A woman made a vague threat to a healthcare company – does she really deserve up to 15 years in prison?
A woman made a vague threat to a healthcare company – does she really deserve up to 15 years in prison?
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I hope this case gets some attention too. This is some ginned up bullshit. We can’t let them stomp us into silence.
I’m not celebrating a murder, this is some fucked up shit in many dimensions and I would prefer a different timeline.
But remember we are not children who need to bow our heads and take our scolding.
For-profit insurance companies are liable for the deaths they cause. Full stop.
How’s that for moral clarity?
She should not be charged in my opinion. It wasn’t a credible threat.
What the shootings has done is shown how many Americans are fed up with the current system.
You’re seeing stories from democrat and republicans.
I don’t condone the violence at all but he may have sparked a medical revolution in our country.
Saying (paraphrased) "you're next" is not a threat. It's an observation.
She made no threat.
See you at the barricades.
I’m not a person who does protest but I would march for changes to our medical system. While I’ve had a positive experience, the stories I’m hearing are mind blowing. It’s beyond absurd. Even if 90% of them were false. It’s still too many horrible stories but I suspect they are mostly true.
Mostly the same. My biggest headache has been some of my dependents have secondary insurance and no matter which company I've been with at the time, they always assume all of the do and will forget multiple times a year which are which and deny all of them claims until I talk to them because there are of course no self serve options there.
I also care for a child who is on medicaid, never any problems there. All the scary news on how I shouldn't be able to find providers has never been an issue and they are many medical conditions.
Those are the stories I call bullshit on. They want us to be afraid of single payer so they over emphasize lack of care while ignoring the people who directly pay and actually lack care.
I always assumed that everyone’s experience was similar to mine. That’s why these stories have been mind blowing.
I needed a PA for a very expensive mediation that most insurances deny. Uhc did deny it but then called the provider and walked them through the forms to get it covered. All in the same day.
Yet you read about them deny cancer medication.
I support a dual system where everyone has coverage but people can have private as well. That’s the Australian model. I think that would be easier to pass in America.
All I know is this drew the average person to speak out against our medical system.
I don't know of any nation that has single-payer that doesn't also have private available. I'm not well-travelled so I don't really know.
While I’ve had a positive experience
Let me guess, still on parents insurance or never had insurance through an employer?
I’m 51. I’ve always had health insurance through my employer. Never an issue. Most of my career has been in tech companies where the insurance is much better than the average company I’ve discovered.
I'm only a few years younger and have pretty much always had shitty/non-existent insurance until the last decade.
Without revealing too much about myself, my employer just switched their provider to UHC this year so you can imagine I'm watching all this intently.
I’ve had nothing but positive experiences with them and I’ve had them on and off for thirty years.
That said, I think it’s because tech has better insurance than I realized. Many of the stories coming out are from uhc and I believe them
Do you have any links to conservative takes on this? I know full well I am in a bubble and that’s the way I god damn like it. But in this case, knowing the universality of the sentiment would be really, umm, empowering?
Well I am a conservative and mostly associate with conservatives. Talking to my liberal friends, their take is almost identical to my Republican friends.
I don’t think people realized how aligned everyone is on this issue.
It’s the stories that are coming out that is making people talk about this topic. Those stories were ignored until the CEO was murdered.
People denied cancer treatment. wtf.
I live in an area so red that if you saw it you'd say it was bleeding. The people here always, and I mean always, talk about how wrong it is for someone to act as a vigilante, and murder is wrong, and the insurance companies might be not-the-best, but it's no excuse... bla bla bla. They think the woman here is in the wrong, and don't even care.
See the recent slew of posts about the new york times for the conservative take on the issue.
I've lost several friends who couldn't afford cancer treatments. I have one now who is looking for some help because their current insurance doesn't cover excision of diseased organ, and open enrollment is over.
Sorry to hear about your fiends. That’s bullshit.
My dad died from cancer and the place where he worked was amazing. When you are out of work, you have to pay cobra.
The owner of the company paid his full insurance till he died. My dad had only worked there a year or so. The owner said his employees are like family and he’d never let them be uninsured.
