That feeling you’re feeling right now? The one where you’re scared, at every moment of every day, at least a little, sometimes a lot, but never not scared?
Yeah, the people you’re scared of feel that from about age five until they die, for all manner of reasons. They know how to go on with that fear inside them. You don’t. When - not if, when - shit goes sideways and you’ve got the resources that people need, they’re going to come take that shit from you, and there’s not a goddamned thing you’ll be able to do about it.
It’s the same feeling parents of children with cancer feel when you deny their child treatment. The combination of fear and rage. You’ve had years of getting comfortable with handing out the fear, now you’re starting to learn what it means to have the rage come looking for you.
The whole point of insurance is that a bunch of people pay a bit of money so that none of those people have to choose between tragedy and financial ruin. Ideally, it is a 100% socialist contract.
When the insurance company denies a claim, or otherwise stands in the way of someone receiving timely treatment, that contract is broken. It’s only a matter of time before someone who has been wronged comes to extract their pound of flesh, and I’m franlky surprised it hasn’t happened much sooner.
That’s why this incident has generated so much indifference towards someone stalking and shooting someone else on the street in broad daylight. Because all of us have experienced that contract being broken. All of us are owed a pound of flesh, and we’re vicariously receiving it.
Running insurance companies (again, insurance is ideally socialist) as capitalist endeavors (profit above everything, funneled to owners) is inherently abusive, and we all instinctively know this.
Open letter to executive committees:
That feeling you’re feeling right now? The one where you’re scared, at every moment of every day, at least a little, sometimes a lot, but never not scared?
Yeah, the people you’re scared of feel that from about age five until they die, for all manner of reasons. They know how to go on with that fear inside them. You don’t. When - not if, when - shit goes sideways and you’ve got the resources that people need, they’re going to come take that shit from you, and there’s not a goddamned thing you’ll be able to do about it.
It’s the same feeling parents of children with cancer feel when you deny their child treatment. The combination of fear and rage. You’ve had years of getting comfortable with handing out the fear, now you’re starting to learn what it means to have the rage come looking for you.
The whole point of insurance is that a bunch of people pay a bit of money so that none of those people have to choose between tragedy and financial ruin. Ideally, it is a 100% socialist contract.
When the insurance company denies a claim, or otherwise stands in the way of someone receiving timely treatment, that contract is broken. It’s only a matter of time before someone who has been wronged comes to extract their pound of flesh, and I’m franlky surprised it hasn’t happened much sooner.
That’s why this incident has generated so much indifference towards someone stalking and shooting someone else on the street in broad daylight. Because all of us have experienced that contract being broken. All of us are owed a pound of flesh, and we’re vicariously receiving it.
Running insurance companies (again, insurance is ideally socialist) as capitalist endeavors (profit above everything, funneled to owners) is inherently abusive, and we all instinctively know this.
Agreed.
Shareholders should never be part of the healthcare business.
It shouldn’t be a business at all.