Summary
Reddit’s r/medicine moderators deleted a thread where doctors and users harshly criticized murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
Comments, including satirical rejections of insurance claims for gunshot wounds, targeted UHC’s reputation for denying care to boost profits.
Despite the removal, similar discussions continue, with medical professionals condemning UHC’s business practices under Thompson’s leadership, which a Senate report recently criticized for denying post-acute care.
Thompson, shot in what appears to be a targeted attack, led a company notorious for its high claim denial rates, fueling ongoing debates about corporate ethics in healthcare.
It’s kinda hilarious watching billionaire owned media try to suppress the fact that absolutely no one feels bad for the CEO. The same thing happened when some billionaires decided to visit the Titanic, and after the Trump assassination attempt. The memes afterwards were top notch
Everyone is so fed up with this country and the shit is this close 🤏🏼 to the fan
I’m still absolutely flabbergasted at how quickly we all moved on from Trump literally getting clipped in an attempt on his life.
They tried to muster some outrage and solidarity, but most of us just shrugged and went, “Damn. Oh well, maybe next time.”
Then the next time came, and it was even more disappointing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What was it the IRA told Thatcher? “You have to be lucky every single time. We only have to be lucky once.”
That’s fuckin metal
They tried to get her so many times and each time they were foiled by more and more lucky series of events.
Reverse Archduke Franz Ferdinand
He didnt get clipped. He cut his hand on glass, on the ground, and didnt realize it, then transfered the blood to his head. Thats why his ear was miraculously fully recovered like a week later when he was caught on camera without bandages.
No, it was just his superior genetics that allowed him to heal quicker than a normal person would.
We have the best ears…
Getting downvoted for an obvious sarcastic ribbing? For shame, Internet.
…Trumperine???
OMG, this was the first thing that came to my head too and you beat me by 2 minutes
Interesting. Got a source for that?
nothing besides the picture of him with blood on the side of his head with no visible injury, and another one with a bandage off a little after a week after the shooting with not a single sign of injury (ears dont heal that fast), and the fact that he absolutely refused to let anyone see his wound or the medical records.
Trump is an opportunistic aggrandizemer.
If he legitimately got even the slightest injury, he would have been ripping the bandage off 15 times a day and pointing at it and screaming about what the “evil woke liberal mob” did to him. And he didnt.
he barely acknowledge it at all after a few days. Does that sound like the Trump you know? The trump that ruminates and obsesses for years, even decades over perceived and imagined slights? That constantly comments on them, regardless of relevance to the topic at hand?
My guess is that a piece of teleprompter glass grazed an old man’s ear. Ears are known to be bloody, moreso on older people. But there’s no way in fucking hell he actually took a bullet, he wouldn’t even have that ear.
So yeah, your assessment fits.
Yeah, I figured it was from a dozen burly secret service guys wrestling a 78 year old man to the ground.
Damn…
Funny I always thought he was juicing like they do in professional wrestling, they cut themselves just a little bit to make it look like they’re injured.
Blood splatters from the human shields sitting behind the sack of shit.
Weird, since I didn’t see blood on his hands (especially his right hand).
Are we really starting conspiracy theories that are already going the direction of “yeah, but was it really an assassination attempt???”
I don’t have any love for the guy, but holy shit, I don’t need Lemmy starting conspiracy theories. Back to reddit if you do.
The sympathy lasted two days. I was expecting maybe a week.
You guys had sympathy?
No but I saw sympathy
Found it hiding under the couch, but squashed it with my shoe real quick.
Biden dropped out shortly after and that dominated the news cycle.
Gotta admit in hindsight, that was funny as hell.
He got to pose for like a week like a badass and then quietly remove the ear bandaid.
IIRC, the final verdict was that he smashed his ear on an agents holster. It wasn’t a bullet or shards of teleprompter glass.
flabbergasted in a good way?
You know I’m honestly not sure. Mostly good I think?
Sidestepping the issue entirely of the act itself - strictly speaking more about the news cycle around it. I don’t know that it needed much more extensive, exhausting coverage. Just given the nature of the news currently, you gotta admit, surprising right? I’m not even trying to imply any sort of conspiracy about why it wasn’t more popular. I’m just saying, I think news cycle would’ve latched on harder if they could have, but the public gagged and said no thanks, we’re simply not interested, causing them to shift focus.
