‘It didn’t use to be like this’: woeful US healthcare system exposed by CEO killing
‘It didn’t use to be like this’: woeful US healthcare system exposed by CEO killing
Americans describe treatment denials, hidden costs and deceptive practices when filing claims with insurers
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.
The OG guerilla marketing tactic...
If anything tangible and lasting actually does come of it you might be right, but so far the "discussion" seems to center around either cheering for Mangione or raging against him, intellectualizing about morality, louder unfocused wealth hatred, and tons of overgeneralized memes. We've had anecdotal reports of more insurance claims being approved, but that's at corporate whim and can change back any time. Are any Congressional bills in the works? Granted, I've mostly been ignoring the news since the fucking election and it's very possible that I've missed something.
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.
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.
Practices closing start at least by late 2000s, most of the 2010s there was a lot of consolidation, esp targeting provider firms with ownership shifting to PE firms. While health insurance newly hopped up on ACA regulations turn into mega corpos in their own right along with vertical integration.
Long story short, this is how the frog got cooked folks.
Kasier Permanente is a non profit so prolly has the best bones. All these parasites need to be nationalized under Kasier and then over a decade turned into a single payer, government ran organization model on of the successful templates across the world. Daddy pick which one he likes but this shot has to work.
This will never happen, i have better chance of exiting work class 🤡
53 here. Healthcare in America has never been worse in my lifetime.
20+ years ago I was told I'd have a $20 co pay by the Dr, and was billed almost $300. Because I didn't get pre approved to see an ear Dr. Insurance has been shit my entire life.
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.
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.
Big part of this is PE firms being able to structure this entities where they cut out lucrative portions of the service chain, and then loot it like that. IE tests is one example, make it out of network too whole at it;)
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.
It's one of the things the US is famous for with the rest of the world, which doesn't even care. That's how exposed it is. It's notorious. The default is, "Oh, that's that place with the insanely poor health system."
"Exposed" lol
People in the known knee... But regular people are busy talking about how great ACA is or how it is straight communism.
Eitherway, cost are high, no body at fault, nothing to be done, the poors deserve it 🤡
You keep thinking maybe... maybe... conservatives who defend corporate healthcare to the death - sometimes literally so - would figure out that making it a public service like fire and police just makes sense and is not a threat to Freedom. How stupid would it be if the fire department refused to hose down your house without preapproval from an insurance company?
All your comment did was convince conservatives we need to privatize police and fire.
We might bring back pouring molten gold down the rich assholes throats, if the fire department did that again.
Edit: I'm aware that probably is just a legend and the Parthians probably killed Crassus in battle/ negotiations.
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