quite so!
and how might we get a congress that is not full of feckless old parasites?
mayhap we might vote in a new tranche of critters every, say, 2 years or so?
UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson fatally shot outside Hilton hotel in Midtown in targeted attack: cops - Just Part and Parcel of visiting a Big City
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and how might we get a congress that is not full of feckless old parasites?
mayhap we might vote in a new tranche of critters every, say, 2 years or so?
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2022
Slaying of UnitedHealthcare executive is the wrong path for a nation with a broken medical care system
Chicago Sun-Times (archive.ph)
By Neil Steinberg
2024-12-08 21:36:52GMT
UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive was shot dead. Why did thousands react with glee?
Los Angeles Times (archive.ph)
By Robin Abcarian
2024-12-07 06:49:49GMT
Chicago Sun-Times (archive.ph)
By Neil Steinberg
2024-12-08 21:36:52GMT
Last Wednesday, the same day UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down in New York, an assistant pharmacist at Walgreens phoned me.
The prescription for needles that fit my insulin pen, she said, can no longer be filled, because my insurance company, Aetna, is now insisting it must be done through the mail, in 90-day batches. I might be able to get an exception, but should call Aetna.
No problem! Calling people is what I do for a living. I phoned the number on the back of my insurance card, jumping online — multi-tasking! — during the long delay to try their website.
Online, a form to fill out and mail to Texas, along with my credit card number. I gazed at the form and tried to imagine it resulting in boxes of BD Nano 2nd Gen 4 mm Pen Needles showing up on my doorstep. Unlikely.
Meanwhile, on the phone, I was passed along to several people whose mastery of English was sub-ideal. My suggestion of an exception meant nothing. Negotiations for obtaining the needles via the mail went nowhere. Eventually, what we worked out was that I should have my doctor call in a 90-day prescription to CVS — did I mention that CVS owns Aetna? It’s true. My cost for three boxes — a 90-day supply — would be $78.
Now I’ve liked CVS ever since Nicholson Baker published “The Mezzanine,” a lapidary little novel about a man who breaks his shoelace and goes to CVS to buy a new one. Excellent, but not enough to snatch brand loyalty away from Walgreens, a venerable Chicago company that invented the malted milkshake. I can ride my bike to Walgreens. Plus I know people there, thanks to routine visits to secure the seven prescriptions I need every day so as not to die from diabetes.
Social media exploded with joy at the slaying of Thompson. Many Americans are denied medical care, either because they can’t navigate the insurance labyrinth or because companies say no to necessary treatment in some arbitrary fashion. Countless people have endured the agony of watching loved ones suffer and die because an unseen bean counter wouldn’t check a box.
Let me be clear. All killing is bad, but Thompson’s slaying is especially bad because it was a targeted assassination. There are many countries in the world where helmeted assassins on mopeds routinely gun down executives on crowded city streets then roar away. We don’t want to live in one of those countries — well, we already do, given last week’s slaying. We don’t want it to get worse.
There is another way. Even bad events can have good results. We should never lose sight that this is the killing of a husband and father of two, but Thompson’s death starkly publicizes the injustice, if not horror, of the American healthcare system, where needing medical care is dismissed as a “preexisting condition.” We are the only industrialized nation without national medicine, and the man just re-elected president has thundered for years against Obamacare, the most successful innovation in recent memory that allowed millions of Americans to afford health insurance. Not to forget he has appointed a certified anti-vaxxer to be the secretary of health and human services.
I’ve had my medical woes over the past five years — a rebuilt spine, artificial hip, and now I have to spend the rest of my life as an insulin junkie shooting up in restaurant bathrooms. But as bothersome as these are, I feel both profoundly grateful for the amazing medical care my union won for me and deep sadness that everyone else shouldn’t receive the same. It’s bad enough to be sick; to be sick and plunged into Kafkaesque bureaucratic subhell is a cruelty that shouldn’t be permitted by the same species that designed something as sleek and painless as a NovoLog FlexPen fitted with a 4 mm disposable needle.
Speaking of which. I hung up on Aetna, but did not phone one of my doctors. I drove over to Walgreens, where the pharmacist showed me a box of Unifine Pentips 4 mm needles that he said are even better than the ones I am using: $27 a box, no prescription necessary. A dollar more than I’d pay at CVS after jumping through Aetna’s hoops, assuming it is humanly possible.