I both applaud the shooter for trying and am simultaneously pissed at him for not being a better shot.
Its also hilarious that lemmy.world admins/mods did the same thing with early threads about this yesterday, nuking individual comments celebrating Thompson’s death and 24 hr instance wide banning the users that made those comments, then within 2 hrs they undid the bans, and by today seem to have just given up trying.
I mean it’s pretty obvious most people are in favor of making yesterday a National Holiday. It’s not like the more outspoken people were in the minority in their feelings.
Even the most vile MAGAs have probably been screwed over by insurance companies, or at the very least had to spend valuable hours of their life fighting for something they should have already had.
I mean it’s pretty obvious most people are in favor of making yesterday a National Holiday.
Nobody Saw Nothin’ Day.
I mean it’s pretty obvious most people are in favor of making yesterday a National Holiday.
Brought to you by my being awake when I don’t want to be:
Remember, remember! The fourth of December, A U-H-C CEO shot; I know of no reason Why the U-H-C season Should ever be forgot!
Hell yeah!
I’m only seeing one upvote and one downvote lol
I think people are having a hard time deciding whether to celebrate your comment or not
Bit of an ambiguous one, when I look back at it myself lol
Taking a look at the recent modlog, as well as other comments around here, it looks like they’re trying to find the right balance for what’s okay and what has crossed the line.
There are an alarming number of comments that are actively encouraging murder and the amount of upvotes that even the worst of those comments receive is sickening.
Something something “kill the billionaires… in minecraft” /s
There are an alarming number of comments that are actively encouraging murder and the amount of upvotes that even the worst of those comments receive is sickening.
Can you really blame people, though? The poor and middle class been screwed and driven against each other by ultra-rich assholes for decades. Murder might not be the most ethical solution from a moral purist standpoint, but at least it has people talking and agreeing about the underlying problem.
You can both not blame people, AND also not allow speech like that.
For some people in might be self defence, who knows who has a treatable illness they were denied coverage for.
alarming number
Yeah, alsrmingly low
Billionaires who own the means of production trying to own the means of communication as well.
When they can’t, they’ll own the government, and outlaw it.
It’s like poetry.
The US mocked Trump for being shot at, then failed to keep him from being elected again.
Pretty good sign that people are not going to direct that anger towards actually fixing the problems.
My empathy for America was lost decades ago when literal children were gunned down in Sandy Hook.
We didn’t collectively mourn as a nation and do anything. Instead, some went to defend guns. Others went to blame the victims, the parents who are literally holding their lifeless child in their hands.
Lol, I appreciate that final line in your comment. So many of us were that close back in 2020… Now things are slated to be worse, and I think I speak for at least millions of Americans when I say we are just fucking over it.
When we’ve tossed out any semblance of justice in our country at the highest levels, literally ruling that the president is immune from all prosecution (you know, like a fucking king), then asshole corpos that indirectly murder countless people getting gunned down doesn’t exactly concern us. In fact, this sort of thing genuinely seems more just than what our highest courts are allowing.
Shit is fucked up in this country, and I don’t think many of us want to pretend otherwise any longer. I’m not advocating violence, but I definitely don’t think I’ll lose sleep over this situation.
Royalty has forgotten that laws are the peaceful alternative to the guillotine. If you stop enforcing laws that protect the peasants what do you think is going to happen?
I’ll quote something that I heard from someone earlier today. “I don’t advocate violence, but I also can’t pretend that justice was not served.”
I disagree. I think it just hit it. Think about how shooters crave noteriaty. Think of how this assain is seen as a hero. No. This is just the beginning.
I think too many people saw this as a kind of justice that the courts have never and will never provide.
I don’t advocate violence. I also don’t think this has a different outcome.
I actually agree (with you.) This could be the start of a movement.
Hopefully this hero is protected and makes a clean escape. The response from law enforcement is disproportionate because it was a rich person that died instead of someone like us.
Remember, they wouldn’t bat an eye if any of us were killed in this manner. It happens all the time and goes unsolved all the time because law enforcement primarily exists to protect rich people.
I’m anxious for what happens next. If this spirals, we’re about to start living in some “interesting times”.
I think the only thing stopping people from posting even worse inflammatory shit about it is not wanting to show up on an FBI watchlist or something later on.
