Rev Left Radio - Red Hot Take: Deny, Defend, Depose...

Episode Date: December 5, 2024

Breht gently and lovingly gives his unique and nuanced perspective on the murder of the CEO of Healthcare United.  Outro Song: To Cause Your Own Death by Mon Rovia Support Rev Left Radio and get access to more episodes like this here: Patreon.com/RevLeftRadio Make a one-time donation to Rev Left at BuyMeACoffee.com/revleftradio  

Victims of the for-profit health care system have a right to defend themselves. I wanted to jump on the mic real quick and just talk a little bit about the recent murder of the CEO of United Healthcare, Brian, something or other. It really doesn't matter. That's been happening. That's been getting covered by the media. And I think the ruling class is kind of shocked. And based on a lot of the media that I've been looking at, a lot of the mainstream media that I've been looking at, the comment sections are full of people. I mean, I'm looking at Fox News, right? I'm looking at right-wing sources as well as left-wing sources. And no matter what source I look at, conservative, liberal, more radical, whatever, all the comments, literally on the Fox News of video covering the story, all the comments were in one way or another justifying this guy's murder talking about the way that they've had pain and suffering and fear and precarity imposed on them. by this parasitic class of corporate profiteer-seeking middlemen who stand between human beings and the help that they need in their most desperate times and attempt to extract billions and billions of dollars out of them over the years. I mean, over one year, right?

This is a cruel, disgusting criminal enterprise that robs people of a human right and uses it as another vehicle for which to, to accumulate profit, exploit and extort regular working people, and fill their own motherfucking pockets. So while the ruling class itself is shocked and all this is so terrible, send the police on a manhunt for whoever did this, regular working Americans know goddamn well, this guy's a hero. This guy is a stand in for all of our frustrations. And I'm talking as somebody who doesn't have health insurance, who's never been able to afford it, whose family has just been kicked off of Medicaid. I have a long family line of people who have been fucked over in their most desperate, fearful

times by insurance companies. One of the sick aspects of the insurance companies is, well, first of all, the millions and millions of people who don't have it, you're just fucked. And I count myself among you. But for those that do have it, you pay exorbitant prices, premiums, month in, month out. for years and years and years and years. Many of us pay through our healthy years when we actually don't need it.

And so that money you're giving those corporations, peer profit. Pure profit from you. And then the time comes when you need help. And what happens? You get charged again, a third time, a fourth time. And most importantly, in United Healthcare was the bottom of the barrel

when it came to this. You get claims denied. So if you have to go do a little, little checkup that'll be covered right it's pretty cheap for them you've paid in i mean hundreds of times more than what it cost to pay for a checkup so they'll pay for that it's precisely at those moments when you are most desperate when there's been a terminal illness diagnosis a cancer diagnosis a whole horrible accident when you are emotionally stressed and in chaos and care about one thing and one thing only making sure your loved one gets the mother fucking help they need

that these vampires will step in and start denying your claims because they know. One, you're not in an emotional, you know, or social situation to be able to calmly deal with something like, oh, we can't cover this desperately needed procedure of your loved one that might result in their death or your bankruptcy afterwards. And two, they know that even if they're being illegal, even if they're denying a claim in an unjust way that violates the contract. that you are very likely to not have the financial wherewithal to be able to hire a legal team, go to court, risk losing that case, spend months and months and months in legal disputes with a huge corporation with a team of lawyers and billions of dollars. So even when they fuck you over, even when it's completely against their own rules,

their own contract that you signed with them, they know that most of us won't have the ability to be able to take them to court and even if we did have the ability to take them to court the entire time that process is playing out they're going to be extorting and exploiting and plundering you in your family and now instead of the medical costs

you have to worry about the legal costs and top of the stress of a sick and dying loved one you have to deal with the huge financial stresses of maybe losing your fucking house maybe losing, and that's if you even fucking have a house. So while the ruling class sort of gasps audibly and every fucking law enforcement in New York City is hunting down this big bad villain,

the people are celebrating. Because this guy enriched himself off the pain, the fear, the misery, the suffering, the precarity of regular motherfucking people. And when you see people on Fox News, people on the New York Post, reactionary right-wing conservative websites sounding exactly like the comment section of a rev-left radio post when it comes to health care, it's stunning to live in a country where politicians don't run on that. We had Bernie out, and that was not acceptable.

