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.
It’s kinda hilarious watching billionaire owned media try to suppress the fact that absolutely no one feels bad for the CEO. The same thing happened when some billionaires decided to visit the Titanic, and after the Trump assassination attempt. The memes afterwards were top notch
Everyone is so fed up with this country and the shit is this close 🤏🏼 to the fan
I find some comments here disturbing. The man may have been not the best example of ethical behavior, but he is still a murder victim with a family who will no doubt miss him. No one deserves to be shot in the back on a city street. If that was true, it’s not long until your number comes up.
The internet is full of false bravado, and few morals.
The man was a mass murderer. But because he wore a suit and did it from an office it was OK. If a gunman put down any other mass murderer noone would complain.
People right here on Lemmy often complain when murderers are executed. For good reason.
The state has other methods of dealing with people. A vigilante really doesn’t.
Neither do lynch mobs. Should we cheer them on?
Lynch mobs generally don’t target mass murderers.
OK, suppose lynch mobs started forming in your city to hang drug dealers. Would you cheer them on?
Are you really comparing drug dealers to a health insurance magistrate directly responsible for the deaths of countless people? Fuck entirely off
One medical doctor, whose identity the Daily Beast confirmed, commented with sympathy for Thompson’s family and said the killer should be charged with murder, but then wondered about the damage the CEO had done.
“I cannot even guess how many person-years UHC has taken from patients and their families through denials,” they wrote. “It has to be on the order of millions. His death won’t make that better, but it’s hard for me to sympathize when so many people have suffered because of his company.”
“What has bothered me the most is people that put «fiduciary responsibility» (eg profits) above human lives, none more so than this company as run by him," wrote another medical doctor, who also spoke to the Daily Beast to confirm their identity. “When other’s human lives are deemed worthless, it is not surprising to have others view your life of no value as well.”
These doctors know what’s up.
The level of greed is so much worse than any normal person understands. They do NOTHING. They aren’t medical field professionals, they don’t need to ever step foot in a hospital or clinic, they only inflate the cost, catastrophelicly with no insurance, only horribly when you’re with them, create endless loopholes to deny coverage with, and use non medical, non trained or consulted opinions and reasoning to justify it, and they are all too educated to not know full well they are lying to get out of paying any bill ever.
Denying someone with crippling medical issues access to treatment with lies and misinformation to shave one more sliver of profit for a parasitic middle man is so many orders of magnitude above evil it’s breath taking.
Denying someone with crippling medical issues access to treatment with lies and misinformation to shave one more sliver of profit for a parasitic middle man is so many orders of magnitude above evil it’s breath taking.
Well said. Really wish people understood this better and how utterly psychopathic and heartless the entire idea of “maximizing profits” in this context is.
Put another way - a for-profit insurance firm is a weird kind of company that does better when it refuses to provide what its customers pay for. It’s not some surprising or counterintuitive result, it’s baked into the business model, on purpose. That’s deeply malignant just at a glance, and it’s all we really need to know when deciding whether it should be involved with healthcare.
Insurance is not unlike gambling, but gambling seems comparatively more fair and less insidious.
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.
Other people will take his place and continue to do what he was doing.
Bullets outnumber CEOs, and guillotines can be resharpened