Literally the only reason. I’ve thought of some goooood ones.
It’s not worth it. No matter how hot the meme would be. Let it sizzle in your mind meatball. Drinking in the basement and playing Factorio is more important
Been mostly on Cyberpunk lately but pretty spot on
Let us take a moment to consider how long the list has grown these past few days.
Maybe just keep track of who isn’t on the list instead?
I think it makes more sense to use the 🤏 emoji in that context, rather than the Italian gesture.
Buttah we’reah theese aclosa…! 🤌🏼
where are the bot writers when you need them. We need italian-accents-as-a-service bot.
I would love to see an Australian or Scottish accent bots.
Jar-jar, is that you?
Fixed :)
Really? Somehow it appears unchanged on my end. And the last edit is before my comment. Lemmy bug?
Nah dude, this shit finally hit the fan. Just wait. Terrorism works. Look at what bin Laden did to this country - is it not obvious to everyone alive before and after that he won? He wanted to destroy America and he did. What this was is an act of terrorism, and it’s going to work. Corrupt leaders all over the spectrum are getting nervous. Americans are armed to the teeth and pissed. It only takes a couple of lone wolves with intelligence and gun skills to do some major damage. And who doesn’t wanna be famous these days? I mean who doesn’t like this guy? I’d put him on the cover of time as person of the year. This is just the beginning of some very interesting times. I can’t believe it took this long.
And even more uplifting, this isn’t politically divisive. There isn’t going to be right vs left retribution over this. The entire political spectrum save for a few uppity pearl clutchers (mostly lib elites) are celebrating this.
School shootings are just a matter of course now, they’re not even newsworthy anymore unless there’s an Uvalde-level of utter incompetence involved. And even then, what happened? Nothing, nothing happened to the cowards who were complicit and accomplices to the murder of children by actively preventing people from around the killer. We’re told to get over it.
So, you know, if I had to choose between school children being murdered as a matter of course and evil profiteers who revel and flourish on the pain and suffering of everyday people being murdered as a matter of course, I’d definitely chose the latter. I wouldn’t then tell people to get over it, I’d tell people the system obviously need to be dismantled and rebuilt entirely.
My real preference would be that there are no evil profiteers who revel and flourish on the pain and suffering and that systems be functioning for the people in the first place, but unfortunately that’s not an option.
r/all is covered with positive press for the shooting. Anything getting removed would have to be pretty egregious.
It was just the News community.
News requires a email, and reddit wasn’t worth the effort. Lemmy is.
One medical doctor, whose identity the Daily Beast confirmed, commented with sympathy for Thompson’s family and said the killer should be charged with murder, but then wondered about the damage the CEO had done.
“I cannot even guess how many person-years UHC has taken from patients and their families through denials,” they wrote. “It has to be on the order of millions. His death won’t make that better, but it’s hard for me to sympathize when so many people have suffered because of his company.”
“What has bothered me the most is people that put «fiduciary responsibility» (eg profits) above human lives, none more so than this company as run by him," wrote another medical doctor, who also spoke to the Daily Beast to confirm their identity. “When other’s human lives are deemed worthless, it is not surprising to have others view your life of no value as well.”
These doctors know what’s up.
The level of greed is so much worse than any normal person understands. They do NOTHING. They aren’t medical field professionals, they don’t need to ever step foot in a hospital or clinic, they only inflate the cost, catastrophelicly with no insurrection, only horribly when you’re with them, create endless loopholes to deny coverage with, and use non medical, non trained or consulted opinions and reasoning to justify it, and they are all too educated to not know full well they are lying to get out of paying any bill ever.
Denying someone with crippling medical issues access to treatment with lies and misinformation to shave one more sliver of profit for a parasitic middle man is so many orders of magnitude above evil it’s breath taking.
Denying someone with crippling medical issues access to treatment with lies and misinformation to shave one more sliver of profit for a parasitic middle man is so many orders of magnitude above evil it’s breath taking.
Well said. Really wish people understood this better and how utterly psychopathic and heartless the entire idea of “maximizing profits” in this context is.
Put another way - a for-profit insurance firm is a weird kind of company that does better when it refuses to provide what its customers pay for. It’s not some surprising or counterintuitive result, it’s baked into the business model, on purpose. That’s deeply malignant just at a glance, and it’s all we really need to know when deciding whether it should be involved with healthcare.
