bet you there was still someone in their offices doing a cost benefit analysis on whether doing it and risking their CEO being ganked was worth it or not, before backpedaling
%100 they had meetings on this
I didn’t create or control the gas chambers I just operated them!
And on a practical note, this man did not create or control the fucked up insurance industry by himself. Other people will take his place and continue to do what he was doing. It’s a systemic issue.
Sure he did. It may have only been one subsection of it, but he absolutely had blood on his hands for his decisions. You don’t get to run an insurance company with one of the highest denial rates out there and not have culpability.
And even if somebody else steps up and doesn’t fix it, that doesn’t absolve him of the blood on his hands.
I’m pretty sure they’re just purging the Ai training data to keep Gemini from suggesting capping a corpo when they won’t pay for grandma’s nausea medication during her chemo.
“Hey Gemini, my health insurance company has denied my claim, what are my next steps?”
I am sorry to hear you are struggling with your health insurance claim. According to Reddit[1], the best way to appeal your claim is to access the Wayback Machine or Archive Today to find out who the executives are for your insurance company and communicate with them directly about the seriousness and validity of your claim.
Here are some effective communication tips to ensure the success of your appeal:
- Volume matters - use subsonic ammunition and a suppressor. You don’t want to disturb your neighbors when pleading your claim.
- Practice makes perfect - you may need to hand cycle the spent rounds. Unless tuned, the gas blow back won’t be enough to eject and then chamber another round.
- Go eco - e-bikes help the planet. In a traffic packed city, e-bikes provide a great opportunity to reduce pollution.
Maybe scaring the insurance industry ghouls to change their ways by radical actions is a systemic solution?
And on a practical note, this man did not create or control the fucked up insurance industry by himself. Other people will take his place and continue to do what he was doing. It’s a systemic issue.
Yeah, but he led the company that had the highest rate of coverage denial ao he was the absolute worst one in the entire industry.
I’m like, oh other people will take his place? Okay, can we get those other people’s names, address, and daily itinerary? Asking for a friend.
Lemmy seems to have done the same. At least .world, I dunno about other instances, but I’m looking for a new community.
Dbzer0. There’s a reason it’s become the central location calling out abuse of power on the fediverse
They do often go far past the mark though. Feels very libertarian over there sometimes.
Sh.itjust.works is pretty nice.
I came here to post, not that anyone cares, that this is the straw that broke this pathetic camel’s back for me with Lemmy. The limited user base and incredibly reduce quality and quantity, clunky tech…I was willing and happy to bear it all thinking I was getting out from under the thumb of fucking corporate censorship and bullshit mod oversimplification. Instead the locked the News thread on the assassination https://lemmy.world/post/22761236 and deleted my comment that said “can’t imagine why” without explanation, ostensibly as it “encouraged or celebrated violence”(https://lemmy.world/comment/13794258).
I provided a response and then they locked the thread. If we can’t even have a discussion about the world why the fuck would I be on fucking Lemmy instead of another shite censored, billionaire-owned platform that at least has user & content depth?
1.5 years, 1300 comments, fuck Lemmy.world and the mod @JonsJava who understands his position in facilitating respectful dialogue that conform to rules to be “overbroadly apply them and pretend it’s something that needs censoring so I can get my jollies” and then say “I don’t have time to deal with this” when you get blowback and lock a thread with tons of engagement. LOL talk about shooting yourself in the foot Lemmy.
I’m debating on lemm.ee or sh.itjust.works or however you spell the second
join lemmy.ml, the politics here are way more sane
I will have to agree to disagree. I’m not interested in joining an authoritarian instance, which .ml is.
I haven’t really had any good experiences with ml and politics.
ah yes nothing says sane politics like fascism and censorship
I was kinda disappointed I couldn’t find anything with .ml when all the .world mod drama was going on. Plenty of meme’s but nothing in the news and politics communities when I checked at the time.
LOL
If Reddit mods (or lemmy mods for that matter) are overwhelmed by the workload of a thread, they should lock it, and clean it up. not delete it!
That’s gonna Streisand Effect like crazy.
Reddit is a piece of shit platform, people who use it deserve the poor treatment they sign up for
Because Lemmy has never had a moderation problem 🙄🙄
Earth is a shit platform. How do I unsubscribe?!
Oh don’t worry, earth will handle that for us.
Easy, just start a new instance and leave this one.
Addressed to an unnamed applicant—following “a careful review of the claim submitted for emergency services on December 4, 2024″—it informs them they are being rejected for coverage because “you failed to obtain prior authorization before seeking care for the gunshot wound to your chest.” “If you would like to appeal the fatal gunshot, please call 1-800-555-1234 with case # 123456789P to initiate a peer to peer within 48 hours of the fatal gun shot,” wrote one user.
Does this sound LLM generated to anyone else? I mean I’ve seen other LLM generated articles summarizing top Reddit posts, and this reads a lot like that.
