The New York Post reports that wanted posters targeting CEOs of insurance and other health care companies are appearing in Manhattan. Some say “HEALTH CARE CEOS SHOULD NOT FEEL SAFE” and include the words “DENY,” “DEFEND,” and “DEPOSE,” which are the same words that the cute assassin who shot UnitedHealthcare’s CEO wrote on his bullets. The posters also feature each executive’s salary, and some have appeared with the photos of CEOs of non-health care companies, like Goldman Sachs. ABC reports some posters say “UnitedHealthcare killed everyday people for the sake of profit. As a result Brian Thompson was denied his claim to life. Who will be denied next?”
This bloodlust for capitalists has been fueled by social media as well as the current administration’s rhetoric blaming “corporate greed” for inflation. About half the country voted for a Presidential candidate who flogged that line, and New York City overwhelmingly voted for her while accepting the claim that the supporters of her opponent were the violent and dangerous ones. You know…
I hope I’m wrong, but I doubt the current outbreak of virtual applause for this assassination is a minor and insignificant outbreak of ugliness, as when some people expressed satisfaction at the death of Barbara Bush. I think this is part of a serious and insidious form of ethics rot in the culture nurtured by irresponsible politicians, propagandists and “influencers.”
Ethics Alarms 
And the entire American academy.
I consider these posters incitement to violence, to be frank. Someone on Facebook wanted to know if Mr. Thompson was guilty of crimes against humanity. This is the mindset that has been leaking into the minds of citizens for years and years due to the relentless media propaganda campaign against the so-called Haves.
Regardless of who you are, there are always going to be some people who have more money than you do. There are also always going to be people who have less money than you do. If you think someone who has more doesn’t deserve it, it’s likely there are people out there who think you don’t deserve what you have.
Who died as a result of the Goldman-Sachs CEO? See how they quickly went from the CEOs of one industry to the CEO of another? My earlier comment on another post asked what would happen if some climate change hysteric decides the CEO of GM or Ford don’t deserve to live because of the deaths he’s been assured will be caused in a few years due to carbon emissions? Or the CEO of McDonald’s or Burger King who serve food made from carbon-emitting cattle that clogs the arteries of Americans every day? These posters are arguing for a license to kill. It’s as if Lenin were behind the scenes directing the proletariat to kill factory owners and Kulaks.
When we decide it’s okay to take from those who have more than we think they need, we fuel the rationale behind insane laws incentivizing shoplifting and other crimes deemed victimless.
What a large step, but a predictable one, to take from stealing property to stealing lives. That’s a genie that’s hard to put back into the bottle.
And these are the people who condemned Mr. Penny as a vigilante? Why is everything that comes out of lefty’s mouth projection?
Some of us see the progressive income tax structure as “taking from those who have more than we think they need”… and its steroid-fueled brothers, “Wealth Tax” and “Unrealized Income Tax”.
The irony of all this is that the killer of the UHC CEO was a trust fund baby from a wealthy family. He would have ended up “eaten” by his less wealthy compatriots. For some reason I am reminded of Patty Hearst.
I bet President Obama is deleting all kinds of references to the ACA from his social media accounts right about now.
These posters would be IMHO incitement to violence and immediate threats to the individuals identified. As such, claims of free speech cannot be defended.
I read an interesting article on the history of health insurance from PubMed A (Brief) History of Health Policy in the United States – PMC. While it outlined the historical development it fails miserably with respect to why health care costs have risen so dramatically. The primary reason for health care inflation is that insurance decouples the patient from the provider when it comes to making choices. If health care providers were not compensated based on a fee for service model it stands to reason that the number of services would fall which would allow greater access to health care when actually needed. Having your primary care physician have you make an appointment every 3-6 months just to evaluate you is an appointment that cannot go to someone in need resulting in long wait times.