Now the owner was wealthy but not that wealthy. He came to the funeral and brought his whole family.
While it’s an amazing story, it sucks my dad could have been without insurance had it not been the the dentistry of his boss. The boss was also out of a lot of money and while he was wealthy, he wasn’t that wealthy.
Nobody should have to deal with a chronic condition because of a lack of insurance. It’s a problem we need to solve and neither party really wants to solve it.
I’m hoping Trump does something about it. This is his chance to blow everyone away with a solution. He’s supported a single payer system in the past. Let’s see him do it now.
Thank you so much for your kindness, it is so meaningful in the right way. I am sorry you lost your dad. Insurance is no guarantee of anything, but it does help ease financial burdens. It's touching that a boss of an employee of one year had the kindness and compassion to cover your dad.
No, neither party wants to rush the wrath of the owning class, and to be honest, I have a hard time imagining politicians will work toward meaningful changes until we fix the fact that an owning class exists. It's our tax dollars, yet we have crumbling education, crumbling health, crumbling physical infrastructure, crumbling postal service, and "too big to fail" corporate interests, which if they had failed, would have tanked theglobal economy, not only our own.
It's almost like most people have depth and nuance, but are so mired in bs, that has to be moved away from ourselves to see it in others, even in ourselves, sometimes.
We can hope, but getting mad and channeling that answer to working together for common causes is probably a good idea. Hope for the best, plan for the worst. If be honored to work alongside you, in spirit, since proximity is an immediate issue.
Wishing you all the best.
Side topic: does anyone know if there are Lemmy magazines dedicated to helping us find organizing groups in our individual areas? Tyia
I’m not celebrating a murder
You can though, no one will stop you.
This specific murder It isn't morally wrong. It isn't hypocritical. It isn't compromising some foundational pillar of being a human.
Those who stand at the top of a capitistic, private healthcare industry made a choice to create, perpetuate, secure, and promote a system which resulted in deaths of millions for the benefit of shareholders and themselves.
You don't have to qualify your indifference or quiet your support. There is no moral quandary here.
This has literally helped people already. Anthem undid an anesthesia policy reform which would have not covered it in procedures after a certain amount of minutes
This is some ginned up bullshit.
The "you're next" after referencing a high profile murder is what actually did it.
Like, that's a credible threat. 15 years is fucking insane, and context is going to matter a lot. Did she just get denied cancer treatment for her 2 year old? Or told it's not insurance's fault doctors won't prescribe opioids? Or any of a million things in between.
That's why we have trials, to find out all that stuff. And if it's a jury trial I feel juries would be sympathetic.
The 100k is the real bullshit, but not owning guns doesn't mean much. It's insanely easy to buy a gun without a background check thru private seller loopholes.
But our bond system is insane, because the it causes judges to inflate the amount 10x. If you can afford to put it up, you get it all back later. A bondsman you pay 10%, they put up 90%, and they get the whole 100% back. Your 10% is their profit. If a bondsman thinks that's a good risk, why does the court consistently over estimate the risk?
Bonds only exist so poor people are punished more than rich people.
credible
able to be believed; convincing
Did anyone really think she was coming after them after that? No. She got heated on the phone and said something she shouldn't have.
It's not nothing. What she did was wrong, and it's reasonable for it to be a crime. We don't want to always have to investigate or deal with constant threats. However, she was neither credible nor specific, which are two major criteria. (Keep that in mind when you're posting here, by the way.) She committed a crime, but not one that should be very serious.
The way they've framed her is obscene.
No. It was not a threat. It was not wrong. It was not a crime.
The way they’ve framed her is obscene.
You're factoring in what you already know about this woman and letting that influence if it was credible.
The people she was on the phone likely know nothing about her besides what was discussed on the call and the threat. That should be reported, and should be investigated.
The bigger issue about framing is the media running headlines that it was just the "deny, defend, despise" that resulted in charges.
A cynic would say that was by order of the owners hoping to discourage a movement, even tho any idiot could have told them it would have the opposite and inflame people.
