Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling for December 13, 2024

I assume the intent of this comic is sarcasm. The health insurance industry should be ashamed that their actions often destroy people who think their health needs are covered, only to be denied what they are due by greedy health insurance executives putting profits before people. That said, there is absolutely no excuse for murder !!!!!

Oh, it’s much too soon to politicize this, but I am sending my thoughts and prayers.

Excellent cartoon, Ruben.

After this happened, one of the spins to humanize the CEO was the family he leaves behind. Heck, I don’t think there’s a serial killer or war criminal who didn’t have a mother.

Has anyone noticed that there have been virtually NO magat comments about the murder?

Even after one of their own elites was gunned down. Nothing about how guns make us safer, nor any 2nd amendment celebrations, nothing.

Not much from any of the rwnj cartoonists either.

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Did Fox not report it? Was there no memo issued from RNC?

It’s not just Health Insurance.

Auto coverage would rather total a car and make a crappy offer, instead of paying to fix it.

Homeowners in North Carolina now are going to be suing their home owner insurance companies, for all the crap excuses they are using to get out of paying. And then my homeowner insurance rates will increase again. They went up 40% in 2024.

According to capitalist demi-god Milton Friedman the primary, if not only, purpose of a corporation is to increase shareholder value. That’s what this CEO was doing. Here’s one result.

Lets just convert to a single payer system. Might save a then former CEO’s life. More important save a lot of others lives and make their lives better.

“I’m-a Luigi: Numbah One!”

Thank you, Mr. Bolling.

Of course, the police investigation aspect is poetic license on Ruben Bolling’s part. In real life, a death caused by corporate or political malfeasance is not even against the law. It certainly should be, but it isn’t. As far as I know, there were no legal consequences at all for any of the people who poisoned the residents of Flint, Michigan by changing the source of the city’s drinking water. Or trump’s and the con’s incompetence and malfeasance that caused the unnecessary 100’s of thousand excess deaths from covid.

We all know the Major Health Insurance company boards of directors are laser focused on a solution. The obvious answer is:

More Security for company executives!

What if that CEO had met the orange baboon on Fifth Ave? That would really have put the Rittenhouse line of jurisprudence to the test.

Shooting insurance company CEOs is not the way to effect reform of the health care system. The way to do that is through legislation, where fearless lawmakers with the best interest of all citizens in mind stand up to the insurance industry and…

Oh, right.

Sorry, never mind.

Thank dog we emigrated to a civilized country with national health.

If my health insurance claim is denied, it’s because my employer doesn’t want to pay it. I realize my employer does not know or see each and every claim, they hired the insurance company to do that. They did, however, ask the insurance company to reduce costs.

Nice!

Talk about fantasy, finding someone who is solely responsible for a corporate (or government) action you might as well toss a dart at the directory. Its all done by committee or according to the rules drawn up by the committee.

Ruben better hope the not so great state of Florida doesn’t charge him with threats to conduct a mass shooting or act of terrorism for printing those three awful D words.

When we were in England, my Mother had to visit the emergency room. We were seen immediately, possibly because she was older and they weren’t sure what was wrong with her. We asked for the bill, explaining that we were Americans and didn’t qualify for the free medical care. They replied that they didn’t have any forms for making out a bill, no one who would know how to make out the form if they had one and anyway everyone who was getting paid was busy taking care of sick people. On the other hand, when my son needed surgery for his cancer, he had to wait six weeks for the doctor to have an opening in his schedule. And, later, his treatments were postponed because the insurance company was deciding whether to pay for them. This was the president of the Midwestern Prostate Ontological group being dictated to by a pencil pusher who probably never graduated from college. That was in Saint Louis, Missouri, United States of America. We pay more for medical care than anyone else on earth and it’s not because we are paying for actual medical care. We are spending money to support a huge insurance industry with money that then isn’t available to provide for patient care. Can you blame a person who is offered a high paying job in an industry that is already established and sucking the blood out of the health care needed by Americans, or blame the system that offered him the job?

While I have always favored a universal health care plan of some sort, news comes in the past month about money issues with the plan that the U.K. has.

When I was a kid our family doctor made house calls, had his office up a narrow stairway above a Stineway Drug store. We were in a major city. After WW2 benefits were starting to come to workers. The doctor was not the wealthiest in town, unless he came from a wealthy family, and drove a used car he took in payment from the local garage owner for his wife’s hysterectomy. His house was painted by the painter whose kids had their tonsils out. He ate steaks from the butcher who needed all those stitches when he sliced himself. Fruit and vegetables from the grocer who hurt his back. Most did pay in cash, but an office visit was $5 when a Teamster Union truck driver made $4/hr. The GP treated illness, set broken bones, and did surgeries. Our doctor was a General Practitioner (GP), and chief of surgery at the hospital. There were only a handful of specialties at that time, heart specialist, brain specialist, etc. The old folks were charged less, if at all. Most only had Social Security. Then in 1965 came Medicare. Doctors were actually getting paid real money. Within 3 years our doctor bought his very first brand new car, a Cadillac no less, and then built a small clinic for his office, a dentist and a drug store that now paid him rent. Since then the specialties have gone at least 40 fold. My heart ‘team’ has one who is the ‘plumber’ (the valves and arteries etc.) and one who is the ‘electrician’ (the signals sent for heartbeat, etc).

All the specialties today cost more money. Some of the treatments and tests they do are surely needed. Some are not. Insurance companies need to protect themselves as well as the insured. Sometimes it doesn’t work. The complicated will always have issues.

In Germany, a doctor would serve time for denying a patient life-saving treatment. The hippocratic oath is taken seriously there, meaning you have to act first and discuss the bill later.

In the US, a doctor is apparently handed a jail sentence if he does administer life-saving treatment to a woman who loses her baby in the process.

I ask you, where would you prefer to live?

The only thing that is likely to change is UHC’s response to strongly worded correspondence regarding denials of service. The sender will get a visit from the police.

Insurance companies are the most successful of the bait-and-switch outfits.

The CEO of Boeing was being roasted by the Press and Congressional investigations on quality issues of their aircraft that led to many deaths.

But in that case, he ended up hounded out of his $30M/year job and forced to resign, with nothing but the shirt on his back and an $80M severance package.

While I don’t think murder is the answer to the problem, the fact remains that insurance companies make money by denying claims. In health insurance the denial can extend to to things that are considered to be medically necessary by actual medical practitioners.

College friends of the suspect say that he was successful, outgoing, and well-liked. In recent years, though, there were increasing signs that he was contracting a dangerous mental illness relating to his bottom line.

Falsely attributed to Stalin, Kill one person and it’s a tragedy. Kill a million and it’s a statistic.

For the CEO, that’s all their clients are.