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 was reading an article that quoted his wife about what a great guy he was. It reminded me of Ken Lay’s wife talking about her families liquidity problems after the Enron collapse. Hundreds of employees lost everything and she’s griping about liquidity.
We had that last year in Ohio when Householder was sentanced to 20 years prison for his roll in the bribery scandal. He cried about hard that was going to be on his family and the judge told him “you should have thought about that before accepting those bribes.”
He may have been nice in some ways. She probably just wasn’t aware or chose not to think about the darker aspects of health insurance corporations and what it takes to make billions at the expense of people’s health care.
Also people tend to whine when their gravy train runs out of gravy.
His wife is a physical therapist so she has an intimate understanding of the health care system. I’m sure it’s turning a blind eye. The article I read described their home as a $1.5 million home in an exclusive Minneapolis suburb. She knew. Cognitive dissonance can be very powerful.
Lets be real, one of the primary motivators for a woman to be with and stay with a man is if he can provide adequately for her offspring. I’m sure he was doing a great job at that.
Okay, I’ll bite. The reason women end up choosing to be with a man of means, and I am in no way saying that all or even most women want this, is because we often don’t/didn’t have the opportunity to gain those means ourselves which thereby impacted our ability to survive and control our own lives. This is due to the oppression of the very men that you think we seek. Over the course of thousands of years, men cultivated a world where they steadily sought, gained, and ever increasingly obtained as much power as possible. In order to gain more power for yourself or your group, you have to take away power from someone else.
One of the people or groups whose power was regularly stolen is women. I’m sure this was a slow transition over a long period of time, but it ended with a world where women were rarely allowed to gain the skills or implement what skills they had in order to earn money. If you don’t have the ability to earn money yourself, you are forced to be reliant on someone else who is allowed to earn money. My point being, if you want enough money for you and your children to survive, you basically had to marry as rich as you possibly could.
Enter the modern women’s rights movement. This is where financial freedom became incredibly important to women. We collectively realized that we, much like any other human beings in existence ever, wanted to be able to have some control of our lives, our families, and our fates. This is why we entered the workforce in droves. Women who were suffering under the control of men who beat them and their children, potentially raped them, or demeaned them regularly with the full acceptance and support of society, wanted a way out. The available options were pretty bleak, so we worked in solidarity to find another way to survive with both our physical safety and dignity intact. Now, as an obligatory caveat, not every man was/is oppressive to women. But, since men as a whole created these arbitrary restrictions on women’s lives, they are the ones who have to suffer the aftermath of this system of control that was developed, especially since they are the ones who continue to experience advantages and benefits because of those exact lingering effects.
Most women would prefer to be able to support themselves and their family while having their partner contribute equally, either through earning money or doing an equivalent share of the household/family tasks. But, since something that becomes systemic is difficult to remove, we are still trying to shake the ramifications of this exertion of control. I assure you, most women would rather have less money and more autonomy when given the option.
This brings me to the point you’re trying to make. If the “primary motivator” of a woman is to choose a man who can provide adequately for her offspring, it is only because of the lingering effects of historical oppression that men created in order to exert control over women. It’s very frustrating to be in a world that constantly tells you that you should be pursuing a partner with money so you can have a stable future, but then simultaneously reprimands you for actually making that choice. Just as it’s difficult, but required, to acquiesce to the control of the man who holds your money.
I don’t think it should be presented as though this woman is shallow or terrible for making such a choice. Who wouldn’t choose a life of stability over one of chaos or continual financial stress? I know many men who would make the same choice if offered it. Like you said, I’m sure he was doing a good job of providing for their family financially, but let’s not be too reductive about her choice to have him as a partner. You say it in such a way that you are not only chastising her for her choice of husbands but are chastising all women for prioritizing their and their children’s survival and safety. That is something that comes across as offensive to the entirety of my gender because it implies that we shouldn’t consider ourselves of value or of having worth.
You may be right that this woman chose the CEO of UHC as her husband because of his wealth and ability to support their children and family lifestyle. Most likely, she knew what her husband actually did for a living and it’s effect on the lives of others and chose to ignore or not look into the deaths, horrors, and financial destruction that were created by the company her husband controlled.