Which it obviously has.
I like to think at some point people realized this would backfire, and just held their tongue. But I'm an optimist when I can be.
That should be reported, and should be investigated.
Yes. Certainly.
But the bigger issue is that the punishment doesn't fit the crime. It's going to cost some resources from law enforcement, and that needs to be punished because we don't want people like this regularly draining our tax dollars. But any punishment more than probation and/or community service is obscene.
They've framed her as a terrorist, and she's clearly not.
But the bigger issue is that the punishment doesn’t fit the crime
Yes, that's why the rest of my comment was essentially what you wrote, just more in depth...
The people she was on the phone likely know nothing about her besides what was discussed on the call and the threat.
Likewise, she knew nothing about them. A threat against some random customer service agent in a company so huge you have no idea even what country the call center is in is categorically not credible!
Thanks for the insight on the typical terms of bonds. Good info.
So eyes peeled on this one too I guess. They are making an example of her, I mean the judge plainly said so. We can’t let them get away with these excessive charges.
I didn’t kill anyone and I never will. But I will be damned if I let this moment fade into the next news cycle.
As a society, we are having the conversation about for-profit healthcare NOW!
They are making an example of her,
Yep, which is opening them up to civil suits, but is an open secret about our justice system.
As a society, we are having the conversation about for-profit healthcare NOW!
Think of it like the fediverse. Last year a big event made a lot of us ditch reddit, but some had already been here, and for the majority it wasn't enough for them to change behavior.
I don't think Luigi is the big event that causes permanent change, there's been a lot of people who have been pushing for healthcare reform, 20 years isn't rare, some for decades longer.
The first presidential candidate who had universal healthcare as a part of the party platform was Teddy Roosevelt in 1920...
It's a century long fight against the healthcare industry, and it's not going to be as easy as what just happened to change shit as long as all of our options in general elections have already been bought off.
We reference dogs who catch a car everytime Republicans win majorities and the presidency, but on 1/7/2020 Joe Biden didn't leap into action, he "looked into" things for so long we lost the House and had an excuse not to do anything. "Winning" by electing a moderate only depresses turnout in midterms and the next presidential cycle.
We have to grow up and admit that or absolutely nothing will really change. The first step is understanding the root cause or we'll never stop fighting symptoms.
What are you talking about? You just sort of wandered off in the middle there. If I sus your point, we just have to accept it? Or that it will be a gradual erosion?
You can sit there and be all wise. I’m going to keep shitting on insurance executives and encouraging others to do the same.
If I sus your point, we just have to accept it? Or that it will be a gradual erosion?
Nope, it's that Joe Biden wouldn't fix it, and neither would Kamala, hell, the biggest recipient of UHC donations was Kamala
https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/unitedhealth-group/summary?id=D000000348
I’m going to keep shitting on insurance executives and encouraging others to do the same.
No one's saying you shouldn't.
I'm just saying we also need to shit on the investors.
And the politicians from both parties they bought to prevent us from fixing anything.
We won't win this thru the courts, they said with the money.
We won't win this with politicians who took the money either, we can only win if we first win in the Dem primary. Lose there and we'll keep losing.
I want to actually fix the problem, and am talking about how
You want to fix a symptom, and it's a major symptom, but we'll be fighting the problem at the same time so why not fix the problem so fixing this (and other) symptoms is easy?
You can sit there and be all wise
In general you do t insult people because you don't understand, but I provided clarification anyways because this is important. Others won't.
"The car on the other side of the zipper merge is going now. You're next."
It doesn't mean I intend to do anything, I'm just observing society.
Work any phone helpdesk job and you will be threatened six ways to Sunday by people who are upset over the most minor things.
Yes this incident came after very prominent consequences for an insurer in the US, but I would be hard pressed to believe that someone who works for a company that denies people lifesaving healthcare hasn’t heard worse.
I did for a couple years, we'd have reported this too.
Anyone would...
And they did, I was threatened multiple times at a Sprint call center and reported it.
We all did, cops never even take a report, weird that the health insurance people get special treatment.