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An Astonishing Level of Dehumanization (slrpnk.net)

submitted 1 week ago by meyotch@slrpnk.net to c/politics@beehaw.org

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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.

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[–] octopus_ink@lemmy.ml 22 points 1 week ago

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.