IHIP News - Healthcare CEOs Beefing Up Security Instead of Addressing the PROBLEM

Episode Date: December 14, 2024

The media and politicians are failing to address the real issues in the American healthcare system after CEO's killing. PRE-ORDER OUR NEW BOOK and find live tour dates + more by clicking here: https://linktr.ee/ivehaditpodcast Follow Us: I've Had It Podcast: @Ivehaditpodcast Jennifer Welch: @mizzwelch Angie "Pumps" Sullivan: @pumpspumpspumps Special thanks to @cnraun for the IHIP Theme SongSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to IHIP News. On corporate media, I've noticed a lot of stories since the UnitedHealthcare CEO's murder that in the chyrons it says, corporate CEOs beefing up security. And then they have a security expert come on and talk about how scared all of these CEOs are and how they're beefing up security. And then they have a security expert come on and talk about how scared all of these CEOs are and how they're beefing up security. And it's really a missed opportunity. And it really shows how much corporate media is aligned with the UnitedHealthcares of the world. Because I think what would be really helpful right now would be to have a panel of people who went to work, paid their monthly insurance fee, and then were denied health care. And why is it that this man was shot in cold blood on the streets of Manhattan?

And this is the large portion of the public's response to this. And I haven't really seen that answered in the corporate media. And it seems like right now you have Jeff Bezos trotting over to Mar-a-Lago donating a million dollars. You have Meta donating money to Trump. Trump's transition, they pulled it, has a 56% approval rating. And what's lost in all of this are the working class people that bought into, you're going to send your kids to school, their wieners are going to get whacked off. You're going to pick them up.

Nobody's going to know what the hell is going on. And when you look at what happened with this murder, you have corporate America all colliding on that sidewalk. You've got guns. You've got the healthcare system. You've got corporate greed and then the sensationalizing of American culture and all of these things colliding in one place. And I think it's interesting that so many people that, as Trump famously says, I do great with the poorly educated. It gets a lot of union workers to vote against unionizing.

There was no real strong economic message from the Democrats that we have to raise wages. Instead, we get in these nuanced arguments about the opportunity economy and all of these, you know, more nuanced conversations that pundits on the East and West Coast that are Ivy League educated try to explain to people. Instead of very simply saying, yes, inflation is real. The problem here is we have not raised wages. But guess who is making more money? All of the shareholders. They're all making more money because as soon as they raise grocery prices, guess what?

When the supply chain kind of fixed itself and then the demand fixed itself, they got a taste of those higher prices and they were too greedy to reduce it. So since they won't do it and we can't get the votes from these greedy Republicans, what we're going to do is we're going to talk incessantly about raising wages and it never happens. We're talking about CEO security right now. Yes. And I've also seen all of these articles about now is not the time to talk about the healthcare industry. Now is the time to talk about the callousness of the American people. And I'm with you. There is a missed opportunity. What we should be talking about is why are people not able to be empathetic to this

CEO culture, to this billionaire? Is it because they are so frustrated by what's going on in their lives with the healthcare system? I mean, this is the perfect opportunity to talk about how do we make it better? Obviously, murder is never an option. But instead of talking about, oh, the poor CEOs now have to hire security, which is fine, because they make billions and billions and billions of dollars a year. And we're so worried about them. Why are we not worried about the person that works and falls off a roof and can't get health care, or the mother that, you know, can't get reproductive care.

I mean, there's so many things in health care that we could talk about. But I, too, have seen just a desert of what people want to talk about. They want to talk about callousness and how these poor CEOs have to beef up security. And my thing is, let's talk about why people are not empathetic. Let's get real solutions for that. I'll tell you why they're not empathetic. Because corporate America is not empathetic to them. You know, you get, you reap what you sow. And so this expectation and this onus on working class people to be so empathetic to corporate America, when corporate America is brutal, unrelenting,

compulsive liars, bait and switchers. It's just, of course, there is a void of empathy for this violent act in the streets of Manhattan because a lot of working class people feel violence from corporate America when they finally need their health care after they paid into it and did a random checkup here or there. And something serious happens and they're denied. And they're like, what? Let me read to you some headlines from some opinion colonists. Here's one.

