Summary
Reddit’s r/medicine moderators deleted a thread where doctors and users harshly criticized murdered UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.
Comments, including satirical rejections of insurance claims for gunshot wounds, targeted UHC’s reputation for denying care to boost profits.
Despite the removal, similar discussions continue, with medical professionals condemning UHC’s business practices under Thompson’s leadership, which a Senate report recently criticized for denying post-acute care.
Thompson, shot in what appears to be a targeted attack, led a company notorious for its high claim denial rates, fueling ongoing debates about corporate ethics in healthcare.
Civility is a failure of moderation.
Some people are bastards. We must be able to say, out loud: bad people can deserve bad things. “Good riddance” exists for a reason. That’s not incitement. He’s dead. Nothing bad can ever happen to him, again.
You can feel differently about this than any other event. It’s not hypocrisy to cry when soldiers kill children, but shrug when some schmuck shoots an executive. One doesn’t undermine the other, in either direction. They are unrelated moral judgements.
Even the tribalists who reduce everything to ‘you just don’t like it’ need to fucking realize, people had reasons not to like this guy. He was not a victim of bigotry, jealousy, or disinformation. His actions hurt people.
You plainly can’t make us feel bad about this… and you simply won’t make us feel bad about that. Let people speak ill of the dead. What the fuck are we doing when monsters and corpses are so vigorously protected from harsh language?