https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/12/astonishing-level-dehumanization/681189/
The pearl clutching is strong with this one. As usual, they gloss over the fact that health insurance profits are determined by the denial rate. The author conflates necessary rationing of care in any system with the clear incentive of for-profit insurance to deny care. Such cupidity.
Healthcare should never ever be a system based on making profit. It should be based on keeping the people as healthy as possible and limit suffering. This means strict government control and that’s something America isn’t fond off.
It’s hilarious when they go on about the dehumanization of Brian Thompson while completely ignoring that dehumanization is 100% how they’re capable of making the decisions they do by viewing humans as a number on a spreadsheet that impacts their profits instead of a real person with a real life. To look at a piece of paper and make decisions to make profits by denying people care is the definition of dehumanizing them to you can make the decision without feeling remorse. Their job is literally steeped in more dehumanization than you can shake a fucking stick at! Their job is literally to dehumanize people in search of profit.
It’s so painfully hypocritical it’s not even funny, it’s just anger-inducing.
When they dehumanize us, nothings wrong with it, but the second they’re dehumanized for acting inhumanely suddenly it’s a problem.
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard it either, I’ve seen a few interviews with the same sentiment shared from CEO’s, but in the interviews it was even more painful because for a moment it sounds like they’re talking about the dehumanization of people who need healthcare, but no, they’re talking about the CEO of course.
The victims of healthcare insurers also don’t get the news media breathlessly defending them for having been dehumanized (which in itself is an attempted act to humanize the CEO). Their names are conveniently forgotten because they’ve been… you guessed it… dehumanized.
I’d add yet a bit more nuance: the dehumanization that happens at the hands of insurers is a choice. These companies and all their employees have the option to do things differently or work somewhere else.
On the other hand, the dehumanization that happens TO the insured is out of their control; they have the option to be dehumanized or die.
Now, when talking about the dehumanization of CEOs: those CEOs have a choice to take those positions and make those decisions. So they are stepping into an already dehumanized role with their eyes open. Sure, they don’t deserve to be killed without a trial and due process for their actions, but the dehumanization aspect is a direct result of their informed choices.
The Atlantic published an article last year saying the murder of Gazan children should not be considered murder because it was legal under Israeli law. They are shameless imperial Zionist pieces of shit, and that article earned them a place in my boycott list.
In the meantime, Bryce and Dane Thompson just spent their first Christmas without their father.
It’s remarkable to me that this sentence is intended to be the emotional gut punch at the end of the same article containing this prior text:
Other insurers are for-profit companies, like UnitedHealthcare.
…
UnitedHealthcare surely makes some horrifying decisions and outright mistakes, and even when it rules out coverage based on a defensible calculus of costs and benefits, that can be a devastating thing for patients and their loved ones to hear.
In other words, UHC is responsible for a great many “first Christmas” moments, but those are OK in aggregate, because they are for profit.
The entire article is predicated on the idea that someone needs to profit from rationing healthcare, so it may as well be these guys. NO, there is not a reason for someone to profit from acting as the middleman to deny care my doctor already determined I needed.
No one can plausibly argue that the murder of Thompson will do a single thing to fix the problems in America’s health-care system.
It already has. Countless articles dissecting the issue, some in agreement with this article, some not. A true conversation about it unlike any in recent years. Someone in DC has to have noticed that the left and right have unified on this one, and I’m not sure what they’ll do with that info, but something, I hope. And everyone else who is grossly profiting from the death and suffering of others has been and continues to be forced to consciously examine that reality. They can’t turn away from the externalities of their decisions any more. I’m not sure what that’s going to change, but an inflection point like that on an entire industry is going to have some kind of impact for sure.
Author is perhaps overly humanizing the CEO while not humanizing all the victims of the health care system enough.
One could write an article that was simply short biographies of everyone who died because of health insurance profits. I imagine, like the wealth to scale page, people would have an emotional journey reading it as it kept going and going.
To be fair, the author looks like he could easily be mistaken as a ghoulish CEO walking down 5th avenue. The guy has certainly made a career being their mouth piece.
There’s an argument to be made there but this article did not make that argument. This was just a poorly-reasoned romp through a garden of logical fallacies. I’m surprised that this was printed by The Atlantic, I thought they were better than that.
They’re owned by Laurene Powell Jobs… They’re not better than that.
