- cross-posted to:
- usa@lemmy.ml
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UnitedHealth Group’s Facebook post sharing its statement on Thompson’s death received more than 46,000 reactions, with about 41,000 of respondents clicking the platform’s “haha” option displaying a laughing emoji.
Holy shit.
57k and climbing.
That’s compared to 2.3k “sad” and 1.9k “care” reactions.
That is astonishing. Imagine being this guy’s grieving family, and finding out that 9 out of ten people are going out of their way to let everyone know they’re glad he’s dead.
Probably, in their minds, he wasn’t doing anything wrong. I’m not trying to defend him, since he clearly was doing something wrong, and the world is almost certainly a better place without him in it. But holy shit. Even when Nixon died, a lot of people tried to come up with nice things to say about him.
Even when Nixon died, a lot of people tried to come up with nice things to say about him.
They shouldn’t have. Simply being dead doesn’t make you a good person and washing away crimes because they’re beyond personal shaming ignores the benefits of establishing that you can do things that will forever taint your name and legacy.
I said the same thing when Rush Limbaugh died. If you never did one thing to make me respect you when you were alive, suddenly being dead isn’t going to change your score. It’s just going to make you dead and hated instead of alive and hated.
I dunno. I think as a dead person he will hurt a lot less people than he did while he was alive. So that’s a personal Improvement for him. But you know what they say. Never speak ill of the dead. He’s dead, good.
Y’know to an extent I get the whole “but he was a father and husband!” angle
But how many thousands of parents and children died so this man could get another yacht? How many of them died slow, painful deaths from awful illnesses that could have been cured or prevented while he didn’t? He, along with all his executive friends, was a mass murdering psychopath. There is zero moral difference between committing murder with a gun and committing murder with the stroke of a pen.
Completely agree, zero sympathy in my case for anyone in this man’s orbit. That’s not to say I find them culpable, I simply do not care, at all, I find it irrational to the point of absurd to care about them. This man’s actions are some of the vilest crimes against human life, inflicting so much misery and death on so many, purely for the basest greed. People often say the fight against the insurance companies is worse than the (terminal!!) cancer. Let that sink in.
Meanwhile, this guy’s family led, and will lead, lives of extreme privilege, forever.
Lemme put it this way - if there’s any kind of cosmic balance sheet, even be it just the pedestrian moral reckoning of we humans…the limited suffering of anyone in this guy’s life as a result of this…in comparison, I mean it’s a fuckin rounding error. Nothing.
Another thing is how most of media talks about his wife and kids, failing to mention the wife was estranged and they already were separated. The kids are adults too, so the Picture they paint is highly misleading. The reason seems. … manipulative.
Huh, weird! It’s almost like they see some value in trying to rehab the least sympathetic crime victim of maybe our whole lives!
They damn sure aren’t telling stories people want to hear, we’ve echoed pretty loudly, from about every corner of the Internet, something to the tune of “lmao fuck that guy”.
Imagine being this guy’s grieving family, and finding out that 9 out of ten people are going out of their way to let everyone know they’re glad he’s dead.
Do you give this same consideration to other people who get shot? What if he had been the kingpin of a drug cartel - would you still be saying ‘Oh, won’t anyone think of his family!’ if the police raided his meth lab and he got shot?
The example I prefer is Bin Ladin. The United CEO killed more people than Bin Ladin. Bin Ladin was just a drama queen and made his killings a lot flashier. Does someone care so much for the rule of law, on such a deep principled level, that they objected to Bin Ladin’s extrajudicial execution? If there is such a rare and gentle soul that they were willing to be offended that even Bin Ladin didn’t get a fair trial, then I will be willing to listen to that person’s objections to celebrating a murderous CEO’s death.
Personally, I am not that good a person. And I am glad that both Bin Ladin and this CEO are out of the picture.
The fact that you only remember one of their names should tell you that you don’t have a valid comparison. If Thompson was as bad as Bin Laden, you’d remember it.
$10 says you and everybody else in this thread didn’t even know this dude existed 2 days ago.
Everyone knows Bin Laden because his name was plastered all over the news for months on end. People have been angry at United Healthcare for a lot longer but it was always a faceless corporation. This event has put a name to that corporation and a focus for that anger. If the media covers this like they did Bin Laden I guarantee everyone would remember his name.
If Thompson was as bad as Bin Laden, we’d have been talking about him already. It’s not like United anonymized their CEO position or anything, there’s been a face to the corp the whole time. It’s just that nobody cared.
I get that people are glad he’s dead. But be realistic; he’s a piece of shit, but he’s not fucking Bin Laden. Gross indifference to suffering patients and flying planes into buildings are both despicable acts, but on two completely different orders of magnitude.
