penningtron wrote: Thu Dec 05, 2024 4:44 pm

Frankie99 wrote: Thu Dec 05, 2024 4:16 pm you realize this man was 100% a net negative on society

Sure but there was a team of people feeding him these awful policies, and a board of directors happily giving their approval. There are dozens of other fleece vest dudes who will gladly take this dude's place (with beefed up security next time) so what was the point of all this.

I would argue that, by extension, any of us with a 401k, IRA, or mutual funds are just as complicit. How much of your retirement is tied up in healthcare? Insurance? Pharmaceuticals?

I've said this before in other threads where someone awful dies and normal people celebrate and pious people clutch their pearls:

Saying "hooray" when someone shitty dies has no weight on any scale of being or causing a problem. Nobody gets hurt, no needle is moved in any direction. Expressing feelings about a death has no influence on the death, because they're dead already. It works both ways; condolences don't bring anyone back or make the person who "gives" condolences (how do you give something you can't see or measure?) a better person, just like saying "Fuck Kissinger, glad he's dead, may he rot in hell" doesn't mean or change anything about the speaker. We're humans, we got feelings, and it's healthy to let them out, no harm no foul.

Anthem Blue Cross announced they would not be pursuing a new policy of only partial/timed coverage for anesthesia during surgeries in 3 US states.

Great lil coincidence.

gotdamn wrote: Thu Dec 05, 2024 6:20 pm Anthem Blue Cross announced they would not be pursuing a new policy of only partial/timed coverage for anesthesia during surgeries in 3 US states.

Great lil coincidence.

They blamed it on "misinformation" being spread at the moment and will undoubtedly try it or something similar again once the internet has moved on to something else.

Teacher's Pet wrote: Thu Dec 05, 2024 11:59 am When the covid vax had been available for a while and the blue state / red state covid death numbers began to diverge, it was darkly tempting to find joy in the demise of stupid Trumpers.

Instead I found myself angry and disgusted at the whole system for even allowing such a grim debacle to unfold in the first place. This feels a bit like that.

then i have good news for you. there was no one-to-one correlation between trump voters and excess mortality. it was cherry picking the data to fit a narrative.

It is a good thing when evil shit-scum are not allowed to live out their lives and enjoy the wealth they accumulated from causing unimaginable suffering. Nothing anyone says will change my mind. His family/kin will enjoy the blood money, I'm sure. True fucking parasites. Health care is probably the #1 stressor in my life. I have foregone testing, checkups and treatments and rationed medication even in times when I WAS well insured. Lockheed can build defense systems in addition to WMD's...but there is literally nothing but the blackest evil to be found in for-profit healthcare and I hope they all fucking die.

Sounds like some of y'all must have shook your heads and clicked your tongues when Jesse Pinkman crushed Todd's windpipe with his bare hands.

Geiginni wrote: Thu Dec 05, 2024 6:09 pm I would argue that, by extension, any of us with a 401k, IRA, or mutual funds are just as complicit. How much of your retirement is tied up in healthcare? Insurance? Pharmaceuticals?

A strictly regulated pharma industry would be a net positive for humanity. Granted, it doesn't currently work that way, but some good does come out of it. Insurance is pure evil. Minimizing care to maximize profits.

Not crap.

This man was directly responsible for helming a company that created Harrowing, Dickensian suffering. In honor of the massive, outsized profit that he scored for his shitty company, he got his wig split.

I work in healthcare. Did for a year, then had some time off. Just picked up a new job. I work with people that would be written off and left to die if is wasn't for state medical programs. These people would be dead if these companies got their way. I would be dead if these companies got their way. Would you?

If you're an American, you've bumped up against the shambling beast of healthcare. It's been designed this way to extract maximum profit for the minimum amount of effort. A crucial component to you or I receiving healthcare in this dipshit nation is tied to a boardroom filled to the brim with execs looking at bars and graphs that represent me, your family, your cancer treatment, your biopsy, my clients getting their meds in sufficient quantities at acceptable time.

This person went home and kissed his wife and kids and bought them gifts with our blood, sweat, and tears. He bought extravagant, wild things that I couldn't possibly imagine affording. The concept of his baseline level of comfort is probably something I'll never experience outside of pictures or videos. He did that with full knowledge that the things he did reduced people to lines and numbers. And he could live with that. I guess not forever.

He lived with the knowledge that he was doing this. He died because he could have done something, but there was no profit incentive.


This person should not be mourned. You mourn people that mean something.

Younger Grammy would have been chomping at the bit over this. But now not so much.

Our economic system corrupts the human spirit. People like Brian Whatshisname aren’t born evil. They don’t even think they are, they just become cogs in the machine and often have little self awareness of the suffering they cause or if they do they think it’s a necessary part of a system with “no alternative”.

I’ve seen this over and over with friends back in New Zealand, which is culturally far more like America than England. Friends from school (I went to a fancy school) moving into corporate life and moving up the ladder, some to very high positions, super socially liberal in particular towards gay people… some of us ended up gay (who’da thought) but on matters of taxation and some social policy they’ve swung hard to the right, often libertarian, or just basically resenting every cent they pay and doing everything possible to minimise their taxes. But they live in worlds that just replicate and accelerate their fiscal conservatism. These aren’t bad people, they’re people trapped in a system that happens to advance them.

We don’t need to live in such rapacious societies.

I’ve probably made my point very clumsily here.

Gramsci wrote: Fri Dec 06, 2024 4:24 am These aren’t bad people, they’re people trapped in a system that happens to advance them.

They're not trapped. Lost, you could argue, but not trapped. They choose to be where they are.