As someone who watched earlier this year as their wife had a heart attack, and later, a stroke, due to her plan of care being repeatedly denied by insurance, this resonates with me…
High-profile killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO in New York
- Thread starter VorZakone
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A lot of people seem to be dancing around saying what I imagine most of us are thinking 
The police won't be wanting for people with a reasonable motive. The C-suites of their healthcare providers is probably the one group of people the US populace is most undivided in thinking that the world would be better off without them in it.
Good god, the soulless ghouls at these companies are another level of greed.
I mean, for how long they gonna push the line before people lose their shit, govts not gonna do shit about it anyway.
It’s the system that’s the problem. Anaesthetists having a stop watch running and billing by the minute for each operation is insane. Everything about the American healthcare system is bonkers. The costs of doing even the most routine stuff is off the charts. So insurance companies inevitably try to find ways to keep costs down.
I don’t think people who live in countries where you get free healthcare appreciate what an amazing service they’re getting. The alternative is horrendous.
The closest I get to this is with my dog insurance. They’ll do anything possible to avoid paying out. Wankers.
They haven’t yet pushed me this far, mind you.
try Allianz, never had a problem with them.It's mad. Americans at my company have told me how much their health insurance premium would be if it wasn't covered by the company and it's outrageous. I know Ireland isn't perfect but thank feck we have mostly (shitty) free healthcare and our private insurance doesn't bankrupt you.
Switzerland manages a private system just fine. It's only the Americans who specialise in this shit.
IIRC Switzerland has the second-highest healthcare spending per-capita (and possibly also as percentage of GDP) in the world.
I saw something before about anaesthetists in the US being paid so much money that some of them just work 2 day weeks and are still easily on 6 figure salaries. What a life.
"Dammit son. You denied health coverage to John Wick's wife."
We’ve a reasonably well functioning private/public combination system in Ireland. I’m not fully sure why America ended up so deeply dysfunctional but I think it’s a combination of never having any public healthcare and extreme litigiousness. I did an elective in a hospital in Boston a very long time ago and the reckless disregard for costs blew my mind. Every ward round every patient would have had a battery of expensive investigations taken the day before. Repeated daily. For no good reason other than ruling out unbelievably unlikely illnesses, or to prove they were definitely getting better, day by day. It was like nobody gave a shit about how much it was costing to do these unnecessary tests, so long as they could cover their own arse. It was really strange.
Yeah physicians in America make insane amount of money. They rinse the system for all it’s worth. As you would.
Mind you, something else we don’t appreciate here is how little we get away with paying our medical staff. When people who design software routinely earn more than people who save lives every day then your economy has issues. There has to be a happy medium.
There'll never not be something perverse about everyday healthcare being a multi-billion dollar profit centre.
It's hard to cat insurance for a pet that's over 8 here and the caps on payouts make it hardly worthwhile, given vets cost a bomb here.
Sounds like it maybe wasn't as professional as people are making out.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/man-fatally-shot-nyc-hotel-police-say-rcna182789
Relevent to the UK, both Wes Streeting and Kier Starmer are funded, personally, by John Armitage, his hedgefund has around $800 million invested in United Health.
How do you legally "personally fund" a politician and it's not a bribe out of interest?
That's how our system works.
Armitage sends streeting 15 grand every couple of months, to him personally, not the party, he also paid £100K to starmer's leadership campaign (the biggest donation ever to an internal political campaign for party positions) and regular 60 grand payments. Again, to him, not the party.
Streeting has actually taken about £300K in personal donations from people tied to private health.
They aren't called bribes because the people getting the bribes also make the laws that say what these payments are, and they call them donations.
Very good post. I wonder what the plan for NHS reform is?
I’m struggling to understand why anybody would ever buy health insurance from a company that routinely rejects 30% of claims?
I won't be celebrating his death but I certainly won't be mourning, seems like an utter cnut.
It wouldn't surprise me if it was a case of them taking on people that struggle to find insurance from other companies because of their health, charging them a fortune because of it, and then routinely denying their claims.
It's because most Americans get their health insurance through their job, so they don't actually have a choice.
Isn't healthcare often provided by the employer?
They pay for what they get, probably the best healthcare system in the world.
They also have exorbitant costs for everything. This is a country where lunch at Starbucks will cost you 50 quid.
This is definitely going to be made into a movie/HBO mini-series with the shooter being a anti-hero.
People in power and in this case insurances use that voice against people. They take people money for decades and then deny any service which directly causes deaths that people paid to avoid. I'm continuously amazed by how disciplined most of us are.
Heh.
In the state that i'm living most insurance is somewhat reasonable to at least negotiate with. I will never forget United refused my patient who lost 2 legs and an arm her stay in the hospital after 1 week of amputation, discharge home on her own without any assistive equipments but a wheelchair despite us basically on our knees begging.
Sadly he was just a piece of the puzzle, working for a system design to trade people's welfare for profit, who is ruling this country.
Yes, and no. They make huge dollars, but it is mostly equivalent to the amount of work they have to do, whicj is inhumane for both the doctors and the patients. If you were to have a life outside of work, you wouldnt even have a job in the field let alone earning a bit less.
They are squeezing us dry.
I presume you're not trying to say insurance companies are victims of the system?
In fairness , it’s all relative. My American colleagues earn significantly more than we do in Europe and I know a few who make over a million a year. This is essentially unthinkable in Europe, for almost anyone.
Still, American salaries at the higher end are generally much higher than in Europe anyway. And American doctors still often seem to be paid less than their highly trained equivalents in law , finance and tech etc. In my experience anyway.
United seems….particularly bad, even for an insurance company.
That’s a very strange interpretation of what I wrote.
I can well believe that. Although doctors in most European countries get squeezed just as hard without the same remuneration. To be clear, I don’t think this is a better situation. In the grand scheme of people who are paid too much money doctors are a very long way down the list. Even in America.