Not being notorious doesn’t make somebody not a bad person.
I’m not defending Thompson. I’m just saying that comparing him to Bin Laden is asinine.
$10 says you and everybody else in this thread didn’t even know this dude existed 2 days ago.
You’re gonna lose that bet. As soon as my mom started working for UHC I knew which evil fuck was the CEO of the worst healthcare insurer in the country. Their own employees refer to it as the Walmart of healthcare, and it’s lived up to that description in every comparison imaginable. I’m not surprised at all that someone decided to take doing something about it into their own hands.
The problem with capitalism is there are thousands of bin ladens running around and we’re not aware of the misery they inflict, because it’s normal. This guy is a hero for reminding us of that.
I think what I meant is pretty self-evident. Read it again, and lose the knee-jerk reaction where you assume that I was saying, “Oh, won’t anyone think of his family!” I was just saying it was a mindfuck.
Probably, if the head of the cartel got shot, his family would be shattered but they wouldn’t think it was shocking to hear everyone cheering for it. This guy lives in a world where he thinks he’s doing everything he’s supposed to be doing. He and his family probably thought he was really doing good, and everyone else should be getting on his level. Maybe not. I have no idea. It was just a mindfuck for me thinking about it.
What if he had been the kingpin of a drug cartel
Big pharma is next.
Apparently he and his wife have been living in separate houses, so there was some mind of problem there. The ones I feel sorry for are the kids. They look to be mid-to-late teens, so they likely have a poor understanding of exactly what their dad’s company did, and they certainly have no standing to change things - and they’re the perfect age to be spending lots of their time on the internet.
They wake up one morning and their dad’s been shot and literally the entire internet is celebrating? That’s absolutely brutal.
They wake up one morning and their dad’s been shot and literally the entire internet is celebrating? That’s absolutely brutal.
Imagine instead if they’re like “nah, yeah, I get it, I get what you mean, he was kind of a dick”
lol
Ted Cruz’s kids hate him. There’s some good videos of them doing it at functions in public.
Yeah, I thought about that after I said it. It would stand to reason if his sociopathy in business also corresponded with some sociopathy in his personal life and people around him had experience with it.
His family knew this already. They just didnt care. Obscene wealth will do that to a person.
They were enjoying the fruits of his actions, so I have no sympathy for them.
In all likelihood, they hated him too.
Here are the latest numbers. I logged into Facebook to contribute.
Damn, put Kyra on blast for no reason lol
not enough?
Yeah. What were the remaining 5,000 thinking?
My uneducated guess is that 4k were love hearts
The future is weird.
Would this be a bad thing to catch on? Scumbag gets offed, platform for everyone to laugh at?
This is how the bees attack you
“I’m worried about the fact that violence in the country is just escalating so much,” she says. “That this is a symptom of everyone thinking violence will solve their problems, and that I find tremendously frightening.”
I don’t know if violence can solve our problems or not, but I can guarantee that not changing anything, and maintaining the status quo, absolutely will NOT solve our problems, in healthcare or otherwise.
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The violent revolutionaries added an “or else” to Ghandi’s message.
I thought in Gandhi’s case what he preached was to just not cooperate with the British occupation and let it collapse under its own weight, which is kind of its own or else. Where can I learn more about the violent revolutionaries?
Dunno about the Ghandi situation, but a book that talks about how unions were forced into violence to get their pay from thieving industrial barons, among other examples of violence being the only way people claw back what they’re owed from the ruling class is A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn.
I like that even the doctors and professionals they found to interview for the story went out of their way to point out that yes, of course violence isn’t a good thing and this probably isn’t the way, but he’s been hurting people left and right, and they see it every day, and they’re glad he’s dead, and so is everyone they know.
The status quo is violent.
Murdering people with a pen is still murdering people.
Biden in 2020, Harris in 2024: “Nothing will fundamentally change if you vote for us!”
Obama (“Change you can believe in”): Come on, you know why you are having such trouble at the ballot box
And even if it doesn’t solve the problem it at least makes people feel a bit better about it.
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
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How is this an escalation? It’s just one murder.
Violence is on their side lol
If a mass shooter kills a dozen people then gets shot and killed, people applaud the one who shot them.
If a CEO directly contributes to the suffering and death of an untold number of people, then gets shot and killed, why should anyone respond differently?
The fact that the deaths he caused were within the bounds of our legal system should be seen as a condemnation of our policies, not as justification for what he did. When other avenues have been exhausted, what did they think people were going to do - just sit around forever and say ‘Well, that sucks’?