You know what’s really insane? Before the ACA was passed, there was no federal requirement for how much insurance companies had to pay out on healthcare costs. The ACA set a minimum of 85%, so no less than 85% of premiums has to actually go toward paying for medical services.
Before that, they could literally just pocket 75 cents for every premium dollar if they wanted to with zero legal repercussions. I guarantee we’d be on our way there if the ACA were never passed.
For-profit health insurance should be illegal. Same thing with for-profit hospitals. I’ve read stories about doctors whose hospitals were bought by for-profits or VCs and turned into patient mills where they’re forced to push unnecessary elective surgeries and provide the bare minimum of care to maximize profits.
A healthy population is good for society and it should be something we invest in. We shouldn’t make a business out of someone getting sick, and then another business out of charging then exorbitant amounts of money for getting treatment, and then ANOTHER business to harass them because they can’t pay that exorbitant amount.
You’re absolutely right, I did kind of momentarily forget that, even having lived through it. They could also just deny care or coverage for “pre-existing conditions” and just drop you as a customer as soon as you get a major illness. And guess what, they did! That’s maybe the most egregious, but hey, we’re not lacking for contenders.
The ACA felt like a serious change for good in this country at the time. And I gotta say, watching the way it got ratfucked, misrepresented, deliberately destroyed…I dunno, it was heartbreaking. I think it showed me what we were in for, I guess, almost a straight line passing through that and other things like Citizens United, repeal of Dodd Frank, and everything else that led to today. Some of those I can’t fault everyone for being unfamiliar with, but damn.
Seeing how we responded to the ACA in particular as a nation was really telling. I knew idiots whose lives got directly measurably better by using it for their own insurance, and still thought it should go and voted for the folks who said they’d get rid of it. What do you even do there? Sad stuff.
deleted by creator
Insurance is not unlike gambling, but gambling seems comparatively more fair and less insidious.
Greed is common throughout history. One might say it’s human.
I disagree. The worst monsters wear human faces. At the top, you have the dragons with their hoards. The billionaires. The owner class. The ones who just accumulate. Then you have the dragon’s monsters. They may well be far worse than the Dragons themselves, but the dragons just demand more, they don’t care how. These monsters line up to take a bit of the hoard. The more they can deliver the dragons and their fellow monsters, the more they get themselves.
And what do the monsters do? They lie. They cheat. They swindle and con. They budge their way into things in the phrase of “efficiency” and “improvement.”
I’m sure quite literally in many cases
As do the nurses
I have been following the news about Brian Thompson’s assassination in New York, and I am astounded by the flood of sympathy the media has poured out for him. Why? This man spent his entire career working tirelessly to deny healthcare to millions of Americans, all in the name of lining his own pockets and enriching shareholders. Yet the media praises him for his “kindness” and “generosity.” Let me be clear: pushing your company’s claim denial rate to nearly double that of your most cold-hearted competitors, bankrupting families through deceptive fine print and delay tactics, is not kindness, and it is not generosity. No, setting up boiler-room style offices with denial scoreboards is one of the most inhuman things I can imagine.
I spent nearly a decade writing software to help hospital systems fight insurance claim denials, and I can tell you, these insurers are getting better at it every year. They deny even the most justified claims, banking on the fact that most people won’t have the energy, resources, or will to fight back. And for the majority, they’re right. We had a team of a dozen nurses and PAs working alongside twice as many analysts. These were people who knew the system inside and out. We knew the deadlines, the bureaucratic jargon, the documentation required, and we tracked every claim meticulously. But even armed with all that knowledge and experience, we couldn’t win them all. On a good month, we might win two-thirds of the denials. That was considered a success.
What’s even worse is that for every claim we fought, there were countless others that never even made it that far, we only got denials on services that actually happened. A patient’s doctor tells them they need surgery, but an insurer like UnitedHealth says no and that’s it. The patient gives up and it is difficult to imagine they get better.
If you’ve ever had a serious medical condition—and I pray you haven’t—you know how much it drains you, how it strips you of your will to do anything. When every moment is agony, you don’t have the strength to sit on hold for hours, fill out endless forms, or chase down a bureaucratic system designed to wear you down. All you want is to sleep, because that’s the only place that pain can’t find you. How many people have simply lacked the strength to fight back, and ultimately succumbed to their conditions? How many families have been driven into poverty, their lives torn apart by a single emergency, all because of these executives’ policies?
