The cold-blooded murder of Brian Thompson, the CEO of United HealthCare is a deeply immoral thing. In spite of the vitriol coming out from under the rocks of the social media world attacking him and the industry he represented, it solves nothing and cannot be countenanced nor alibied because his company made $22.3B last year selling medical insurance instead of high-quality widgets.
At the same time, we cannot lose sight of the fact that tens of thousands of Americans die every year because of the health insurance industry. I also mourn for them. But I don’t see any press or media coverage or concern for their deaths.
The case can be made that United HealthCare merely follows the laws written by Congress; they simply play by the rules. And that would probably be correct. But we cannot ignore the fact that those rules allow the the health care industry to net hundreds of billions every year while patients go bankrupt from medical debt. But the real culprit here isn’t even Congress or the money in politics.
Unlike every other nation in the world that is part of the Western economy (and many that aren’t), America, the richest nation in the world, does not offer its citizens universal health care. That’s because we have been lied to for decades by Conservatives, – whose job it is to protect and provide for the enhancement of the profits of American industry – that universal health care is really “socialized medicine.” And that anything remotely connected to socialism reeks of communism and is evil. And for the most part, we have believed this travesty.
Therefore, we have allowed its consequences.
At the time of this writing we do not know the motive of the shooter in the murder of Mr. Thompson. Officials are sure it was a targeted action, and from the words found etched on the assassin’s ejected bullet casings, we can reasonably assume Thompson’s killing had something to do with the company he headed and the inequities of the system it represents. And if that is the case, should we wish to search for the the real culprit in this heinous act of murder, we have only to look no further than the mirror.
The culprit is us.
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