What I’ve been asking people is - “did you weep for Bin Ladin?” If anyone is hand wringing about people mocking the insurance CEO, you should ask them if they wept for Bin Ladin.
This CEO killed far more people than Bin Ladin. And he didn’t even do it out of some misguided religion - at least Bin Ladin thought he was making the world a better place. This guy just killed thousands of people for the money. Yes, the insurance guy never got a fair trial in court, but neither did Bin Ladin - OBL was killed in an extrajudicial assassination by armed US government agents. Now, in Bin Ladin’s case, capture wasn’t really an option. But with the UHC CEO, it’s not like there was any other way to bring him to justice either.
If someone really just is that principled that they actually wept for Bin Ladin being killed without trial, then I will take their hand wringing about this guy being shot seriously. Otherwise, I’ll have to believe that the person only objects because it was a wealthy and powerful American that was killed.
And he didn’t even do it out of some misguided religion - at least Bin Ladin thought he was making the world a better place.
For accuracy’s sake, I’ll just point out that Bin Laden didn’t do 9/11 for some misguided religion; he did it because he correctly considered the West with America at its head the cause of the state of the Middle East at the time (and right now), and especially the state of Palestine. Therefore, he targeted what he considered (whether correctly or not I can’t tell you; I wasn’t born at the time) the symbol of US capitalists who direct policy and profit from American warmongering. Not saying he was right to kill 3000 people who are almost all innocent along the way, or that it was an appropriate or even smart way of expressing these grievances, but it was nothing as simple as misguided religion that led him to blowing up the towers (and Pentagon, which I think was a lot more appropriate as a target).
Definitely putting an end to his violence was good
I’m not going to say how I feel about this, but I will say that United Health Care told me 2 separate times that they would reimburse me $2,000 for the vaccines before I traveled.
Then I got the vaccines and when I submitted the paperwork, they refused to reimburse me and the manger was like, “Oh, we made a mistake, we will not reimburse you for that.”
Should’ve said no take backs. Thats on you /s
This genuinely made me laugh.
I feel like the “/s” thing always ruins the joke. For me, it’s the ambiguity that makes it funny, if sarcasm is stated explicitly it just doesn’t work that well.
I see it a lot nowadays, so my comment is not targeted at you, do not take it personally. Just a thought I had.
Sarcasm without tags on 4chan gave safe harbor to neonazis. I think a slightly tarnished joke is worth it to keep out nazis.
That, plus sarcasm really only works if people know who you are, and thus can know you’re being sarcastic. It doesn’t reliably come across when you’re talking to strangers.
I partly agree with your second point, but the thing is that you have to figure out the person does not mean what they say - that’s the point. If you state the sarcasm explicitly it is not really sarcasm. And while in some contexts it can be hard to know for sure whether something is sarcasm, I do not think this is a problem, and it is more often than not, like in this case, rather obvious.
Also, for the “antifascist” thing to work you would have to take everything everyone says at face value to make sure there are no ambiguities. So if made a joke withut the “/s” or “/j” or whatever you would assume I am being serious? Honestly, making our communication more primitive just so that fascists are marginally easier to spot(I mean you can probably figure it out without the “/s” anyway) is, in my opinion, absurd.
No. If you omit it, you reinforce the belief of fascists
Is this an actual reason for why people do that, an ad hoc explanation, or a view that just a few people hold?
People are lazy. But, yes, many people who do write “/s” do it so that fascists know we’re making fun of them, not reinforcing their beliefs.
It’s the same reason Mein Kampf requires footnotes in Germany, by law
Ok fine, I can accept this can be used SOMETIMES when you need to make something completely unambiguous, but more often than not you want the opposite - amd most things don’t have anything to do with nazism, and sarcasm can be picked up easily usually as well.
Starship Troopers. American Psycho. Taxi Driver. Joker. South Park.
All of these are celebrated by the right because they failed to understand that I was actually a criticism of them.
Also - $2000 for vaccines?!
Anti rabies was $1080 for 3 shots. There were a few others I needed since I was moving to a different country.
wtf. I’m glad I won the lottery with where I was born. But saying that, it has to be a constant struggle to prevent that dystopia anywhere. Not luck. Were the shots required for visas? Did you look into the price difference getting them at your destination? - more out of curiosity . $200nzd is the highest price I could find for full dose here in NZ - and thats private (not publicly funded). Approx 100usd. Some of your others would be free. I’m guessing you’re not coming to NZ though so not questioning your choice to vax for whats required at destination - sensible. Just the absolute scam world you poor Americans have to live with. We are all headed there if we aren’t careful, and keep our wits.