We all know someone who has been through a health insurance nightmare and we also know that while political changes could probably help this problem the reality now is that these people are making a choice to run their companies this way, knowing full well the impact of their greed and indifference.
Where are your tears, your headlines, for the thousands of people and families whose lives have been destroyed and whose loved ones have died because of these same executives?
Fuck censorship.
Rest in piss
“Rot in poverty” -UHC policy
Corporate Ethics
I made a large collection of screenshots from Facebook of people who had their claims denied by United Healthcare today if you want to really see how bad it is.
I was reading an article that quoted his wife about what a great guy he was. It reminded me of Ken Lay’s wife talking about her families liquidity problems after the Enron collapse. Hundreds of employees lost everything and she’s griping about liquidity.
We had that last year in Ohio when Householder was sentanced to 20 years prison for his roll in the bribery scandal. He cried about hard that was going to be on his family and the judge told him “you should have thought about that before accepting those bribes.”
Of course he is. It’ll only happen if he’s of some value to Trump. Everything with Donald Trump is transctional.
Fuck that guy. The worst part, we’re still paying for his fucking corrupt bullshit.
I saw one that had a different relative say he was an honest person and hard worker.
This honest person’s company had $290 billion in insurance premium revenue in 2023 and they had $22 billion in profit. I always knew insurance was a grift but holy fuck.
And the company rewarded him with a $10 million compensation package in 2023. No living person works hard enough in a single year to earn multiple lifetime’s of average worker wages.
Being honest and a hard worker could be used to describe a hit man. Working hard at something unethical isn’t a virtue.
cEoS wOrK tHe HaRdEsT!
Someone else in another thread said their friend inherited a billion dollars and is the hardest working person they’ve ever met and I honestly couldn’t help but laugh out loud.
I love reading Melon Husk’s claim that he works 100 hours a week. He’s the CEO of five companies, which means even if his claim is true, being a CEO is a 20-hour-a-week job.
i wonder what job the hardest working person they ever met does? gotta be something like alaskan crab fisher or deep sea welder. definitely not some bullshit email job.
“Hardest working” at pulling their own dick
Honestly 10M is pretty small for a CEO of a company that size (especially on 22B in profit).
United health group listed 5 executives in their def14a filing which details executive compensation of 5 executives. Brian was the 4th executive, the ceo of the united health group was awarded 23 million and then there were two others who got 16 million. Overall it came out to about 75 million. Which i agree is less than i was expecting for 22B profit but it is still multiple lifetime’s of wages for an average worker
They’ll probably have to offer more now.
I saw one that had a different relative say he was an honest person and hard worker.
CEO
Which one was it now?!
He may have been nice in some ways. She probably just wasn’t aware or chose not to think about the darker aspects of health insurance corporations and what it takes to make billions at the expense of people’s health care.
Also people tend to whine when their gravy train runs out of gravy.
His wife is a physical therapist so she has an intimate understanding of the health care system. I’m sure it’s turning a blind eye. The article I read described their home as a $1.5 million home in an exclusive Minneapolis suburb. She knew. Cognitive dissonance can be very powerful.
I’m sure he was a swell guy, a lot of fun at barbecues, dog lover and good with kids yada yada. Plenty of awful folks in history are like that. I hear Hitler was a fun guy who liked dogs and kids too.
…well not ALL kids but still
Ken Lay who tooooootally died before being sentenced and toooootally didn’t disappear into a foreign country
I see that a lot with out-of-touch folks, boomers especially.
Lets be real, one of the primary motivators for a woman to be with and stay with a man is if he can provide adequately for her offspring. I’m sure he was doing a great job at that.
one of the primary motivators for a woman to be with and stay with a man
I think you meant “female” lol.
Okay, I’ll bite. The reason women end up choosing to be with a man of means, and I am in no way saying that all or even most women want this, is because we often don’t/didn’t have the opportunity to gain those means ourselves which thereby impacted our ability to survive and control our own lives. This is due to the oppression of the very men that you think we seek. Over the course of thousands of years, men cultivated a world where they steadily sought, gained, and ever increasingly obtained as much power as possible. In order to gain more power for yourself or your group, you have to take away power from someone else.
