Summary
Progressive lawmakers view the online praise for the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson as a sign of deep public frustration with the U.S. healthcare system.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called it a “wake-up call” highlighting resentment over financial and health precarity, while Sen. Bernie Sanders emphasized that anger reflects the belief that healthcare is a human right.
Though all lawmakers condemned the murder, some progressives argue it underscores systemic issues like claim denials.
Calls for healthcare reform have intensified amid public outrage.
Agree, though we’ve had so many wake up calls lately…none seem to land.
Too many people still chasing the American Dream, scared to death of being woke.
To paraphrase George Carlin: they call it the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.
Progressive lawmakers view the online praise for the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson as a sign of deep public frustration with the U.S. healthcare system.
It’s not just the healthcare system
Agreed, and also it’s not just “frustration”. Their choice of words is a sugar coating.
We need to stop the needless CEO killings by switching to universal healthcare! Think of all the CEO lives we could save by doing this!
At risk of going off topic, it wouldn’t matter of Bernie or AOC or someone to the left of them had run for every open position.
The Democrat’s problem was campaigning on a high horse like its 1950, instead of seeding propaganda in social media. It’s the delivery, not the message, and they are going to keep losing until we get a “liberal Trump” shameless enough to break that mould.
The wake-up call for me was watching post election interviews of ostensibly educated college students from fairly liberal campuses… and now, there is no govt incentive to reign that in.
What exactly are you basing this on? Harris ran a terrible campaign with the usual Democratic half-measure policy proposals and lost. That should hardly be a surprise. There is no evidence to say that a populist Democrat like Bernie or AOC couldn’t win.
What if Harris had made the whole campaign into a referendum on the broken healthcare system? It turns out that that’s where the Republican voters she was trying to woo were hiding all along.
What if Harris had made the whole campaign into a referendum on the broken healthcare system?
Wouldn’t have mattered. Trump would have just countered with a similar populist angle, and by the time it was filtered down to voters, it would still be pro-Trump.
To be more specific about the college students, I saw them coo and rave about how “strong” Trump feels, or list off all these (seemingly) blatant lies about policy or what either candidate going to do, a few I recognized online, and again this is ostensibly a well connected and “smart” demographic. At that point, I realized their world is totally shaped by what their favorite feeds and influencers tell them, and this is a space being won by the GOP:
https://www.axios.com/2024/11/18/news-influencers-conservative-tiktok-youtube
I actually kinda feel that someone like Bernie may have had enough youth appeal to have a somewhat organic version of that happen. During the 2016 primaries, a decent amount of memes and online talk were spawned by him/his campaign.
Definitely agree that delivery is extremely important though, campaigning on helping workers while appearing elite and out of touch just makes people consider you a liar or to be looking down at people.
Unless lawmakers get their heads out of their asses and do something useful, the only change that will come from this “wake-up call” is that companies will try to obfuscate their executive roster and those executives will travel with a security detail paid for by denying more insurance claims.
denying more insurance claims
You say that like that wasn’t their top priority the day before the shooting.
I don’t mean to antagonize, but I dislike even passive implications that they’ve shown us any quarter or will stop being nice now.
They were always for maximum murder for maximum profit. At no point does anyone in charge go “well if they’ve paid their premiums for decades and never used their plan at all, let them have the surgery” if they have any technicality to prevent it.
No amount of Good boy/girl reverence towards them has or will result in anything positive for their customers/marks.
That’s bad for business. They never used kid gloves, so they have nothing to take off. There was 0 good faith being exercised between private health insurers and their customers on December 3rd.
If anything, what happened helped a few BlueCross patients not be billed tens of thousands for anasthesia for their approved surgeries after the fact, at least for a few months until they institute it anyway if this moment passes without becoming a movement. Unlike goodwill, they do seem to respond to fear.
