The UnitedHealthcare Gunman Understands the Surveillance State
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/12/09/nyregion/uhc-ceo-mur...
It's easy to forget that in previous generations american police were widely viewed and portrayed as incompetent and corrupt. Neither is completely true of course. Modern police are extremely well equipped and have an almost unfathomable surveillance apparatus at their disposal. But they are also incompetent and corrupt so it's kind of a wash.
This is the official story.[1] Maybe he just had the cellphone with him all the time.
[1] unless he was dressed in the same way when he entered McDonalds.
I don’t live in the US and in a perfect world I wish such event restart the conversation of how to build a less treacherous health care system.
But some of these issues aren’t health specific. Like the CEO’s insider trading - wealthy people often get away with financial crimes. And the context of the insider trading is that they were under antitrust investigation from the DOJ but didn’t reveal it to shareholders for months. And before they let the public know these executives sold their shares at a higher price. But the antitrust issue is one of big companies being safe from competition solely due to their size. And now we see massive amounts of resources spent on investigating this single murder when thousands across the country every year get no investigation.
All this highlights a massive unified appetite (across the political spectrum) to create a fair system for everyone, to bring megacorps under control, to treat different citizens equally. And that’s bigger than healthcare.
The US is getting closer to the guillotine.
Sorry to say that but, the US has the _best_ propaganda system ever created.
I'm more surprised by the number of people phoning in tips and helping the police by trying to play internet sleuth.
I also hope that this event results in changes, but I think it would take a lot more than one killing. So far, instead of stopping the killing of people for profit, companies have decided that the best way to protect themselves from their victims is by removing photos of their CEOs from websites and increasing security.
The only option is Medicare for All, with decades of it slowly chipping away at private insurance and surviving endless challenges by the combined might of the insurance, pharmaceutical, banking, private equity, and medical device manufacturer industries who are willing to spend trillions of dollars and fight endlessly to protect their revenue streams-- so that's a long shot, to say the least.
edit: also, all of the people running the industries with which we need to have "a conversation" are narcissists and/or sociopaths who would kill, dehydrate, and grind up the general public for resale to the masses as protein powder if they could get away with it.
The PNHP is like the ACLU or EFF but for healthcare.
For comparison in western Europe it's 77% to 98%
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/147737081876484...
Ah, and now it's time for settling into that good old corporate media management of the Overton window. The reaction to this event definitely isn't an immediate society-wide outpouring of energy from everyone being thoroughly frustrated with the healthcare racket specifically, and the utter lack of corporate accountability in general. No, it's just a small faction of "some commentators" who "dislike the American health-insurance system" creating a "mythology" only after "the hours have passed". Everyday upstanding people all believe that it's downright shocking how a member of the corporate class that has managed to except themselves from every other form of accountability has suffered this escalated attempt at accountability. He had a family, don't you know!