Health insurance is not longer used to protect you against catastrophic occurrences or specialized procedures because of an accident. Today health insurance has become a health maintenance contract through which your doctor (read mechanic) looks you over (visual inspection) 15-20 minutes, takes rudimentary measurements (checks your oil and tire pressure) and then documents that in your file at which point your insurer is billed several hundred dollars which the carrier discounts to maybe $150. Emergency rooms are a different matter and they charge more accordingly. Insurers incentivize their customers by making them pay a higher fee for using ER care than seeing their PC Physician. More often than not someone needing immediate care from their primary cannot get an appointment because they have scheduled other patients months ahead for those routine money maker visits. Those patients are referred to the ER.
The patient is not without fault though. Some relish their doctor visits because it is a way for them to get out of the house or for them to feel victimized by some awful health issue that was no fault of their own, other than their diet, lack of regular exercise, or age of course but we won’t mention that. Others engage in high risk behaviors that can result in high cost orthopedic surgeries. Moreover, the costs associated with criminal violence or drug abuse are called uncompensated care but that is untrue the costs of those are rolled into the costs we all must pay which is why a single tab of Tylenol can cost as much as an entire bottle from the local pharmacy when administered in the hospital.
We have 350 million people in the United States and insurers as well as the government pay through the nose to physicians, and hospitals from the premiums that are paid. Tens of thousands of employees from coding specialists in doctors offices to CNP’s and doctors who evaluate medical necessity within insurance firms derive billions in income from the capitalistic insurance industry. If we were to add up the costs of insurance firms management salaries I would bet that the combined total would not exceed 25 cents of every dollar paid in premiums.
Health insurance CEOs rake in millions: Here’s the top 10 list This is pure Scapegoating.
From the article linked above UnitedHealth Group had the highest market share at 18% in 2022. “The largest, UnitedHealth Group, covering almost 18% of market share, the report states. That’s 53 million people covered. Its CEO, Andrew Witty, took home $20,865,106 in 2022.” My calculation is that the CEO took .064 cents of each dollar of revenue as compensation. That means 99.5 cents out of every premium dollar went toward someone else’s income. Or, in actual per head insured count costs were 39 cents of the total premium paid by the insured went to the CEO.
Conversely, “Joseph Zubretsky, CEO of Molina Healthcare, with only 2.16% of the market, was paid $22,131,256. His company covers 4.2 million people”. Molina Healthcare had revenues of only 32 billion or one tenth that if UnitedHealth Group. You can do the math simply by multiplying the above by ten to get a rough estimate.
The problem is not health care executive salary costs the problem is that health care has gotten to become a business among physicians and the hospitals with which these physician groups associate. Elisabeth Rosenthal Explains How U.S. Health Care Became Big Business : Shots – Health News : NPR
No one complains that doctors can charge 3-400 dollars to meet with you for less than 1/2 hour because the doctors are the ones who relieve your actual or perceived pain. We are unwilling to drive to another location for a high cost test because doctors have lobbied to allow every large medical establishment to be allowed to have all types of underutilized equipment such as Cat scanners or other tomographic equipment. There used to be a certificate of need to get permission to obtain these diagnostic jewels.
We do not consider the fact that the insurer is doing what it can to keep costs down but as long as the patient never has to worry that he or she can go to the doctor as often as they desire and pay only a minimal amount for the service they maintain their ignorance regarding the entire business model and only blame the companies to which they pay their premiums. They never consider that they are part of the problem and as long as we have so called “health care advocates spewing nonsense as that below, the public will willingly remain ignorant.
“I’m not an expert in executive compensation. I don’t know how this compares to executive compensation, but it certainly doesn’t seem fair,” said Sean King, acting state healthcare advocate.
“When these executives are bringing home millions of dollars a year in compensation, when more than 40% of adults in America are carrying medical debt that they can’t pay, a third of Americans can’t cover emergency expenses of $400 or more,” he said. “So it doesn’t doesn’t seem fair when you look at it from that perspective.”
