we can have a little grave-dancing, as a treat

[doodlemancy]

in case you somehow haven't heard, someone (as of this writing, we still don't know who, and i kinda hope we never do) murdered Brian Thompson, the CEO of United Healthcare, outside an investors' meeting a couple of days ago. (the investors went on with the meeting, because, like Brian Thompson, nothing in the world has any meaning to them except for money.) it's extremely funny and people are rightly dancing on his grave.

whenever some asshole dies and people dare to have a little fun about it, it's always followed by an inevitable wave of annoying handwringing and moralizing from the fun police. waaaaaaaaaah he was a human being! it's sad when anyone dies! nobody deserves to be murdered! what about his family? how would you feel if you were his kids, watching the entire internet celebrate the death of their father? waaaaaaaaaaah abloohoooo buhhh blahbhooaghghhh NUHHHHHHHHH sniff hork BUHHHHHHHHHHH. it's a morally cowardly position, and you also look like a total dipshit sobbing over the corpse of someone who wouldn't have pissed in your direction if you were on fire.

i think americans have a really hard time reckoning with death. i think it's kind of something we avoid thinking about too deeply. it's a really weird tangle. like there's this pretty persistent obsession with true crime, a lot of our media is centered around violence, we love to Celebrate The Troops, and yet when it comes down to a real person's death we kind of can't deal with it. if you've had to deal with loss, you know how isolating it can be to still be grieving but also be at the point where everyone else who wasn't involved... kinda just wants to be done with it. go back to work. go back to school. just get back to your life.

we also really like to ignore that violence and killing have always been major components of social change. every right i still (supposedly) have under US law was established partly through violence. the 8 hour work day is partly a result of union organizers straight up killing their shitty bosses. Suffragettes killed people. the civil rights movement in the US wasn't just MLK speeches and sit-ins, there was a fair amount of violence and threats thereof. it's just kind of how things work. if you're in power, and people ask you to stop killing a minority or something, and you go "nah, i don't wanna," and there's no way to make you stop other than violence, well, they're probably going to do violence to you.

but i think the thing people like to ignore the most is that violence isn't just one person hurting or killing another. what the pearl-clutchers don't seem to grasp is that the healthcare system in this country runs on violence. it is a meat grinder, and it isn't hard to find enough horror stories about United Healthcare (and every other health insurance provider under the sun) to give yourself clinical depression in under 24 hours. these companies exist to generate profit, first and foremost. they do not actually exist to help anyone. it's in their best interests to do whatever they can to get out of paying for your treatment. it is literally their duty to their shareholders to make sure that they pay out as little as possible. and what that leads to is a lot of extremely preventable mass suffering and mass death.

if you're in charge of a company that's responsible for mass death, you know what you are? a fuckin' mass murderer.

i kind of wonder what the venn diagram is re: pearl-clutchers and people who have never experienced a serious health issue or had to deal with bad insurance, because it's baffling to me that any normal everyday person with a normal everyday wage would waste their breath boohooing over the death of someone who happily would have tortured or killed them for profit. i think for some people, maybe it's hard to admit that this is our reality. they really want you to be exaggerating. it's like how people will be like "well surely if you were REALLY disabled you could get disability pay!" or whatever, because they've never had to interact with that system and they NEED to believe it would be there for them if they needed it. maybe for some people it is easiest to ignore the sickening noises coming out of the meat grinder and just assume those people are doing it wrong, or something.

here's one of the stand-out parts of this, for me: even over on LinkedIn, the safest place in the world to be a CEO, people were showing up to Brian Thompson's comments sections on his post to tell him off for being a soulless piece of shit. the thing is like. even if you are relatively comfortable, the healthcare system will probably fuck with you (or someone you care about) at some point, unless you're really, really, really rich, and so is everyone you know. the middle class isn't safe from being bankrupted by cancer. hell, in some situations you're probably MORE likely to be financially ruined by healthcare if you're too wealthy to qualify for medicaid or something.

i've been put through hell too. i've never had the displeasure of dealing with UHC specifically, but i've had claims denied for necessary healthcare and treatment delayed for months and months. it's part of how i ended up having to leave my old job. i've suffered a hell of a lot at the hands of the US healthcare system, even with medicaid, in Oregon, which is about as least-bad as it gets. i have watched this system try to kill family and friends. it's tried to kill me, too. i am alive in spite of it. like dealing with loss, it can be very isolating. it's often a solo battle against an unfeeling machine that doesn't care. a thing i've ended up saying a lot is "no one who cares can help me, and no one that can help me cares." and if misery-profiteering fuckheads like Brian Thompson didn't exist, medicaid probably wouldn't be so goddamn stingy about a lot of stuff I legitimately need. even the most generous public plans are made worse by the mere existence of for-profit healthcare, because their entire business exists to drive up the price of any and all medical care.