One of the people or groups whose power was regularly stolen is women. I’m sure this was a slow transition over a long period of time, but it ended with a world where women were rarely allowed to gain the skills or implement what skills they had in order to earn money. If you don’t have the ability to earn money yourself, you are forced to be reliant on someone else who is allowed to earn money. My point being, if you want enough money for you and your children to survive, you basically had to marry as rich as you possibly could.
Enter the modern women’s rights movement. This is where financial freedom became incredibly important to women. We collectively realized that we, much like any other human beings in existence ever, wanted to be able to have some control of our lives, our families, and our fates. This is why we entered the workforce in droves. Women who were suffering under the control of men who beat them and their children, potentially raped them, or demeaned them regularly with the full acceptance and support of society, wanted a way out. The available options were pretty bleak, so we worked in solidarity to find another way to survive with both our physical safety and dignity intact. Now, as an obligatory caveat, not every man was/is oppressive to women. But, since men as a whole created these arbitrary restrictions on women’s lives, they are the ones who have to suffer the aftermath of this system of control that was developed, especially since they are the ones who continue to experience advantages and benefits because of those exact lingering effects.
Most women would prefer to be able to support themselves and their family while having their partner contribute equally, either through earning money or doing an equivalent share of the household/family tasks. But, since something that becomes systemic is difficult to remove, we are still trying to shake the ramifications of this exertion of control. I assure you, most women would rather have less money and more autonomy when given the option.
This brings me to the point you’re trying to make. If the “primary motivator” of a woman is to choose a man who can provide adequately for her offspring, it is only because of the lingering effects of historical oppression that men created in order to exert control over women. It’s very frustrating to be in a world that constantly tells you that you should be pursuing a partner with money so you can have a stable future, but then simultaneously reprimands you for actually making that choice. Just as it’s difficult, but required, to acquiesce to the control of the man who holds your money.
I don’t think it should be presented as though this woman is shallow or terrible for making such a choice. Who wouldn’t choose a life of stability over one of chaos or continual financial stress? I know many men who would make the same choice if offered it. Like you said, I’m sure he was doing a good job of providing for their family financially, but let’s not be too reductive about her choice to have him as a partner. You say it in such a way that you are not only chastising her for her choice of husbands but are chastising all women for prioritizing their and their children’s survival and safety. That is something that comes across as offensive to the entirety of my gender because it implies that we shouldn’t consider ourselves of value or of having worth.
You may be right that this woman chose the CEO of UHC as her husband because of his wealth and ability to support their children and family lifestyle. Most likely, she knew what her husband actually did for a living and it’s effect on the lives of others and chose to ignore or not look into the deaths, horrors, and financial destruction that were created by the company her husband controlled.
But, one way or another, let’s not reduce the struggle that women go through at the hands of historical, and often modern, men to blanketly imply that we are all naturally money hungry and that we are obviously all using men for our own gain. I’m going to go ahead and assume that women, including myself, disagree with such an unfair assumption.
I agree with everything you said - it was worded well and you inserted the exceptions and qualifiers to make your point in a generalization that allows outliers. I do, however, wonder about the women who consider financial stability as a (if not the) major factor when choosing a partner, because we tend to hear only the stories of gold diggers, etc. and not the stories of women who married for love and simply had the fortune of having a partner that was able to acquire significant means. I’m guessing that’s why the commenter you replied to said what they said. I’m sure the percentage is small, but those type of women give the rest of us a bad name.
The following is anecdotal, but I think still relevant: Speaking from personal experience, my husband is well educated, I love him to death, and he chooses to work in a job that is stable (meaning it’s hard for them to get rid of him unless he makes some serious errors) rather than working for some private firm where he can easily be paid double if not more. He makes enough for us to get by while I’m finishing up grad school. I’m proud of his moral compass; he always tries to do the right thing.
His cousin, gem that she is, has always openly bragged about how she only goes on dates if the man is paying, yada yada, and she ended up finding some desperate sap 15 years her senior with money to burn; the culture they are from values marriage, so a single man in his 40’s gets a lot of questions. Mind you, this is a woman who was fired from her job because she got caught breaking security protocol, blamed it on her cousin’s husband (saying he snitched on her because they worked for the same firm), caused a feud, and refused to take responsibility. She hasn’t held a job since, nor do I think she plans to, because they are now slum lords in Florida. Most of the family doesn’t like interacting with her, but she’s not the only one who has decided it’s easier for her to behave this way rather than work herself.