The Democratic Party made goddamn sure that that wasn't going to come to fruition. We had Obama messing around with the edges of the system, but doing nothing to displace the private insurance. industry as a whole, and so we're still fucked. And aside from them, people don't even talk about it. Did Kamala, in this latest run, talk about universal health care, Medicare for all? She didn't fucking mention it. So isn't it odd in a quote unquote democracy or a quote unquote representative republic

that one of the clearest things that the fucking people want across the entire political spectrum, One of the biggest albatrosses around a regular working class family's motherfucking neck is medical bills and medical premiums and co-pays and all the bullshit you have to deal with. If we lived in a democracy and a representative republic, wouldn't at least one party or one of the candidates running for high office use this obviously massively supported policy and go balls to the wall calling out these corporations and making enemies of these motherfucking vampires

that 90% of people in this country fucking hate and have every right to do so, and yet you don't hear a single candidate talking about it. That's because, my dear friends, we live in an oligarchy. We live in the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Your democracy is fake. It's an illusion. It's a mirage.

They treat you like a child. My favorite metaphor for democracy in America is when a parent is driving a car and you have your little toddler in the back seat and you hand them a fake, you know, toy steering wheel with a little beep beep button on it, horn on it. And they're sitting in their little chair pretending they're driving.

That's the American voter. You think that you're in control of this system. You are not. Big money is. So even when you have a certain policy that 80, 90% of people want to see, it doesn't fucking happen. It's not even promised.

I mean, we're used to politicians promising something and then not following through on it. They don't even bother promising it. So we are a country run, exploited, extorted by the rich, whether we're trying to buy groceries, whether we're trying to get access to health care, whether we're trying to pursue higher education.

If you're not born rich and you don't have generational wealth, you're a fucking peasant. and everywhere you turn some fat fucking pig is slipping his hand in your pocket to take a little bit more out of it oh there's an inflation crisis

let's gouge the grocery prices oh people need healthcare right okay awesome we can set up a barrier to entry we can charge them monthly fucking payments and then when they really fucking get in trouble and they're like they're fucking dying and their whole family's like crying

and they're shattered emotionally that's when we strike that's when we deny their claim these motherfuckers would charge you to breathe the air in the atmosphere if they could if they could find a way to prop up a barrier of entry to being able to breathe fucking oxygen and they still might and charge you for every fucking breath you take or a monthly subscription they would fucking do it the american people are fed up but the american people are also completely subordinated by ideology

and the ruling elite and the two-party system. So we know that we won't get any change when it comes to the voting booth. We know we have no power over our own lives whatsoever and no hope on the horizon of anything changing. And so what can we do except sit back and have a little fun when a sick fucking psychopathic CEO gets gunned down or a billionaire who tries to go to the bottom of the ocean and gets blown the fuck up?

Those are our little moments of catharsis And then the ruling class Wags their finger at us You guys are sick, man You guys are sick in the head You know what's sick in the head Leveraging people's Want for their loved ones

To survive in order to extract profit out of them You know what's sick in the head Making billions and billions And billions and billions of dollars and denying people's medical claims that have paid you for years, sometimes decades faithfully

so that you can bump up that profit margin a little bit more. Now, if you shoot one person in Manhattan, you're a murderer, we're on a manhunt for you. You murder 100,000 for profit because you're a CEO of a healthcare industry corporation or a pharmaceutical corporation or whatever the fuck. Well, that's just the free market.

baby that's just capitalism surely that's not a crime that's freedom that's liberty that's what the founding fathers died for but your mom your dad your brother your spouse your sister somebody you love your best friend dies can't make it to your wedding because they died because a claim was rejected or you do get help but now you have to sell your home everything you've worked your entire fucking life for

in a society where owning a home is harder and harder and harder every fucking millisecond that's sick that's a crime but that's normalized now your tax dollars will go all day long

to bombing babies murdering toddler dropping 2,000-pound bombs on schools and refugee camps, killing people's grandmother and grandfather, murdering disabled people in Palestine and around West Asia and anywhere else the U.S. wants to start a war. Your tax dollars, by the trillions, go to murdering millions of people in Iraq and Afghanistan, Libya, Syria,

funding proxy wars around the planet. And if anyone has the goal to say, hey, maybe instead of using trillions of dollars to murder people around the planet for profit and geopolitical egemony, we actually ask for a return on our money in a form of health care, housing, education, the things, you know, humans need to survive, investing our tax dollars that we work for, the wealth we create as workers to go to increasing the quality of life for the people that actually make this fucking system run in the first place? Well, that's socialism, man. What are you? Some sort of Stalinist extremist?

