Posted by Much has been said written and speculated about the murder of United Healthcare executive Brian Thompson last week. In a most obnoxious op-ed, the Washington Post decried the “depraved” reactions of many people online (ranging from indifference to glee). Then they explained that in a complex healthcare system, trade-offs are common, and that other countries have similar problems. Sure, no healthcare system is perfect, but isn’t it telling that many countries, such as Germany, do not even have a word for medical bankruptcy or medical debt?
Violence can take many forms. One of them being shot in the chest at 6.45 am before going to a conference on how to maximize the profits.
Perhaps a but less straightforward, but still effective for of violence would be using an AI model to reject health insurance claims as medically unnecessary, and using it in bad faith, because the AI model has a 90% error rate (and you know it’s a feature, not a bug).
Inflicting pain and suffering on people, because their insurance claims are denied is violence.
Vigilante justice is not something to celebrate, and I am from justifying it.
But let’s stop the pearl-clutching, and the “that’s not who we are” whining. Violence begets violence. Live by the sword, and so on.
Any comment section, any Reddit thread on medical insurance, any go fund me page, anyone working in the health sector will have heart-breaking stories and anecdotes that are all too familiar. All these people are victims of violence, but because there are so many of them, they are a statistic.
A ProPublica investigation from last year is a powerful attempt to feature both the people behind the statistic and the shady, if not straightforward criminal inner workings of a healthcare company (incidentally the one Thompson was a CEO of). The article hit especially home for me, since the young man, who, together with his brave parents, took on the insurance, had a severe case of ulcerative colitis. So I was fairly familiar with both treatment and symptoms. Like me, he gets a higher dose of biological medication than indicated. But unlike my insurance, his refused to pay for it, deeming it “medically unnecessary,” challenging the expertise of one of the world’s leading gastroenterologists. And so a multi- year martyrium began for the patient. What is especially infuriating, among the many things that are infuriating in the article, is the fact that he was on a university healthcare plan. University healthcare plans are money-makers for insurances! You have thousands of fairly healthy students who rarely if ever use the system. So what would it have cost them to cover one exception? They would have still made huge profits. But it wasn’t enough.
The brazen and unethical practices within the insurance (such as making paperwork go away) to delay and protract the case, are so outrageous that I had to stop reading a few times.
The 371.6 Billion in profits that United Healthcare made last year has been made on the back of millions of sick and chronically ill Americans. This is not a left or right issue, it’s a greed issue. One commenter likened the public reaction to the Gilded Age, suggesting that there may be more violence and erosion of democratic structures to come. I disagree. Our democracy has been undermined, for a long time, by a cut-throat capitalism that stops at nothing.
The Morbus Crohnicles 