But, one way or another, let’s not reduce the struggle that women go through at the hands of historical, and often modern, men to blanketly imply that we are all naturally money hungry and that we are obviously all using men for our own gain. I’m going to go ahead and assume that women, including myself, disagree with such an unfair assumption.
I agree with everything you said - it was worded well and you inserted the exceptions and qualifiers to make your point in a generalization that allows outliers. I do, however, wonder about the women who consider financial stability as a (if not the) major factor when choosing a partner, because we tend to hear only the stories of gold diggers, etc. and not the stories of women who married for love and simply had the fortune of having a partner that was able to acquire significant means. I’m guessing that’s why the commenter you replied to said what they said. I’m sure the percentage is small, but those type of women give the rest of us a bad name.
The following is anecdotal, but I think still relevant: Speaking from personal experience, my husband is well educated, I love him to death, and he chooses to work in a job that is stable (meaning it’s hard for them to get rid of him unless he makes some serious errors) rather than working for some private firm where he can easily be paid double if not more. He makes enough for us to get by while I’m finishing up grad school. I’m proud of his moral compass; he always tries to do the right thing.
His cousin, gem that she is, has always openly bragged about how she only goes on dates if the man is paying, yada yada, and she ended up finding some desperate sap 15 years her senior with money to burn; the culture they are from values marriage, so a single man in his 40’s gets a lot of questions. Mind you, this is a woman who was fired from her job because she got caught breaking security protocol, blamed it on her cousin’s husband (saying he snitched on her because they worked for the same firm), caused a feud, and refused to take responsibility. She hasn’t held a job since, nor do I think she plans to, because they are now slum lords in Florida. Most of the family doesn’t like interacting with her, but she’s not the only one who has decided it’s easier for her to behave this way rather than work herself.
People change, and when someone marries for love and one of the partners begins to change for the worse, it usually causes strain in a marriage as the values each partner holds no longer line up. Some people seek help and try to fix things. I read somewhere that the CEO’s wife was a physical therapist? If so, she definitely knows how the medical industry works, and she should be very aware of the harm insurance companies are responsible for. If she chose to turn a blind eye instead of trying to aid him in seeing the error of his ways, it’s because she herself lost sight of what the value of a human life is. She can blindly talk about how great of a guy he was because she was benefitting from all the perceived good it brought to her personally. I would wager she married him before he became CEO, but the fact that she stayed married to someone who led a company directly responsible for so much suffering is an indication of her character.
Another example: Mackenzie left Bozo because she saw who he turned into. I’m sure she’d speak well of him, but I imagine she would acknowledge all of his poor qualities. It’s not unfair to judge anyone married to someone of high means (regardless of gender), because there’s always a choice, especially when those means are directly gained by punishing others. There is a risk in financial instability through divorce, but at the level of assets in the millions it’s not a really dire concern - courts can award alimony, split assets, etc. Or, you know, they could get a job.
The question becomes, “who are you as a person; do you value money above all else, or positively contributing to a society where the give and take is balanced?”
We can all work to uplift each other together but still criticize those who are working against us, even other women. I guess my point is that we shouldn’t judge her for marrying into money, but we absolutely can judge her for her character if she chose to continue down this path.
I saw one that had a different relative say he was an honest person and hard worker.
This honest person’s company had $290 billion in insurance premium revenue in 2023 and they had $22 billion in profit. I always knew insurance was a grift but holy fuck.
And the company rewarded him with a $10 million compensation package in 2023. No living person works hard enough in a single year to earn multiple lifetime’s of average worker wages.
Someone else in another thread said their friend inherited a billion dollars and is the hardest working person they’ve ever met and I honestly couldn’t help but laugh out loud.
Honestly 10M is pretty small for a CEO of a company that size (especially on 22B in profit).
United health group listed 5 executives in their def14a filing which details executive compensation of 5 executives. Brian was the 4th executive, the ceo of the united health group was awarded 23 million and then there were two others who got 16 million. Overall it came out to about 75 million. Which i agree is less than i was expecting for 22B profit but it is still multiple lifetime’s of wages for an average worker