No, no, no. Your tax dollars are going to go to pay for trillions of dollars of wars forever. And at home, you're going to be ruthlessly exploited and robbed at every fucking turn for every basic need that you have, whether it's housing, education, food and groceries, or health care. And you're going to shut the fuck up And you're going to take it More than that, you're going to wave an American flag You're a patriot, right? We're all one family after all.

We're all Americans, right? It doesn't matter if you're rich or poor. We're all Americans. That's whose side you're really on, right? Now shut the fuck up and get back to work Because Israel needs more fucking weapons To drop on the heads of fucking infants. So yeah, when this fucking pig

gets shot down by a hero in Manhattan. Apologies to us if we don't faint and fall on the ground, clutching our pearls. In fact, we like to see it. Fuck that guy. He made his entire living off the misery of others. Fuck him. He's a criminal.

And the guy who shot him? We don't know his motives. But we do know one thing. on his bullets that he buried into this fucking capitalist pig he had the words deny, defend, and depose. Those words, the title of a book about how the health care industry is a fucking scam meant to destroy your family for profit.

So although we don't know the motivations and honestly, hopefully we never find out because if we find out that means he got caught, I support our troops. There's a pretty good indication here that he is somebody who has been fucked over by this system either directly or somebody he loves by the United Healthcare system which just go read the comments of any story anywhere and you'll see people by the hundreds telling you that they too had their claims denied

for basic access to basic health care dental vision a procedure that they needed to survive or make their quality of life better that was denied and why do they deny because that makes them more profit. If they can bring in more than they have to put out, that makes their profit margins higher. And if you're not willing to fucking rake regular people over the goddamn coals and destroy lives to increase that profit margin, well, you don't have what it takes to be an American CEO. And if you are a CEO of a company like United Healthcare, and I don't know you take mushrooms one night and wake the fuck up to the insane fucking things that you're doing and you decide hey i'm in a position of power i just had a revelation about not being an

evil sack of shit let's make some reforms to this company let's lower our profit margins and make sure that we take care of our customers what's going to happen the board is going to fire your dumb ass and replace you with somebody who's willing to sink their fangs into the necks of regular people so On one hand, there's obviously individual failure. These people as individuals are evil. They know what they're doing. On the other hand, there's a structural evil that this is not nearly incentivized.

This is required to get to that position in the first place and for these companies to perpetuate themselves. And so they're going to keep doing it. and so when we see this reaction by the American people this is another obvious signal that the vast majority of people across the political no matter what their other political beliefs are because they're a human being with a beating heart that will one day die and they love other people and their family friends whatever just by virtue of that by virtue of being a human being in the fucking world in the cosmos on planet earth

no matter what other political ideals they might have, they're celebrating the death of an obvious parasite. Now, this guy didn't have to do that. He didn't have to spend his life like that in the dog and psychopathic search for more and more and more money. He had choices to make, and he chose not only to be the CEO of a company, which profit maximization is the goal,

not only to be the CEO of a health care company where your profit is premised on the brutalization of other regular working people but he decided to be the CEO of the worst of the health care fucking companies of the company that compared to all other companies has the highest rate of denying claims so literally personally enriching himself

off the devastation suffering pain, emiseration, and murder of other human beings. We don't have a right to fight back? If somebody stands between you and your loved one's ability to survive, and they prevent your loved one from surviving until you pay them money until you stuff green paper into their pockets, then they'll give you the thumbs up and let your loved one live or let you keep your home or whatever the fuck,

that's violence that's a crime if somebody came to my house and tried to hurt my loved ones I would kill them that's what they're doing they're just not coming to your house they're sitting in a skyscraper in Manhattan