People change, and when someone marries for love and one of the partners begins to change for the worse, it usually causes strain in a marriage as the values each partner holds no longer line up. Some people seek help and try to fix things. I read somewhere that the CEO’s wife was a physical therapist? If so, she definitely knows how the medical industry works, and she should be very aware of the harm insurance companies are responsible for. If she chose to turn a blind eye instead of trying to aid him in seeing the error of his ways, it’s because she herself lost sight of what the value of a human life is. She can blindly talk about how great of a guy he was because she was benefitting from all the perceived good it brought to her personally. I would wager she married him before he became CEO, but the fact that she stayed married to someone who led a company directly responsible for so much suffering is an indication of her character.
Another example: Mackenzie left Bozo because she saw who he turned into. I’m sure she’d speak well of him, but I imagine she would acknowledge all of his poor qualities. It’s not unfair to judge anyone married to someone of high means (regardless of gender), because there’s always a choice, especially when those means are directly gained by punishing others. There is a risk in financial instability through divorce, but at the level of assets in the millions it’s not a really dire concern - courts can award alimony, split assets, etc. Or, you know, they could get a job.
The question becomes, “who are you as a person; do you value money above all else, or positively contributing to a society where the give and take is balanced?”
We can all work to uplift each other together but still criticize those who are working against us, even other women. I guess my point is that we shouldn’t judge her for marrying into money, but we absolutely can judge her for her character if she chose to continue down this path.
Absolutely; I agree. I appreciate your thoughtful response. There are always going to be selfish people and users in every gender, and they do give the whole group a bad rap. I’m never going to say that all women are above the description the poster I replied to gave. And, like you said, we can call these specific people out while still uplifting others who don’t engage in such behavior.
The poster that I was replying to seemed like they had been burned by a person like that, and while I understand that it must be awful to experience being with someone who uses you only for what you can provide and that it can easily make you jaded, this particular post comes off like they have extended that bitterness to the entirety of women, whether or not those women have chosen (or seek) a partner with wealth. It’s frustrating to watch so many great women be reduced to greedy users, and I don’t want to allow the continuation of someone spouting blanket assumptions toward my gender without addressing it. That’s how I ended up with a multi-paragraph response to a simple statement.
But I absolutely agree with your assessment and really appreciate the thought and effort you put into it. It’s incredibly refreshing to be able to have an actual discussion about a topic.
Fuck Reddit and the life is cheap US healthcare system.
This is a really uncomfortable situation for me as a user and made me want to use Lemmy even more
Not a great decision from the moderators.
Hopefully, it encourages more platform attrition.
I do think about pitching Lemmy to Redditors annoyed by all this.
But that would require me to
-
Sign back up on Reddit
-
Post a comment that may get deleted
Not may, will. Power mods hate it when you pitch alternatives they have no control over.
Lemmy has been pitched numerous times on Reddit without deletion.
-
Watch people join Lemmy, Doxx people and make death threats then grab their pearls when they realize you can’t do that here either lol.
“We are paid by CEOs. Better side with them.”
“You’re moderator; you don’t get paid at all!”
Happens on Lemmy too.
They made it clear site wide that you can’t support/celebrate this
At least one of the mods here was going heavy censorship in the initial thread here yesterday. I get it, we aren’t supposed to celebrate the death or suffering of other human beings. I’m not sure that rule applied to this individual though.
Death is always tragic… I don’t care if the guy is a billionaire or not, he or she had family.
I would however agree that having such wealth is clearly perverse and clearly done at the expense of others. You don’t get that rich by being kind hearted and generous…
In any case, if you become CEO of a business that has sloppy morals and essentially encourage parasitic behavior… Don’t expect to be loved… Or surprised that you may get shot…
It’s like being the CEO of Blackwater… No one that has clean hands takes that position…
No one becomes a CEO by accident, it was a choice and ambition to become that level of scum…
Now imagine if companies could only give a maximum of around 2000$
I wonder how that would change the landscape of American politics
If Reddit mods (or lemmy mods for that matter) are overwhelmed by the workload of a thread, they should lock it, and clean it up. not delete it!