I absolutely don’t shed a tear for this man, nor his family, honestly. They lived their best life with the money he made off the denials of those who needed help the most. They can all straight up fuck themselves. Same with the media outlets trying to chastise the masses for their corporate overloads finally feeling a bit of the same discomfort and worry that they’ve saddled the rest of us with.
I don’t advocate for violence, but I absolutely don’t feel a thing for this guy or any other billionaire with similar targets bearing down on them. I see nothing, I know nothing, and thanks to their ilk, I feel nothing.
Oh look at Mr Tough Guy over here! Too tough to shed tears of joy, huh Mr Tough Guy! Pathetic!
This was lost completely on light thinkers.
Why are you so mad? You might need to take a break from online interaction until you calm down. Or not, I’m not your unloving parent!
Sounds like the US population is down to bring out the guillotine. Let’s do this.
Why not! They are trying to kill us with a smile.
Looking like gun violence is the American guillotine.
I’m a ghoul because I take delight in seeing this happen and hope these people feel genuinely afraid to leave their mansions.
He was a ghoul because his decisions lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths and a leading cause of homelessness just to see a line go up.
We are not the same.
Hey now, that’s no solution at all.
If they’re too scared to leave their homes, they’ll be harder to assassinate.
Username checks out.
Universal healthcare NOW
https://www.newsweek.com/87-democrats-support-medicare-all-though-joe-biden-doesnt-1522833
87% of democrats support single payer but Biden doesnt. Trump doesnt either.
Single payer or a public option would be steps in the right direction.
And yet this country chose to elect a president who has in no uncertain terms said he will dissolve Obamacare which will only give more money and power to the CEOs of shitty healthcare companies.
To be fair, people tried to shoot him too.
But the reason many voted for him, or simply didn’t vote at all was because the traditional poloticians weren’t helping either. Kind of a “banging my head against this wall hasn’t worked, let try this other wall.”
More like “I didn’t bother educating myself on these two walls but when I was growing up in the 80s ‘R’ next to a name meant financial security to my daddy, so now that the economy isn’t great I need to vote R.”
Ding ding ding!
I am sure there were plenty of those, but they always do that. So nothing new there. And I don’t blame them honestly. When both choices suck, why invest a ton of time and energy into researching. The way businesses pass work onto us these days means everyone is short of time and energy.
More like “let’s blow myself up together with the wall, that’ll show it!”
Yeah, nothing like trying to reign in the oligarchs who are over pricing everything by installing a bunch of oligarchs as your defacto government. That’ll surely fix the problem.
I don’t think the people who crossed over or stayed home expect trump to fix anything. That just wanted to send a message that they were not okay with what the dems were doing. And they didn’t have many options.
You are assigning far too much thought to how people voted this go around. I think it’s more basic than that. I think it’s just straight up apathy. Along with a good bit of confusion that was juiced by one of the richest men on the planet. Who just so happens to own one of the largest social media platforms that has ever existed.
Conspiracy theorists fall into the hole of trying to boil down complicated problems to just one singular factor. But it’s not. It’s very very complicated and there’s a lot of things that need to be done to fix it. My personal hope is that one of those will be that this absolute win by the Republican party and Trump in particular will be the the ax that takes down the Democratic party and allows us to build a new one in its place. But that’s kind of a pipe dream I think. Old dogs die hard. Plus there’s nobody out there who wants to step up and push the Democratic party out of the way. Bernie would be the obvious choice but he doesn’t seem interested in taking leadership role in a brand new party to oust the old one.
Bernie is too old. His time has passed. Some point to AOC. But I’m not feeling it really. Who knows though. Trump sort of came out of nowhere and took over the republican party.
Obamacare is a pretty huge handout to insurance companies anyway.
I am too young to have experienced what it was like Pre Obamacare. But as I understand it, insurance companies used to be able to drop you if you cost too much. What is the point of their existence then? What is the point of buying insurance if they can just drop you if you cost too much.
The point of their existence is - and has always been - to line their own pockets. Thassit.
How so. I always thought the things like forcing them to keep children till they’re 26 and not being able to drop people for pre existing conditions were good for consumers.
It also mandated people buy coverage and let them have 20% overhead which is absurdly high. Marketplaces added subsidies for buying insurance, which is ultimately a benefit to the insurance company. It also expanded Medicaid, which pays out tons to insurance companies through HMO plans. It also gave them justification to raise rates, as they now had to cover more things.
Covering kids until 26 is nice, but it’s basically free from the insurance company perspective. Covering pre-existing conditions is a negative, but there’s still room to increase premiums from it. The overall affect of the bill was positive for insurance companies.
