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.
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.
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]?
See, that’s what I’m saying - you assign a negative connotation to “scream”. Why do you think that is?
Because not only have I seen that used by conservatives trying to discredit Bernie, I’ve seen it used by everyone to discredit anyone they disagree with. It seems like you’re saying connotations are an individual problem that billions of us need to just get over. I don’t agree, they are a standard part of human communication that need to be considered.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nixon basically legalised for-profit healthcare in 73.
If they deny you. Deny their existence. That is all.
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.
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.
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.
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