Great comment and analysis. I had Obamacare for a couple years through the Marketplace before I turned 65 and had to get Medicare.
I was less than impressed with my choices. Between the monthly premiums and deductibles, I think I would have to incur over $20k in medical expenses before my insurance would start to pay anything at all.
And saying that I got a subsidy for the monthly premiums is not really an answer. The government pays the bill for that, which means all of you were paying my health insurance premiums. I’m making more now, meaning I get to pay taxes that will go to someone else’s health insurance.
That’s the ultimate in being disconnected — if you pay nothing for your insurance, why not go to the ER for care? It’s not like the hospital can really come after you effectively.
I don’t have an answer — I doubt if Trump does, and I am certain Harris didn’t.
I do have hopes for DOGE, but those two face a Herculean task.
Currently, healthcare is 20% of our economy. LPN’s make more money with their 1-year degree than a physics Ph.D. earns after 20 years at a university. The salaries are obscene for the level of education and experience required. This is directly due to the price distortion caused by insurance. Before health insurance, the medical community had to charge what people could pay. Health insurance, which started as a premium service for top employees, paid more than that. More and more people demanded it, and the price inflation increased. Now, we won’t be able to get the physicians to work for less than $400,000/year. Well, most people can afford to pay a $400,000 worker for ANYTHING. So, the only way to fix this is with a severe disruption to the current system.
Why? The AMA determines how many physicians can be trained in US med schools and they don’t want that number to increase (accreditation). The med school charge insane amounts of money for a $25,000/year education (they use typical science professors and large lectures for most courses), so the new physicians have massive college debt. If you lower the salaries, people won’t want to go into medicine because of the high debt load and most of the current physicians will just retire rather than accept lower salaries. On top of that, much of the money is siphoned off to the high-paid medical bureaucracy that now exists and that has grown much faster than the medical providers.
So, if you cut the cost of healthcare, you will immediately have a vast shortage of providers, you will have to fight the AMA to get more providers trained, colleges will go bankrupt left and right because the excessive fees from the med schools are being used to prop up the financials of the university, and people won’t want to go into the field because the driving motivation currently is the money. On top of that, our K-12 education is so poor that few of our college students are capable of becoming healthcare providers and we are making due with what we have. Then you will have a massive bureaucracy of medical managers who are required by mountains of current regulations and who will hold the system hostage.
Other than that, however, there aren’t many problems fixing healthcare.
In general terms, the casual bloodlust and moral derangement makes me think of an old line that I copied down from Solzhenitsyn’s _Gulag Archipeligo_, somewhere.
I have some notes, somewhere, from reading portions of that work. I cannot access my notes currently.
To paraphrase freely from my memory…
“Czarism died not in the street-fighting of 1917 but decades earlier. Czarism began to die when respectable people refused to shake hands with gendarmes in the street, when a prison term became a badge of honor in good families.”
What he is referring to is erroneous belief, common among the morally unhinged intelligentsia, that the Old Regime was so corrupt it needed to be brought down with indiscriminate violence against authority. There was a notion that random violence against authority figures was justified in order to bring down the Czarist Regime.
Solzhenitsyn was very conservative in many ways. He periodically reminded the reader that the newly empowered Communists executed more people in a month or two than the Czars had executed under Russian law during the whole previous century.
Similar things might be said about Iran under the Shah compared to what happened under the ayatollahs. Or France under the Old Regime compared to the what happened after the Revolution gained speed.
charles w abbott
rochester NY
Doesn’t this just echo all the times our Democratic politicians said that Trump supporters shouldn’t feel ‘safe’ at any time? Doesn’t this just echo all the DEI people who said white people (Nazi’s) shouldn’t feel ‘safe’? Doesn’t this just echo all the times the pro-Palestinian protesters said that Jews shouldn’t feel ‘safe’? Remember all the rhetoric against ‘the unvaccinated’ and ‘vaccine deniers’?
Nothing to see here, just Democrats being Democrats.