The Manifesto
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Not ignoring it at all, but discussions I’ve had have been in real life rather than online.
But to answer your question about whether the public reaction has surprised me, I guess the answer is no. Not much of anything surprises me anymore.
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I get his position. It is informed by a situation much worse than most people ever deal with, but we’ve dealt with similar runarounds - a different and contradictory story every time you talk to them. It’s incredibly frustrating even when it’s relatively minor health issues. Couple extreme suffering with it and one can understand his anger. Still, not how he expressed it. This kid had a top education and could have chosen to fight within the law.
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Well, I'm going to give my opinion about his manifesto and contradictory self identity.
This is a link to a Sun [tabloid] article saying he praised the Unabomber.
I'm assuming we're supposed to think how awful it is he did that. Ok.
The point they leave out is his manifesto copied much of the Unabomber's actual manifesto.
You can read on the Unabomber's Wikipedia page about his experience with Dr. Murray when he was a student at another Ivy League school (as opposed to the University of Pennsylvania in this case) Harvard.
Dr. Murray ran the ****** program at Harvard.
This case has all the hallmarks of the ****** program.
It also turns out there has been a staggering amount of corruption at UH and the CEO was about to be called before Congress to testify.
Other strange elements to this story include the fact the CEO was without his usual security along with the clown like nature of the assassin who melodramaticly wrote messages on bullets, dropped a backpack filled with Monopoly money in Central Park, and was caught at a McDonald's whose corporate mascot is a clown buying some kind of Happy Meal.
Food for thought.
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I find the whole thing very distressing. The whole thing being, the American medical system, health insurance, the experience that led him to break, his choice of violence as a solution, and the gleeful reaction of many…
One thing that’s troubling is not long ago I was thinking about Michele Obama and thinking “well, they went low, we went high, and look where it got us.”
That idea, that taking the high road hasn’t done us any good, is basically what he wrote in that manifesto.
I’m not, and never will, advocate or condone violence. But we are running out of tools…
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@ShiroKuro said in The Manifesto:
I find the whole thing very distressing. The whole thing being, the American medical system, health insurance, the experience that led him to break, his choice of violence as a solution, and the gleeful reaction of many…
One thing that’s troubling is not long ago I was thinking about Michele Obama and thinking “well, they went low, we went high, and look where it got us.”
That idea, that taking the high road hasn’t done us any good, is basically what he wrote in that manifesto.
I’m not, and never will, advocate or condone violence. But we are running out of tools…
I would say we have more tools than most any other place. We have the right to gather to protest, the right to organize. We have representatives. But it’s a lot of work so you have to be committed and willing to do the work it takes to bring issues to light. He was well equipped to do so, but delayed gratification is baked in. Perhaps we’ve been so conditioned by our instant gratification society that it is difficult to tackle such David and Goliath tasks. But David can still win.
“I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer”
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There's no glee in any of it for me. It really isn't an issue of just the CEO and his assailant. And as dysfunctional and genuinely evil the entire U.S. for-profit healthcare delivery, pharmaceutical, and insurance complex is, it really isn't even about that. t's just the latest iteration of the age old dilemma: since the worst evil and atrocities in human history have always played out within systems that declared their actions both legal and protected, is there ever a threshold beyond which it is moral and just to work to fight the evil in ways that are declared to be illegal? And if there is such a threshold, how and where is it defined?
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@Mik said in The Manifesto:
we’ve been so conditioned by our instant gratification society
This is definitely one of the problems. Sustained attention, focus, ability to work toward a far-off goal... these skills are becoming more and more rare, and we can see the ill effects of that impatience all around us.
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Those who benefit obscenely by the system we have are not going to give up their advantages willingly. Those charged with ensuring a good and just society, who are bought by those benefiting obscenely are not going to relinquish the hand outs willingly. Revolt is the only way to change entrenched greed.
The question I ask myself these days is which is going to come first? WWIII, US Civil War, or a revolution. The US cannot continue on the path it is on without some major upheaval.
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@DeweyLOU said in The Manifesto:
... is there ever a threshold beyond which it is moral and just to work to fight the evil in ways that are declared to be illegal?
It is always moral and just and work to fight the evil. Laws are not always moral and just.
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Worth noting that denial of care isn't a particularly American issue, or one tied exclusively to "for-profit" medicine. Care is extensively rationed in government run health systems.
Private medicine has to have gatekeepers because of the "flat of the curve" problem in a 3rd party payer system. The doctors/hospitals and the patients have the incentive to use care out to the point where the marginal benefit is zippo, because they (the hospitals and patients) don't bear the costs of that kind of excessive treatment. So in our system the insurers act as gatekeepers to make sure that there is enough benefit to the procedure to justify the coverage. In other nations, many procedures are simply out of the question from the get-go, and decisions are made by bureaucrats.
Our system has many problems, especially with distribution of care between the haves (well insured) and the have nots (poorly or non-insured). Having a 3rd party (not the physician, not the patient) make decisions about what is justifiable is not one of them.
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As someone who suffered as badly from neuropathy for a few years as this man's mother, I truly empathize with her agony. And I also faced claims denials by our insurance. And I didn't have a choice of insurers--we went with Mr. Pique's employment policy because that's all we had. And when he went to work for the county, they were self-insured, and they were exempt from oversight from the state insurance commissioner, so we had zero recourse when they turned down my claims. Pretty outrageous. (There was one smug asshole in the insurance administrator's office I would have loved to have seen die, at times.)
So this is a hot button issue for many, many people, and I haven't seen much empathy for the CEO who lost his life, or for his wife, or for his children. People have had enough. I can't say I am surprised by the reaction, though I think it is unfortunate.
From reading the manifesto, I'm surprised by this man's obvious intelligence and education. He threw himself on his own sword. To his credit, it has sparked a lot of serious discussion about the abomination that is the American insurance industry. But, I think he certainly could have achieved that notoriety and attention without killing another human being. However much you might revile the CEO of United Healthcare, his death is not the appropriate remedy.
Being on Medicare (original, not the joke that is Medicare Advantage, which United Health Care is a huge purveyor of) has been relief. What they cover and what they don't is clearly defined. I have never faced a denied claim. The biggest problem now with Medicare is that doctors are dropping it because they get only pennies on the dollar for Medicare claims. My own excellent doctor will no longer take Medicare patients after the first of the year. "We aren't a charity," he told me, apologetically.
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Medicare Advantage is a nightmare that I recognized immediately and shied away from. They have every financial incentive to deny coverage and I've seen my brother have to fight with them for months to get needed care. Their approach seems to be deny and see if you will go away. That's not just UHC. It's baked into the Part C program.
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Well, I've said I don't think his thoughts are original. It follows from my premise that nobody here could make choices similar or dissimilar to the ones he made. If my theory is correct, he has been the victim of psychological torture. I think all of it, the entire situation, is an indictment of the ways our society addresses healthcare. I've always tended to think we could and should do better. Yet when I think about it, I don't think there is any other aspect of the ways society addresses basic human needs that is any more fair, just, or logical. I've said this before but I think an individual's opportunities and achieved outcomes in life are much more random than most people believe. This wouldn't be surprising given we are all told by society that such opportunities and achievements aren't random at all.
