on healthcare ceo's

and our individual and collective shadows

I’m not going to pretend that I wasn’t delighted to find out that the CEO of United Health Care was assassinated.

I was thrilled. Giddy even to discover that a man who brought a company to the point of denying 30% of insurance claims costing untold thousands of people unnecessary distress and even their lives finally met his end at the hands of a dissatisfied customer.

The media is doing their best to present outrage.

Some in the Youtube comments section are also pretending to be indignant that this parasite was wiped from the earth.

It’s cute - pretending that it’s somehow more wrong to wack a dude whose actions directly or indirectly led to the unnecessary deaths of thousands of Americans than it was for this man to preside over an industry that kills people by dragging its feet.

It’s somehow more violent to shoot someone than it is to sentence them to die of cancer?

I don’t get it.

What I do see is the collective shadow emerging.

Go to youtube.

Watch any video about this shooting, then read the comments.

Though there are the occasional ‘partisan jibes’, Americans seem pretty united in their delight at the end of this man’s life. The jokes are dark and frequent. The stories about people denied care are even worse

The media are calling this ‘senseless violence’.

LOL

Shooting up a school or a church is senseless violence.

This shooting makes sense to me. The shooter seemed to be a person with clear reasoning directing his targeted actions.

Perhaps it’s unfair to make him the scapegoat.

But given what I’ve read about the pain and suffering caused by a system that denies claims to this extent, I’m surprised this hasn’t happened sooner and more often.

Sure, people will continue to chirp moral platitudes about his wife and sons.

At the same time?

The shadow will whisper about tens of thousands of suffering due to denied claims.