i saw someone say "people don't realize they're arguing over the death penalty," which is uhhhh, an interesting way to misunderstand the situation i guess. the guy's already dead; we're mostly arguing over whether or not it's funny. the death penalty is when the state kills you for a crime. the state didn't kill him. the state never would have lifted a finger to stop him, violently or otherwise, because under our laws, he wasn't a criminal, he was a fucking businessman. like... if you're mad at people joking about this i do need to know how mad you are that it isn't a crime to literally kill people by making healthcare expensive and impossible. i need to know how mad you are about the fact that sometimes people who are sick or bleeding profusely or KNOW they're having a heart attack end up driving themselves to the hospital (or asking someone to drive them) because one out-of-network ambulance bill would bankrupt them. i need to know how angry you are about how often people in this country are forced to choose between surviving a serious illness and dragging their families further into poverty, or giving up and dying so their spouse and kids don't lose the house.

every single CEO profiteering from medicine/healthcare is a mass murderer, and deserves the grace, sympathy, and empathy i would extend to anyone else with the blood of thousands on their hands. which is none. fuck 'em. i don't think this is a particularly inflammatory or shocking opinion. i don't think i'm super edgy for having it, or whatever. i think it's normal to hate mass murderers. i think it's normal to feel very Party Hat about it when they die.

i know this isn't exactly justice served and that killing the CEO doesn't kill the company. they'll just find a new monster to replace him. but the public response to this, for the most part, has been a really fun time, and it rattled all the other healthcare companies enough to start taking down staff photos off their websites. we all just got a very, very clear picture of how much everyone fucking hates them. and even the people crying and hand-wringing and pearl-clutching, for the most part, seem to agree that healthcare needs to change. even if this doesn't turn out to be a watershed moment (and i'm not really holding out hope that it will be), it is very fucking funny, and this widespread collaborative grave-pissing gives me a shred of hope we might still be able to change things someday.

Comments

[adore]

all of this! louder for the people in the back!

[dismallyoriented]

I'm in an interesting position, because one of my core memories from middle school involved being in my 8th grade social studies classroom when news of Osama Bin Laden's assassination dropped. All the boys were being loudly Patriotic and celebrating when the teacher snapped that we should stop celebrating because, "only God can judge a man's life" or something along those lines. She'd never stood out to me as religious (certainly not enough to sincerely invoke God), but I had noticed how much empathy she taught with in the face of post-9-11 islamophobia, and at the time I was just starting to grasp the ways in which the US was. Doing its Fucking Thing with the region and its propaganda thereof. That stark counterpoint in the midst of ghoulish patriotic mass celebration was something that stuck with me, and the vague rhyming of circumstance has me thinking about it again.

That said I still recognize the ways in which this circumstance is quite different. I've been blowing balloons with the rest of them, and the catharsis of this has been pretty fucking spectacular. What I've been thinking about wrt UHC is that like. Corporate violence on this scale happens without any consequence. Some guy pulling out a gun and just killing the CEO directly, in clear retributive violence for those business operations. That makes them no longer untouchable, even if only for the moment.

[doodlemancy]

yeahhhhhh like... killing innocents in the pursuit of justified vengeance is not defensible. but the more i learn about what happened before 9/11 (i was 11 years old and not politically aware when it happened) the more i'm like... man we could have avoided this entirely if we hadn't done all the wanton imperialism and mass murder. always with the mass murder! when people say "violence begets violence," they're very often saying it from a context of conveniently ignoring who actually initiated the violence in the first place. when you fuck with people, for years and years, when you kill their families and bomb their cities and extract, extract, extract, retaliation is inevitable. the entirety of human history is a repeated cycle of this and it's pretty goofy of people to act shocked when it happens.

and yeah. these CEOs mostly get to be comfortably detached from the suffering they cause. i think we all needed this little reminder.

[amphobet]

Well said. The hand-wringing is infuriating, but expected. It's all propaganda. The media is run by unfathomably huge corporations and billionaires--they know which side of the conflict they're on. Even beyond that, there's always been a concerted effort by those at the top to convince those at the bottom that change only happens when people ask nicely. So of course, much of the populace believes it as well. It's all they've been told.

And yes, capitalism as a whole is a murder machine, but privatized health care in particular is just completely evil. There are no redeeming qualities to the system we have. One could argue that abolishing the health insurance industry would wreck the economy and put tons of people out of work. OK, maybe. But, like. If the only purpose of a machine is to grind people into a fine paste in order to make a few ghouls slightly richer, you destroy the machine, regardless of how many people make their living operating it. That's not hard to understand.

And yeah, lots of normal people are in denial. It's somewhat understandable. They can't change the system, so they cope by deciding that the system is good, actually. They need to wake the fuck up, but I'm not entirely unsympathetic toward them. The entire system is doing whatever it can to convince them that there are no alternatives.

Anyway, I hope the ghouls are all terrified. They should be. They should never have a moment's peace for the rest of their days.

No war but class war.

[doodlemancy]

yeah tbh, i have little-to-no sympathy for anyone who works in the for-profit health insurance industry, down to the grunts. some of the customer service level people in that industry are really no better than their superiors, just less powerful. like some of them will try their best to help you but a lot of them either don't care, or will gleefully find ways to make your life hell. i spent a couple of years continuously fistfighting Sedgwick Claims Management for disability accommodations at work, and the philosophy i formed after that was like: it's one thing to be forced to work a job that's a little fraught in order to stay out of the meat grinder, it's another thing entirely to accept a job throwing people directly into its jaws.

i hope i live to see that whole industry brought to its knees. we need to do a Nuremburg Trials about it, imo.