She’s just as much of a big piece of shit as Steve Jobs was.
What is going on with The Atlantic lately? I thought that it and The Guardian were the last hold-outs of news enshittification, but it seems like both have succumbed as well. Is there anything at all left then, besides Jon Stewart obviously but other than him?
One result of The Atlantic’s sudden decline is I’m reading a lot more political thinkpieces from Rolling Stone via RSS. As a recent example, their coverage of Carter’s legacy from several different viewpoints has been top-notch.
One thing I’m noticing, and starting to hear from others as well, is a shift away from institutions and more towards individuals. So like I’ve avoided CNN, but Fareed Zakaria on the other hand seems to be making some sense - not that I agree 100%, but enough to get me thinking outside of what I would have unaided.
Perhaps in the future it won’t so much where or how we get out news from - like it could just as readily be Mastodon as YouTube as news org - so much as who we choose to listen to.
Which pisses me off to no end, bc now I have to suddenly keep track of individual names in order to know anything at all?! Plus the good ones will burn out, usually somewhat shortly after they get really good, before which they made mistakes more often, leaving only a window of time in-between where they are awesome.
It’s almost like capitalism enshittifies literally every fucking thing that it touches, ya’know!?:-P
Oh well, the trick is to keep up. Somehow.
Not saying you’re among them, but I think a lot of people neglect the ability of RSS to essentially roll your own morning paper from several disparate sources. Most of what I post on here is just waiting for me in a tab each morning … I have sections broken down into tech, news, politics, science and more.
When a source stops being useful, I remove it. Anytime I run into a good piece from a new source, I attempt to subscribe (usually with success). This keeps my feed from calcifying, and Beehaw is often how I run into new things.
You might not be saying that… so then allow me to: I definitely am one of those people!:-P
I tend to live in places where my vote doesn’t count much, and have to move around a lot, so not always, but often. And for the first 20+ of my life did not really get into politics and such at all - I found it too confusing, and intuitively realized that despite how people would urge me to just get out and vote, I was legitimately better off not doing that, until I was willing to put forth the time and effort required to understand matters and make an actual informed decision.
Translation: I would have voted Republican, bc that’s what my family was, thus amplifying their voices merely due to the fact that they had me as a child. I am so glad that I ignored all the socially accepted advice that somehow always neglected to mention the other side of that coin: e.g. that if you vote for (or against) something - a war perhaps, or a budget cut - it makes you complicit in the outcome. Probably so too does not voting, but I’m talking about when I was a dumb kid here, where it’s more understandable.
Now I realize that my church had lied to me, my state had lied to me, my news had lied to me - or rather, has rather than had for each of these bc it continues to happen - and I see just how much effort it takes to be a responsible citizen. And I see that others are unwilling to put forth that same level of effort that I did.
So yeah, I hope that curated feeds can be made for people. And automation can help with that. On the one hand it continues to make us more and more tribal, but on the other hand if such do not exist then how are the even younger generations going to so much as begin the process of figuring out even the tiniest nuggets of truth as they lie buried amidst all of the numerous and insidious lies?
You put forth some profound questions well above my pay grade.
I prefer to view it as “what can I do to help myself and others?” I started out in journalism wanting to change the world. Then I hit my 20s. Then the buyouts accelerated.
And I can’t change the world by rewriting press releases. It keeps my belly full, and I believe in what I do, but Jan. 20 looms large.
Here’s the thing: The education system was intentionally gutted starting in the '80s to make critical thinking feel too hard, leading to where you’re at. If you want to screw the man, put in the effort to cultivate your own selection of news sources. It’s some upfront time, but then like a minute to add or remove sources.
I’ve never really lived anywhere my vote counted at the federal level, but downballot races are important because that state rep starts up the ladder. Whether your presidential pick matters is relevant and perhaps feeling fruitless now, but 10, 20, 30 years down the line, who you picked for school board could be running in a federal election because you supported them, alongside those in your community.
What can we do right now? This is going to be a dark period with some oncoming trains presenting as the light at the end of the tunnel. What we can do is vote people in at the bottom so they can eventually rise to the top.
Definitely solid points there:-).
Is there anything at all left…
For now, there is National Public Radio and the Associated Press.
Is that the hed or The Atlantic’s new tagline?
Pearls made of solid capitalism.