Health care is a human right. Americans have lost sight of that — we’ve lost sight of a lot of things, a people so lost we don’t value our own one precious, fleeting life in this still-fine world. We gotta fix that, as fellow citizens, working together. Shooting one another won’t solve anything.
The prescription for needles that fit my insulin pen, she said, can no longer be filled, because my insurance company, Aetna, is now insisting it must be done through the mail, in 90-day batches. I might be able to get an exception, but should call Aetna.
No problem! Calling people is what I do for a living. I phoned the number on the back of my insurance card, jumping online — multi-tasking! — during the long delay to try their website.
Online, a form to fill out and mail to Texas, along with my credit card number. I gazed at the form and tried to imagine it resulting in boxes of BD Nano 2nd Gen 4 mm Pen Needles showing up on my doorstep. Unlikely.
Meanwhile, on the phone, I was passed along to several people whose mastery of English was sub-ideal. My suggestion of an exception meant nothing. Negotiations for obtaining the needles via the mail went nowhere. Eventually, what we worked out was that I should have my doctor call in a 90-day prescription to CVS — did I mention that CVS owns Aetna? It’s true. My cost for three boxes — a 90-day supply — would be $78.
Now I’ve liked CVS ever since Nicholson Baker published “The Mezzanine,” a lapidary little novel about a man who breaks his shoelace and goes to CVS to buy a new one. Excellent, but not enough to snatch brand loyalty away from Walgreens, a venerable Chicago company that invented the malted milkshake. I can ride my bike to Walgreens. Plus I know people there, thanks to routine visits to secure the seven prescriptions I need every day so as not to die from diabetes.
Social media exploded with joy at the slaying of Thompson. Many Americans are denied medical care, either because they can’t navigate the insurance labyrinth or because companies say no to necessary treatment in some arbitrary fashion. Countless people have endured the agony of watching loved ones suffer and die because an unseen bean counter wouldn’t check a box.
Let me be clear. All killing is bad, but Thompson’s slaying is especially bad because it was a targeted assassination. There are many countries in the world where helmeted assassins on mopeds routinely gun down executives on crowded city streets then roar away. We don’t want to live in one of those countries — well, we already do, given last week’s slaying. We don’t want it to get worse.
There is another way. Even bad events can have good results. We should never lose sight that this is the killing of a husband and father of two, but Thompson’s death starkly publicizes the injustice, if not horror, of the American healthcare system, where needing medical care is dismissed as a “preexisting condition.” We are the only industrialized nation without national medicine, and the man just re-elected president has thundered for years against Obamacare, the most successful innovation in recent memory that allowed millions of Americans to afford health insurance. Not to forget he has appointed a certified anti-vaxxer to be the secretary of health and human services.
I’ve had my medical woes over the past five years — a rebuilt spine, artificial hip, and now I have to spend the rest of my life as an insulin junkie shooting up in restaurant bathrooms. But as bothersome as these are, I feel both profoundly grateful for the amazing medical care my union won for me and deep sadness that everyone else shouldn’t receive the same. It’s bad enough to be sick; to be sick and plunged into Kafkaesque bureaucratic subhell is a cruelty that shouldn’t be permitted by the same species that designed something as sleek and painless as a NovoLog FlexPen fitted with a 4 mm disposable needle.
Speaking of which. I hung up on Aetna, but did not phone one of my doctors. I drove over to Walgreens, where the pharmacist showed me a box of Unifine Pentips 4 mm needles that he said are even better than the ones I am using: $27 a box, no prescription necessary. A dollar more than I’d pay at CVS after jumping through Aetna’s hoops, assuming it is humanly possible.
Health care is a human right. Americans have lost sight of that — we’ve lost sight of a lot of things, a people so lost we don’t value our own one precious, fleeting life in this still-fine world. We gotta fix that, as fellow citizens, working together. Shooting one another won’t solve anything.
Los Angeles Times (archive.ph)
By Robin Abcarian
2024-12-07 06:49:49GMT
The apparent assassination of UnitedHealthcare Chief Executive Brian Thompson on a Midtown Manhattan sidewalk Wednesday has unleashed an extraordinary outpouring of emotion. But it’s not all horror or sadness over a 50-year-old father of two being shot dead in public by a man in a mask.
Thompson’s death has inspired a torrent of fury about the way his insurance company and others treat — or mistreat — people in their moments of greatest need. Some of the reactions, particularly on social media, have been downright gleeful about the killing.
What a stunning illustration of the hatred so many Americans feel toward for-profit health insurance companies, which too often make money for stockholders by withholding care from sick people.