Brett Stevens. He says, Brian Thompson, not Luigi Mangione, is the real working class hero. I saw that and I about died. Okay. Here's another one from Phil Boas, Arizona Republic says, UnitedHealthcare CEO was murdered. This is no time to trash the industry. What is he talking about? This is the perfect time.

What are we doing? What are we doing? What are we doing here? This is the perfect time. What are we doing? What are we doing? What are we doing here? This is the perfect time to trash the industry. I think the larger question is this. For a large portion of the American public that has had to wrangle the healthcare industry, they are saying, okay, wait a minute. I had all of these terrible things happen and my claims were denied. And then my loved one died, or this has greatly impacted my quality of life for the rest of my life. And that's not a crime that's celebrated in America. The shareholders are popping champagne. Look at what you did when you caused suffering

to Kelly over in Ohio. Look at that. Cheers, cheers. If we can create thousands more Kellys, we can make even this hundred more million dollars this quarter. And so for the victim of this, it feels very criminal. It feels very criminal what they're doing. You're sitting in your house with a stack of bills navigating how to get chemotherapy, how to get anti-nausea medication for it. I would imagine you're sitting there thinking, how is this legal? How can they do this? How is this possible? And then you hear about, oh, the stock market's just roaring back.

I mean, we're so great. Let's go. And then when this guy gets shot and somebody, you know, died or is in the throes of trying to get their chemo paid for. And I can, I get it. I can see how somebody could go, well, I mean, you know, this guy has done far worse to a far greater number of people. And I'm supposed to feel a bunch of empathy. And I think a lot of people would say, look, I don't condone, you know, murder in the middle

of the streets, but why aren't we dealing with this other thing? So it's like these columnists in corporate America only want to deal with one part of it. Secure the CEOs. Right. Make the path for the Jeff Bezos and the Peter Thiel's and the Elon Musk, make their direct path, the Mar-a-Lago to that fleabag roach motel is easy. And let's make that transition for them as smooth as possible so that they can be parasites

on the American public. Not only have I noticed a lack of taking the bulls by the horn in the corporate media, I have not heard very many Democrats that have come out and said, we need to talk about healthcare right now. We need to examine why we have this problem. We need to look at the income disparity. I have not heard any of that. So it's not just the corporate media. I feel like part of my frustration right now is I feel like that the people that should be bringing this out and talking about it and bringing it to the fore, like here are the changes we need to make. We know Donald Trump only has a concept of a plan, so we can't depend on him.

So we need our Democratic leaders to come out and say, there's a lack of empathy. Let's examine why. Let's look at this and talk about it and start educating the public, particularly the people that are paying all of these high-priced insurance and having their claims denied. But have you heard much from that camp? A couple. I mean, Elizabeth Warren, AOC. I did hear her. But I do think that the conversation needs to shift to where is the empathy for the working class. Absolutely. And that void is out there. And for right, wrong, good, bad, Donald Trump filled that void. He's filled it for a decade. And we all know what's

going to happen. I can play this tape through for you because I've been old long enough to tell you exactly what's going to happen at the end of his four years. Look no further than George W. Bush. Deregulate, drill baby drill, billionaires, let's start a war so we can line the pockets of Halliburton, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then what happens to the market? It is a face plant to end all face plants. And a Democrat comes back in and cleans it up. Then look at Trump, 2016, 2020. Drill, baby, drill. I'm the green president and I'm not talking about the environment. I'm talking about cash money, baby. And corporate America is like, oh yeah, Trump's our daddy. Let's go. Let's go. What happens? Face plant catastrophe. Democrat comes back in and cleans it up. We know exactly, we know exactly what's going to happen, but here is what, there is multiple questions that need to be asked. There are the working class people who the Democrats have not articulated.

