The latter group are so, so happy that you addressed the former, and not them. They have successfully avoided the inconvenience and scrutiny that would prompt them to change. (Of course, between Abe and the UHC guy, taking your complaints directly to an executive also seems to be effective, if not even more so.)
It’s a customer facing role where the main responsibility is directing confused and anxious people.
Make things better for people before they get that bad, and you won't have to read such "gross parentheticals" (or worse).
1) I am extremely skeptical that Thompson’s public murder caused any lasting pro-consumer policy changes whatsoever. Luigi being sent to prison for decades will be the final nail in the coffin there, as it should be. I honestly can’t wait to see him locked up and forgotten about.
2) Even if there were any lasting positive changes, what I find gross is the way people refer to this event, as evidenced by both of your comments. The tone is always on a spectrum of cavalier to downright gleeful in a cowardly way: “I don’t condone it, of course, but healthcare companies shouldn’t deny claims if they don’t want their executives to get shot in the back on the street!”
No, you clearly DO condone it, because you disapprove of the health insurance industry, but you’re too cowardly to just say that you think a father of two little kids who has a fully legal job that you disagree with deserves to be publicly executed by a disturbed vigilante.
So yeah, fucking gross.
1) Luigi is already a folk hero*, and the people whose boots you nibble are probably thanking their lucky stars that you're not the one sentencing him, as anyone with a brain will want to avoid decades of a "Free Huey"-style circus.
2) Does it occur to you that maybe I was intentionally speaking euphemistically, for your benefit?
Right, then. Let me be frank. We just buried a family member who died after 2 decades of his family fighting futilely to claw the treatment he needed out of the crapsack system that Brian Thompson helped preside over from his figurative cartel board seat. Many others - including myself - deal with chronic issues that are treatable or preventable in functioning healthcare systems. Unfortunately, ours is one in which Brian's buddies hold sway, and they've made it clear that their profits sit above all else (including, evidently, his own life, let alone ours).
Now, there is a world where I do not care about Brian Thompson. Where he's a teacher, or a firefighter, or an accountant, and I have no reason to know his name, and in August 2026, he is alive and living happily with his wife and children. It might even be a world where my family member, and thousands of other people, are still alive, because Brian Thompson did not take a job as a CEO of a health insurer.
We don't live in that world. We live in the one where Brian Thompson presided over a corporate regime that callously pen-stroked the deaths of thousands and thousands of patients who couldn't get the care that they needed, where HE CHOSE to be that kind of person with that kind of power and that kind of bloody track record. And the one where his successor stood over his grave and gloated about the double-industry-standard care denial rate UHC boasted under his tenure.
But also the one where rival Anthem dropped its planned anesthesia cap days after his death, and where the industry as a whole dropped its decades-long opposition to certain prior authorization reform provisions in the following year. And the one where talking heads got on TV to make sure us commonfolk knew that Luigi had done a very bad thing which they didn't approve of, indicating that our elite were feeling a real and manifest sense of danger, which your comments show continues to this day. In short, Thompson's assassination (and/or the public sentiment it unleashed) absolutely resulted in concrete and lasting change. There is zero doubt.
So, do I think that fabulously wealthy and well-connected executives should be held to account when they make reckless and cynical decisions that ruin and end lives? Do I think that this accountability makes the world a better place? Do I condone vigilante violence against such people when the government consistently refuses to investigate them, put them on trial, and put them in jail - and when the people themselves are made well-aware of the devastation their singularly influential actions have, and still they refuse to change, despite ample opportunity? Do I hope that this violence is targeted, with no collateral, and a limited-time deal because it forces sociopolitical change?
Uh.
Yeah.
At least, as much as we (we!) might condone the same for any other tyrant or despot. If you didn't cry for, I dunno, Gaddafi (fully legal position!), why cry for Thompson? And I notice you didn't say anything about Abe. You know, assassinated in broad daylight for allegations of misconduct that turned out to be true and, while legal, repugnant to much of the public? His was quite close to Thompson's situation, and you didn't even care enough to talk about or try to rebut my take on his case.
So I don't think your stand is principled. You don't care about denouncing an ontological evil, because you're supporting one. And I think the real reason that you're seething is because one of the implicit boons of wealth in America is supposed to be virtual immunity from being held accountable by people "below" you, and this incident shatters that illusion, and you really don't like it. It's merely selfishness on your part - if you want to talk about gross things and gross people.
But show me I'm wrong. Shed a tear for Mr. Pan-African Union and Mr. Moonie. Maybe throw in Kirk (or, if you're on the other side of the aisle, Hortman, though this is largely rhetorical as I can't imagine the kind of person you'd have to be not to see her death as horrific). In detail, please. And tell me what I should say to my family when they don't shed any for the woes of the suits who didn't care while our son/brother/nephew/uncle/cousin suffered. (I'll warn you that you'll have to be exceedingly eloquent in these regards in order to move the needle. Might as well not bother. Your energy is better spent helping to shape a world where simple broad prosperity and a functional social state precludes schadenfreude birthed from kinetic diplomacy, and accordingly you don't have to try to gaslight people out of it.)
*https://www.isdglobal.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/Picture...
Regardless, I hope you find some peace and a healthier set of ethics.
And good luck when he gets sentenced to decades behind bars, as he should. I’m sure that’ll be a rough day for the Redditors and their revenge fantasies.
>Regardless, I hope you find [...] a healthier set of ethics
That's my line.
Suffice it to say that you're not engaging with the comment because you can't. I at least appreciate your tacit acknowledgement that trying to do so while carrying through your selfish and irrational sentiments would be mutually exclusive with being a good person.