UnitedHealthcare is a particularly awful exemplar. It is infamous for high denial rates and low reimbursement levels.
According to an investigation by the medical news site Stat and a federal lawsuit recently filed in Minnesota, UnitedHealthcare has been using a deeply flawed artificial intelligence algorithm to wrongfully deny healthcare to elderly and disabled patients. Stat reported that the company “pressured its medical staff to cut off payments for seriously ill patients … denying rehabilitation care for older and disabled Americans as profits soared.”
ProPublica reported last month that the company was using algorithms to identify people it deemed guilty of “therapy overuse” and deny mental health treatment. Both California and Massachusetts determined that the company was breaking the federal law that requires insurers to cover mental health issues the same way they cover physical ailments. UnitedHealthcare denied claims for more than 34,000 therapy sessions from 2013 to 2020 in New York alone, saving the company about $8 million.
Adding to this unsavory picture, four of its top executives, including Thompson, have been under scrutiny for $101.5 million in stock trades they made after the company was informed that it was the target of a federal antitrust investigation but before the news became public and the stock price dropped.
Perhaps all this helps explain why, as of Friday morning, more than 85,000 people had reacted to UnitedHealthcare’s solemn Facebook statement about Thompson’s death with a laugh emoji.
People on other social media platforms also piled on.
“All human life is sacred, so it’s not proper to laugh when serious harm befalls someone,” wrote one Bluesky user. “The moral thing to do is instead charge them hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
“UnitedHealth CEO meets the same fate as many of his clients,” posted another Bluesky user above photos of the shooter pointing his gun at Thompson’s back before he reportedly rode off on an e-bike.
Stories of terrible interactions with the largest health insurer in the country also poured forth.
Elizabeth Austin, a single mother who lives in Bucks County, Pa., told me she had a miserable experience with UnitedHealthcare after her young daughter, Carolyn, was diagnosed with leukemia during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her chemotherapy caused nausea, so Carolyn’s doctor ordered a nighttime feeding tube to supplement what little she was able to eat while awake. She said United Healthcare wouldn’t pay for the feeding tube unless Carolyn ate no solid food at all.
“I was like, ‘She’s 9! She wants to eat food!’” Austin told me. Unmoved, the insurer forced Austin to pay $900 a month out of pocket for the device.
Later, when Carolyn developed a sensitivity to a sedative used during her monthly lumbar punctures, her doctors switched to another medicine, and the company again denied payment, Austin said. She paid for that herself too.
Austin said she eventually developed a stress-related heart condition that required ablation surgery. She and her daughter are healthy now, but the scars remain. She said she was saddened but not shocked to learn about Thompson’s death.
“These things are happening because people are really struggling,” she told me. “I don’t think the CEO was responsible for my daughter’s caregiving issues, but it’s smart to ask, ‘Why did this happen?’ Could it be a systemic issue?’ People are buckling under the pressure.”
At this point, the motive for Thompson’s killing is a matter of speculation. But ammunition recovered from the scene was inscribed with words often used to describe insurance companies’ anti-patient strategies, including “deny” and “defend,” the Associated Press and others reported.
In the 2010 book “Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It,” Jay M. Feinman, a Rutgers law professor, traces the evolution of insurance companies from generally helpful organizations where adjusters — that is, human beings — were responsible for reimbursements into the antagonistic, algorithm-driven behemoths they are today.
In the 1990s, he writes, insurance companies such as Allstate turned to the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. to develop new strategies.
“McKinsey,” Feinman writes, “saw claims as a ‘zero-sum game,’ with the policyholder and the company competing for the same dollars. No longer would each claim be treated on its merits.” Computers would determine reimbursements, and settlements would be offered on a “take-it-or-litigate basis.” Feinman writes that McKinsey urged Allstate to move “from ‘Good Hands’ to ‘Boxing Gloves.’”
Earlier this year, the insurance giant Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield announced that it would start limiting reimbursements for anesthesia based on its own time limits for surgeries. The idea, Anthem said, was to prevent overbilling. Doctors, predictably, were outraged.
“This is just the latest in a long line of appalling behavior by commercial health insurers looking to drive their profits up at the expense of patients and physicians providing essential care,” Donald Arnold, the president of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, told NPR.
On Thursday, after the outpouring of rage against health insurers sparked by Thompson’s killing, Anthem reversed course, blaming “significant widespread misinformation” about its proposed policy for the about-face.
No wonder there is so little empathy for Brian Thompson, who was by many accounts a lovely human being. In death, he has become an unwitting symbol of the terrible things health insurance companies do to people for money.
