An Astonishing Level of Dehumanization
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/12/astonishing-level-dehumanization/681189/
The pearl clutching is strong with this one. As usual, they gloss over the fact that health insurance profits are determined by the denial rate. The author conflates necessary rationing of care in any system with the clear incentive of for-profit insurance to deny care. Such cupidity.
It's hilarious when they go on about the dehumanization of Brian Thompson while completely ignoring that dehumanization is 100% how they're capable of making the decisions they do by viewing humans as a number on a spreadsheet that impacts their profits instead of a real person with a real life. To look at a piece of paper and make decisions to make profits by denying people care is the definition of dehumanizing them to you can make the decision without feeling remorse. Their job is literally steeped in more dehumanization than you can shake a fucking stick at! Their job is literally to dehumanize people in search of profit.
It's so painfully hypocritical it's not even funny, it's just anger-inducing.
When they dehumanize us, nothings wrong with it, but the second they're dehumanized for acting inhumanely suddenly it's a problem.
This isn't the first time I've heard it either, I've seen a few interviews with the same sentiment shared from CEO's, but in the interviews it was even more painful because for a moment it sounds like they're talking about the dehumanization of people who need healthcare, but no, they're talking about the CEO of course.
The victims of healthcare insurers also don't get the news media breathlessly defending them for having been dehumanized (which in itself is an attempted act to humanize the CEO). Their names are conveniently forgotten because they've been... you guessed it... dehumanized.
I’d add yet a bit more nuance: the dehumanization that happens at the hands of insurers is a choice. These companies and all their employees have the option to do things differently or work somewhere else.
On the other hand, the dehumanization that happens TO the insured is out of their control; they have the option to be dehumanized or die.
Now, when talking about the dehumanization of CEOs: those CEOs have a choice to take those positions and make those decisions. So they are stepping into an already dehumanized role with their eyes open. Sure, they don’t deserve to be killed without a trial and due process for their actions, but the dehumanization aspect is a direct result of their informed choices.
In the meantime, Bryce and Dane Thompson just spent their first Christmas without their father.
It's remarkable to me that this sentence is intended to be the emotional gut punch at the end of the same article containing this prior text:
Other insurers are for-profit companies, like UnitedHealthcare.
...
UnitedHealthcare surely makes some horrifying decisions and outright mistakes, and even when it rules out coverage based on a defensible calculus of costs and benefits, that can be a devastating thing for patients and their loved ones to hear.
In other words, UHC is responsible for a great many "first Christmas" moments, but those are OK in aggregate, because they are for profit.
The entire article is predicated on the idea that someone needs to profit from rationing healthcare, so it may as well be these guys. NO, there is not a reason for someone to profit from acting as the middleman to deny care my doctor already determined I needed.
No one can plausibly argue that the murder of Thompson will do a single thing to fix the problems in America’s health-care system.
It already has. Countless articles dissecting the issue, some in agreement with this article, some not. A true conversation about it unlike any in recent years. Someone in DC has to have noticed that the left and right have unified on this one, and I'm not sure what they'll do with that info, but something, I hope. And everyone else who is grossly profiting from the death and suffering of others has been and continues to be forced to consciously examine that reality. They can't turn away from the externalities of their decisions any more. I'm not sure what that's going to change, but an inflection point like that on an entire industry is going to have some kind of impact for sure.
To be fair, the author looks like he could easily be mistaken as a ghoulish CEO walking down 5th avenue. The guy has certainly made a career being their mouth piece.
There's an argument to be made there but this article did not make that argument. This was just a poorly-reasoned romp through a garden of logical fallacies. I'm surprised that this was printed by The Atlantic, I thought they were better than that.
They're owned by Laurene Powell Jobs... They're not better than that.
She's just as much of a big piece of shit as Steve Jobs was.
What is going on with The Atlantic lately? I thought that it and The Guardian were the last hold-outs of news enshittification, but it seems like both have succumbed as well. Is there anything at all left then, besides Jon Stewart obviously but other than him?
Is there anything at all left...
For now, there is National Public Radio and the Associated Press.
Author is perhaps overly humanizing the CEO while not humanizing all the victims of the health care system enough.
One could write an article that was simply short biographies of everyone who died because of health insurance profits. I imagine, like the wealth to scale page, people would have an emotional journey reading it as it kept going and going.
Is that the hed or The Atlantic's new tagline?
Pearls made of solid capitalism.
The Atlantic published an article last year saying the murder of Gazan children should not be considered murder because it was legal under Israeli law. They are shameless imperial Zionist pieces of shit, and that article earned them a place in my boycott list.
Healthcare should never ever be a system based on making profit. It should be based on keeping the people as healthy as possible and limit suffering. This means strict government control and that's something America isn't fond off.