"Does he have a history of shootings? Denied coverage," CNN post

"For people who do not have money or social connections at hospitals or the ability to spend weeks at a time on the phone, a denied health-insurance claim can instantly bend the trajectory of a life toward bankruptcy and misery and death. 

Health-care workers [in 2018 study] account for seventy-three per cent of all nonfatal workplace injuries due to violence. Nurses, residents, aides, specialists—they are asked to absorb the rage and panic induced by the American health-care system, whose private insurers generate billions of dollars in profit and pay executives eight figures not despite but because of the fact that they routinely deny care to desperate people in need.

Can the C.E.O. class drop its indifference to the suffering and death of ordinary people? Is it possible to do so while achieving record quarterly profits for your stakeholders, in perpetuity?

He [Thompson, the UHC CEO] had sold more than fifteen million dollars’ worth of company stock in February, shortly before it became public that the Department of Justice was investigating the company for antitrust violations, which caused the stock price to drop.

A new policy from Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield also went viral: the company had announced that, in certain states, starting in 2025, it would no longer pay for anesthesia if a surgery passed a pre-allotted time limit. The cost of the “extra” anesthesia would be passed from Anthem—whose year-over-year net income was reported, in June, to have increased by more than twenty-four per cent, to $2.3 billion—to the patient."

Jia Tolentino @ NY-er 

As a friend has pointed out denials of care function like "Death Panels," right?

Still, I'm stuck on the election postmortem angle. There are voters experiencing "the rage and panic induced by the American health-care system" that failed to notice Biden was actually trying to reel in price gouging in the health care industry with Lina Khan's FCC antitrust enforcement, mentioned in the second to last graph above, and implementing price controls on super expensive medicines?! Too abstract, not kitchen table enough? 

Or no one noticed that Grump has promised all along almost the exact opposite: threatening to reduce ACA health insurance coverage and end Biden's antitrust and reforms to the IRS. None of which has a remote chance of making health care more affordable for the working classes. 

Khan, for crying out loud, was probably more than anything else the real reason why billionaires signed on with Grump and are now filling his cabinet. They wanted to stop her and most voters, the working classes, had barely ever heard of her and probably support her anti-monopolist efforts. They know the business people don't like her, maybe. Elizabeth Warren was hazed like this ridiculously in the reform period after the 2008 housing collapse. 

To my point: If what you wanted out of the election was more affordable, humane, and available when you need it health care there was no choice but Harris/Walz. And the popular vote, admittedly razor thin, said nothing to see here. You know these disconnects between the election and what matters, health care, women's rights, living wage jobs, homelessness, climate change, world peace, civil rights, are going to pile up. 

And I can already see one thread of positive spin forming: Maybe some good can come from Grump's radical "disruption." Maybe; vacuums encourage initiative, sure. But I see Grump firing Khan and using antitrust as a way to shakedown monopolists, bringing them to heel and trying to mold them into an oligarchy backing his power. Yeah, I think the rule of Putin and Orban are his models, but Grump is mostly an impulsive blustery windbag of performative dominance in the spirit of professional wrestling on TV. In other words, he's escaped jail and might be satisfied with some splashy revenge TV spectacles. Clearly his personal powers are unstable and waning. 

So a lot of the fascismo revanchist technocratic reaction is going to come down to the energies of the miscreants behind him, Vance, Lusk, Miller, his appointments, who Grump is giving the "initiative" to, make no mistake, and then the resistance and resilience of federalist powers and half the popular vote to stop or reduce their stupidest stuff and worst humanitarian crimes. 

It's not exactly the pacific retirement plan I was contemplating but it will be certainly historic. Hang on and hang in there.