Bluesky: @rabcarian.bsky.social. Threads: @rabcarian
Thompson’s death has inspired a torrent of fury about the way his insurance company and others treat — or mistreat — people in their moments of greatest need. Some of the reactions, particularly on social media, have been downright gleeful about the killing.
What a stunning illustration of the hatred so many Americans feel toward for-profit health insurance companies, which too often make money for stockholders by withholding care from sick people.
UnitedHealthcare is a particularly awful exemplar. It is infamous for high denial rates and low reimbursement levels.
According to an investigation by the medical news site Stat and a federal lawsuit recently filed in Minnesota, UnitedHealthcare has been using a deeply flawed artificial intelligence algorithm to wrongfully deny healthcare to elderly and disabled patients. Stat reported that the company “pressured its medical staff to cut off payments for seriously ill patients … denying rehabilitation care for older and disabled Americans as profits soared.”
ProPublica reported last month that the company was using algorithms to identify people it deemed guilty of “therapy overuse” and deny mental health treatment. Both California and Massachusetts determined that the company was breaking the federal law that requires insurers to cover mental health issues the same way they cover physical ailments. UnitedHealthcare denied claims for more than 34,000 therapy sessions from 2013 to 2020 in New York alone, saving the company about $8 million.
Adding to this unsavory picture, four of its top executives, including Thompson, have been under scrutiny for $101.5 million in stock trades they made after the company was informed that it was the target of a federal antitrust investigation but before the news became public and the stock price dropped.
Perhaps all this helps explain why, as of Friday morning, more than 85,000 people had reacted to UnitedHealthcare’s solemn Facebook statement about Thompson’s death with a laugh emoji.
People on other social media platforms also piled on.
“All human life is sacred, so it’s not proper to laugh when serious harm befalls someone,” wrote one Bluesky user. “The moral thing to do is instead charge them hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
“UnitedHealth CEO meets the same fate as many of his clients,” posted another Bluesky user above photos of the shooter pointing his gun at Thompson’s back before he reportedly rode off on an e-bike.
Stories of terrible interactions with the largest health insurer in the country also poured forth.
Elizabeth Austin, a single mother who lives in Bucks County, Pa., told me she had a miserable experience with UnitedHealthcare after her young daughter, Carolyn, was diagnosed with leukemia during the COVID-19 pandemic. Her chemotherapy caused nausea, so Carolyn’s doctor ordered a nighttime feeding tube to supplement what little she was able to eat while awake. She said United Healthcare wouldn’t pay for the feeding tube unless Carolyn ate no solid food at all.
“I was like, ‘She’s 9! She wants to eat food!’” Austin told me. Unmoved, the insurer forced Austin to pay $900 a month out of pocket for the device.
Later, when Carolyn developed a sensitivity to a sedative used during her monthly lumbar punctures, her doctors switched to another medicine, and the company again denied payment, Austin said. She paid for that herself too.
Austin said she eventually developed a stress-related heart condition that required ablation surgery. She and her daughter are healthy now, but the scars remain. She said she was saddened but not shocked to learn about Thompson’s death.
“These things are happening because people are really struggling,” she told me. “I don’t think the CEO was responsible for my daughter’s caregiving issues, but it’s smart to ask, ‘Why did this happen?’ Could it be a systemic issue?’ People are buckling under the pressure.”
At this point, the motive for Thompson’s killing is a matter of speculation. But ammunition recovered from the scene was inscribed with words often used to describe insurance companies’ anti-patient strategies, including “deny” and “defend,” the Associated Press and others reported.
In the 2010 book “Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don’t Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It,” Jay M. Feinman, a Rutgers law professor, traces the evolution of insurance companies from generally helpful organizations where adjusters — that is, human beings — were responsible for reimbursements into the antagonistic, algorithm-driven behemoths they are today.
In the 1990s, he writes, insurance companies such as Allstate turned to the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. to develop new strategies.
“McKinsey,” Feinman writes, “saw claims as a ‘zero-sum game,’ with the policyholder and the company competing for the same dollars. No longer would each claim be treated on its merits.” Computers would determine reimbursements, and settlements would be offered on a “take-it-or-litigate basis.” Feinman writes that McKinsey urged Allstate to move “from ‘Good Hands’ to ‘Boxing Gloves.’”
Earlier this year, the insurance giant Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield announced that it would start limiting reimbursements for anesthesia based on its own time limits for surgeries. The idea, Anthem said, was to prevent overbilling. Doctors, predictably, were outraged.