We are a place where you can come to get your labor protected, get health insurance, where you can protect yourself and your family and navigate an illness. We are a place that if there is inflation, we are going to make sure your wages are increased. We are a place that if a corporation is putting some sort of addictive chemical out on the earth and saying, oh no, this isn't addictive. I'm talking about Oxycontin that we immediately remove it. They haven't done any of that. And then secondly, there is a group of people in our income bracket. And these are the white people that are deluded and they lie to themselves constantly and say, you know, it's just the economics of the Republican Party. It's the economy and the tax policy.

You know, my husband says that, you know, when it comes to the economy and our tax bracket, we don't like the personality. Trump's kind of a nut. But, you know, we vote for the fiscal policies of this man. That is utter bullshit. And the Democrats need to message that better and take this to the upper middle class. I'm talking about people that make a couple hundred thousand dollars a year or more. It's a big voting block as well as the working class. It needs to be a multi-thronged message that, hey, all of you that attend your little megachurches and say that the Republican Party is so good with economics, let's start with Reagan and

the trickle-down economic disaster that was. Then let's go to George H.W. Bush. Then let's go ahead and talk about George W. Bush and what a fucking epic face plant that was. And then let's look at dipshit Trump and how disastrous that was. They don't do it. They allow this bullshit narrative that I hear all the time. And I think what we've got to do is we've got to start calling out that upper middle class tax bracket for the white supremacist racistsists that they are, because they know, they know

what they're saying is bullshit. They know it, but they vote for this crap because they like their white supremacy and the patriarchal structures of American society. They like for it to be protected. And I have news for them. America is getting more and more and more diverse. The likelihood that one of your children or your grandchildren is going to mate and breed with somebody of the different skin color is very, very much higher because they're not as racist as you

are. And the likelihood that you could have a gay kid or a trans kid is likely. It exists. And I have a big message for all the social wedge issue Christians. You can do all you want to about trans people. You can be an asshole. You can be a bully. You can sit and go apeshit bananas about drag queens. You can sit and go apeshit bananas over gay people. You can make it all illegal.

You can criminalize it. You can do all of those things. But at the end of the day, all of these things will still exist and they have always existed. And your record on this is going to be that you are an evil sociopathic bully. That's what, that's what your legacy is going to be. And some of us, it's going to be, listen, being a person is hard. And if somebody has a different nonconforming sexuality or gender, I don't give a shit. I just don't want to be an asshole to them. Absolutely. I completely agree.

And I think another thing that people are going to have to live with is they like cruelty. When all this rounding up of people and separating families and deporting people, if I assume that there will be a human rights outcry from both sides. But then I think, will it really? Or will the Republicans, the MAGA, the diehard MAGAs, will they like it? Will they like it? It goes beyond the diehard MAGAs. You have the diehard MAGAs and then you have the secret diehard MAGAs.

And they're more insidious. The guy driving down the highway in his pickup truck littered with Trump flags and all this, you know, don't tread on me bullshit stickers. At least I know exactly what he is. At least he flies his freak flag proud. The people that scare the shit out of me far more than that guy are the people who live in their gated communities that we vote for the tax policy. Those people that are too embarrassed and polite social circles to admit that they free base Fox News and voted for Trump three times. Those are the more insidious and more evil people, in my opinion. Well, right, because they have convinced themselves that that's, they, they love people.

No, they haven't convinced. I think they think that they're great people doing the right thing for America. I think if you put truth to them, they would believe all the bullshit that pops up. They think they're doing the right thing for them. You think they don't know the difference on some level? No. College educated, upper middle class people, they know. They know that's why they are embarrassed by it. There is a definite population.

The fact that they are embarrassed by it tells you they know exactly what they're doing. And they know exactly how cruel he is. There is a huge portion of people that know exactly how insidious they are. I will never not believe that because I know these people. Yeah. Trump's America. It's going to be a joy. All right. We'll see you guys later.