Summary
Reddit’s r/medicine moderators deleted a thread where doctors and users harshly criticized murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
Comments, including satirical rejections of insurance claims for gunshot wounds, targeted UHC’s reputation for denying care to boost profits.
Despite the removal, similar discussions continue, with medical professionals condemning UHC’s business practices under Thompson’s leadership, which a Senate report recently criticized for denying post-acute care.
Thompson, shot in what appears to be a targeted attack, led a company notorious for its high claim denial rates, fueling ongoing debates about corporate ethics in healthcare.
I have been following the news about Brian Thompson’s assassination in New York, and I am astounded by the flood of sympathy the media has poured out for him. Why? This man spent his entire career working tirelessly to deny healthcare to millions of Americans, all in the name of lining his own pockets and enriching shareholders. Yet the media praises him for his “kindness” and “generosity.” Let me be clear: pushing your company’s claim denial rate to nearly double that of your most cold-hearted competitors, bankrupting families through deceptive fine print and delay tactics, is not kindness, and it is not generosity. No, setting up boiler-room style offices with denial scoreboards is one of the most inhuman things I can imagine.
I spent nearly a decade writing software to help hospital systems fight insurance claim denials, and I can tell you, these insurers are getting better at it every year. They deny even the most justified claims, banking on the fact that most people won’t have the energy, resources, or will to fight back. And for the majority, they’re right. We had a team of a dozen nurses and PAs working alongside twice as many analysts. These were people who knew the system inside and out. We knew the deadlines, the bureaucratic jargon, the documentation required, and we tracked every claim meticulously. But even armed with all that knowledge and experience, we couldn’t win them all. On a good month, we might win two-thirds of the denials. That was considered a success.
What’s even worse is that for every claim we fought, there were countless others that never even made it that far, we only got denials on services that actually happened. A patient’s doctor tells them they need surgery, but an insurer like UnitedHealth says no and that’s it. The patient gives up and it is difficult to imagine they get better.
If you’ve ever had a serious medical condition—and I pray you haven’t—you know how much it drains you, how it strips you of your will to do anything. When every moment is agony, you don’t have the strength to sit on hold for hours, fill out endless forms, or chase down a bureaucratic system designed to wear you down. All you want is to sleep, because that’s the only place that pain can’t find you. How many people have simply lacked the strength to fight back, and ultimately succumbed to their conditions? How many families have been driven into poverty, their lives torn apart by a single emergency, all because of these executives’ policies?
We all know someone who has been through a health insurance nightmare and we also know that while political changes could probably help this problem the reality now is that these people are making a choice to run their companies this way, knowing full well the impact of their greed and indifference.
Where are your tears, your headlines, for the thousands of people and families whose lives have been destroyed and whose loved ones have died because of these same executives?
Fuck censorship.
Corporate Ethics
I made a large collection of screenshots from Facebook of people who had their claims denied by United Healthcare today if you want to really see how bad it is.
This is a really uncomfortable situation for me as a user and made me want to use Lemmy even more
Fuck Reddit and the life is cheap US healthcare system.
Not a great decision from the moderators.
Hopefully, it encourages more platform attrition.
I do think about pitching Lemmy to Redditors annoyed by all this.
But that would require me to
-
Sign back up on Reddit
-
Post a comment that may get deleted
Not may, will. Power mods hate it when you pitch alternatives they have no control over.
Lemmy has been pitched numerous times on Reddit without deletion.
-
Watch people join Lemmy, Doxx people and make death threats then grab their pearls when they realize you can’t do that here either lol.
“We are paid by CEOs. Better side with them.”
“You’re moderator; you don’t get paid at all!”
Happens on Lemmy too.
They made it clear site wide that you can’t support/celebrate this
At least one of the mods here was going heavy censorship in the initial thread here yesterday. I get it, we aren’t supposed to celebrate the death or suffering of other human beings. I’m not sure that rule applied to this individual though.
Death is always tragic… I don’t care if the guy is a billionaire or not, he or she had family.
I would however agree that having such wealth is clearly perverse and clearly done at the expense of others. You don’t get that rich by being kind hearted and generous…
In any case, if you become CEO of a business that has sloppy morals and essentially encourage parasitic behavior… Don’t expect to be loved… Or surprised that you may get shot…
It’s like being the CEO of Blackwater… No one that has clean hands takes that position…
No one becomes a CEO by accident, it was a choice and ambition to become that level of scum…
Now imagine if companies could only give a maximum of around 2000$
I wonder how that would change the landscape of American politics
If Reddit mods (or lemmy mods for that matter) are overwhelmed by the workload of a thread, they should lock it, and clean it up. not delete it!
Lemmy seems to have done the same. At least .world, I dunno about other instances, but I’m looking for a new community.
Is it hypocritical that the “suits” in the LinkedIn posts using the “laugh” emoji are probably some of the same ones making decisions as to which minimum of health care they can get by with to least impact the bottom line of their company? How much cost should be pushed to the employee? The ones that fire an ill employee for missing too much work?
Deemed unprofitable…
Reddit is a piece of shit platform, people who use it deserve the poor treatment they sign up for
Earth is a shit platform. How do I unsubscribe?!
Just be a CEO of a large corrupt corporation and someone will be along shortly to process your request.
Oh don’t worry, earth will handle that for us.
Easy, just start a new instance and leave this one.
Because Lemmy has never had a moderation problem 🙄🙄
on reddit, you have to hope an admin replaces a bad mod. On lemmy, you can create a competing community that’s well modded, and the user base will generally want to be where the mods are chill, and follow.
I don’t mean to sideline the conversation too much, but I’m only part of .world. What are some other recommendations? I’ve seen lots of complaints about moderator censorship here, though I don’t want to end up in a dark hole of violence, either.
I like where I ended up. I started on Lemmy.ml
I was speaking more about Community (equivalent to a subreddit) moderation, as opposed to instance level moderation from admins, since for the most part a community mod is what users will be interacting with.
I wouldn’t worry much about .world being your home instance. The only real downside is you can’t post or comment on Beehaw, since they defederated from World due to a lack of moderation tools on their end.
.World is the largest instance, so if you wanted to help spread the load across the fediverse and prevent centralization, you could export all your subscriptions to a new account elsewhere.
If you go that route, I’d personally recommend looking for an instance that at least has Hexbear and Lemmygrad in their block list. Lemmy.cafe is a good choice for a smaller instance, while Sopuli.xyz is a solid medium sized one, both general instances. But if you’d like a more themed instance that appeals to you, by all means go for that instead. https://lemmyverse.net/ or the instance finder tool at https://join-lemmy.org/ are good places to find one. :)
This is very helpful, thank you. I will read this post over a few times as I consider and explore Lemmy.
Lemm.ee or sh.itjust.works are probably the best options right now. World is the most similar to Reddit, and a lot of subreddits were essentially replicated on world.
I choose sh.itjust.works on name alone, and I couldn’t be happier with the choice
reddthat is pretty dope