“This is just the latest in a long line of appalling behavior by commercial health insurers looking to drive their profits up at the expense of patients and physicians providing essential care,” Donald Arnold, the president of the American Society of Anesthesiologists, told NPR.
On Thursday, after the outpouring of rage against health insurers sparked by Thompson’s killing, Anthem reversed course, blaming “significant widespread misinformation” about its proposed policy for the about-face.
No wonder there is so little empathy for Brian Thompson, who was by many accounts a lovely human being. In death, he has become an unwitting symbol of the terrible things health insurance companies do to people for money.
Bluesky: @rabcarian.bsky.social. Threads: @rabcarian
- Joined
- Nov 29, 2020
Whoopsie Daisy
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Mar 8, 2023
The FBI and NYPD right now:
If anyone could photoshop the shooters face onto Coop Cooper, that would be great.
If anyone could photoshop the shooters face onto Coop Cooper, that would be great.
urr13 account
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Nov 23, 2021
Not thousands, Millions.
- Joined
- Nov 30, 2022
Arent both of those papers quite leftist? Why are they shocked people are celebrating?
- Joined
- Dec 13, 2021
These papers pander to a leftist audience, of course they're pro-corporation. They're not shocked, they're trying to do what all major news outlets do: herd the cattle.
- Joined
- Sep 27, 2022
Nigga, American's tarred and feathered the taxmen during the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791, this isn't a new concept the details just change over time.
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2022
Berrakh
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jun 13, 2018
I already know what the typical response to my post was. Failing to see the big picture about normalizing leftoid violence because you have crap health and crap health insurance is sort of the point of why I said it.
Trump won. This lost at the ballot box.
“Aha but sometimes Americans did mob justice.” Oof. You think that’s what comes down the pipeline from this? Rather than NGOs, crooked lawyers, and political networks sparing their catspaws from justice? Clarence Darrow bribed the jury for the LA Times Bombing trial. Now he’s remembered as an icon of justice because the Civil Rights revolution was so successful in ruining America’s political and legal norms. We’re just not talking about the same thing here. And I think this stems from ignorance about left wing political violence, even just in America.
I’d liken it to a Russian downplaying organized bolshevik terror because “it’s kind of like a non-anti-semitic pogrom” if you really squint at it. Sorry, one is organized with the intent of forcing really bad changes and the other is spontaneous. That’s a big difference.
Trump won. This lost at the ballot box.
“Aha but sometimes Americans did mob justice.” Oof. You think that’s what comes down the pipeline from this? Rather than NGOs, crooked lawyers, and political networks sparing their catspaws from justice? Clarence Darrow bribed the jury for the LA Times Bombing trial. Now he’s remembered as an icon of justice because the Civil Rights revolution was so successful in ruining America’s political and legal norms. We’re just not talking about the same thing here. And I think this stems from ignorance about left wing political violence, even just in America.
I’d liken it to a Russian downplaying organized bolshevik terror because “it’s kind of like a non-anti-semitic pogrom” if you really squint at it. Sorry, one is organized with the intent of forcing really bad changes and the other is spontaneous. That’s a big difference.
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That was, very literally, a different America. Those were ethnic British people. "Americans" now are mostly mystery meat slop blended together from the world's worst races in the world's septic tank.
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- Sep 27, 2022
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- Jun 26, 2024
- Joined
- Jul 13, 2017
Where is this place? I want to move there.
(The non-stop attempt to get people to feel bad is just ridiculous).
The leftist media is still corporate media.
I see a lot of people here celebrating this that were also celebrating Trump winning.
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- Jul 12, 2024
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- Dec 17, 2022
GarandThumb released a video about the theories of the weapon used:
https://preservetube.com/watch?v=nIbY6lo0RIw
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- Jul 12, 2024
Got you fam.
- Joined
- Jun 26, 2024
I sincerely doubt this will become commonplace, not even in fifty years' time. This guy was fed up. The words on the cartridges would indicate to me that United's business practices affected him, a family member(s), or significant other(s) in such a way that he had to act.
And the act he committed is a catharsis, that's why millions of Americans are cheering this ghost, the one person who was pushed far enough to act in a way the rest of us cannot or will not.
- Joined
- Mar 7, 2023
Mukhrani
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jul 24, 2021
If Trump had personally dumped a mag into this asshole he would have won by an even bigger landslide, and then been sworn in from his Rikers Island cell.