It also mandated people buy coverage
Which got dropped fast, which I think is good, myself, for the reason you stated next:
and let them have 20% overhead
It’s only saving graces were the payment assistance and blocking the insurance companies from denying coverage due to pre-existing conditions. Though the insurance companies found other ways to deny coverage.
Yeah, the only good thing about Trump possibly destroying the ACA is that I may provide the impetus to replace it with something better. I somewhat doubt that, but there’s a chance, especially if we start seeing a lot more hate towards health insurance companies.
No - I’m not letting this logic fester or gain traction. Trump and republicans do not want to replace the ACA. That’s a complete and total fantasy. Democrats took decades to get the ACA enacted, so once it’s gone it’s probably gone for decades. If republicans gave a damn they would’ve helped fix what is wrong with the ACA, but they’d rather full repeal with no plan to replace. Listen to what any of them say or do, they wear it as a badge of honor.
I meant after they destroy it and democrats, or whoever, take back power. Obviously Republicans aren’t going to replace it with anything good.
They had zero actual plan to replace it with anything last time they took it away, they didn’t even really pretend to even have one.
This won’t work if Trump warps our government in order to install himself as president for life.
If caught, this guy could be convicted of a felony. He has also shot someone on “5th Avenue”. Likely this guy could get elected president and avoid serving any time. There’s precedent.
People who claim to hate violence need to learn about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_violence immediately
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TIL about “Adultisim”
If they catch him jury selection will be a tough gig for the State.
Dont think they will catch hiim, and if they do won’t be alive. Bet they have kill on site as their orders.
Maybe. Seems he has a few slip ups and they seem to have several leads. I think he’ll end up caught or end up dead. If caught, everyone in that city will need to remember jury nullification.
They could also just find him innocent. For example, if he is charged with premeditated murder, the jury could say they did not think the murder was premeditated and that he is innocent.
They could say that they don’t think the defendant is the person who did the crime and that he is innocent.
You just described jury nullification
I thought jury nullification was a third verdict that is not guilt or innocent.
Jury nullification refers to a jury’s knowing and deliberate rejection of the evidence or refusal to apply the law either because the jury wants to send a message about some social issue that is larger than the case itself, or because the result dictated by law is contrary to the jury’s sense of justice, morality, or fairness.
It’s a bit more complex and broad than that.
Its the jury disagreeing with the law
Jury nullification is exercised by juries finding defendants not guilty
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“We find the defendant innocent”
Or simply, “Oh this is the shooter? No he isn’t.”
Don’t let the selectors know you know about Jury Nullification.
I can usually empathize, but I’m just not feeling it.
Thatcher and Nixon were people who made choices, had families, and implemented incredibly shitty policies because they believed in them (as much as a politician does). I can understand that: they did what they believed was right.
This CEO was a very well paid cog in a machine designed to avoid giving subscribers treatment they need and deserve. His company built systems and processes to maximize suffering and difficulty to avoid granting coverage to people who had paid for it.
He did nothing on principle. He helped build and perpetuate a horrible system so he could get richer from the suffering of others. No belief. No higher goals. Just money. He set out to become a rich cog, and he succeeded.
Why waste the extra energy trying to sympathize for one of the most despicable companies veiled under the moral bleach of Healthcare?
I haven’t been able to find anything about the guy or his time in the position at United Health Care. Do you have anything you could share so I could find out more about him?
From his Wikipedia page, some selected excerpts:
Thompson joined UnitedHealth Group in 2004 and was named CEO of UnitedHealthcare government programs that included Medicare and retirement, and community and state divisions in 2021. Under his leadership profits at UHC went from $12 billion in 2021 to $16 billion in 2023.
The investigation revealed that in 2019, UHC’s prior authorization denial rate was 8.7%. Thompson became CEO in 2021, and by 2022 the rate of denial had increased to 22.7%. For both Medicare and non-Medicare claims, UHC declines at a rate double the industry average.
A lawsuit was filed against Thompson, UnitedHealth chairman Stephen J. Hemsley and two other senior executives in May 2024 for alleged fraud and insider trading due to failing to disclose an antitrust investigation into the company by the United States Department of Justice and by selling stock options before the probe was made public.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Thompson_(businessman)
Oh. Wow.
Dang, fuck that guy
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 violence.
Horrific!
We all were born into the social contract. The nation states of the world assumed a monopoly on violence to provide justice instead of us taking revenge. But when there is no justice, there are only two options: to resign yourself to injustice or to take revenge.
It is good to see the viewpoint of people working in health care. That they were afraid of being attacked over denied claims they have no control over, and that they see someone shot who was actually one of the guilty.