they're doing the same thing so if I can defend somebody coming to my house to hurt my loved ones for free right let's some fucking asshole wants to hurt people don't we have a right to defend our loved ones from somebody trying to hurt them also hurting them for money isn't that another crime on top of the murder or the imposition of suffering

the assault on regular people you're not only doing the crime of assaulting or hurting or murdering you're also robbing people while you do it that's like a felony right that should be a felony it's free market capitalism so I think what we have to do use this as a moment to highlight

not just the injustice of the health care system the implicit torturous sociopathic logic of capitalism itself we have to tie it to where our tax dollars actually go instead of going to places like universal health care

and honestly whoever this guy is that did this shooting he needs to be made into a hero a folk hero of the people and it should disturb the ruling class It disturbs us what they do. Any millionaire from the Democratic Republican Party, corporate media, all these people that manufacture consent for many things,

including the ongoing genocide of Palestinians, want to wag their finger and get on their moral high horse about the sanctity of human life? I was watching breaking points, and even they, right, this sort of dissident alternative news channel. Even they have to start this off. Like, hey, we're all adult. We don't support this

This violence is crazy But here's why it might happen This violence is it crazy I support this It's self-defense And anybody Who has supported things like the Iraq War The State of Israel

What's going on in Syria right now The toppling of Libya or any number of horrific crimes against humanity that were all justified given the green light you know if you were against those things you were gaslit as crazy or a traitor or something else right all those people they want to act like the death of one

criminally insane fucking guy who hurt people for money that's where they draw the line blowing babies up in cribs and Palestine that's just Israel has a right to defend itself, right? But killing a fucking CEO who's made billions in profit of the misery of fellow Americans? No, that's just sick. The left is sick if they're celebrating this. What the hell's going on?

Fuck you. So, I don't know. I just wanted to jump on the mic. Have some moment of catharsis for myself, maybe some moment of catharsis for you listening because if you listen to a show like this, I guarantee most of you, like me, born and raised in the working class, that you've been on the wrong end of this disgusting, parasitic, vampiric, so-called industry, standing between us and our families and our basic human fucking right to access health care. It's our right as human beings for human dignity,

but it's also our right because our fucking everybody that came before us all the way back to those that were enslaved, to build this country, to our ancestors who worked as regular working people in this fucking country to build up everything, including those hospitals, all the wealth extracted from us when we pay taxes to this fucking system for our whole working lives and our parents, whole working lives and their parents whole working lives. To build up a society that could have a health care system at all? And then for a couple people to come in and say, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on. We're taking all this over And you got to pay us to enter No

This is our society These are our institutions We could survive just fine Without this parasitic class of overlords Extracting money from us At every fucking turn They could not survive one fucking day without us There's a general strike in this country

Of just key industries For one fucking day Their entire system goes away if every CEO of every company was raptured into hell tomorrow sure there'd be a kind of messy transition but we'd be just fucking fine medium and long term just fucking fine this is our society

this world is the world of working people society that have made the wealth and resources over general upon generations upon generations to build this civilization possible in the first place and we reject the idea that a small group of already incredibly rich people can come in take ownership of everything extract our labor at work for profit extract our rent money at home for profit extract our fucking whatever little money we have left over after that

for the possibility of accessing health care we reject it we reject a system premised on this exploitation extortation this murderous disgusting system that murders people abroad and wags its finger in the face of regular working people when they have a fucking cathartic chuckle in the face of somebody who has made their lives miserable and materially worse we reject that whole system and we do not apologize and this guy or girl or whoever the fuck it turns up to be for whatever their intentions turn out to be is a folk hero and this is a moment in time that we can leverage to make these grievances more known

to scare the people who want to keep this system in place literally I think it does scare them a little bit maybe not all of them people in other industries like that's the healthcare industry you know we do something different I don't that be that worried

but I don't know if I was the CEO of another health care company that had a fucking large denial of claim rate I might be looking over my shoulder a little bit and that's good we live in fear every fucking day of getting sick of our rent going up of not being able to afford food or medicine for our families maybe they can live in fear for a little bit sometime too right maybe they can look over their shoulder once in a while billions of dollars drivers nannies cooks living life of luxury and comfort on the backs of millions of people at home and abroad maybe they can live with a little bit of stress once in a while

and cry me a river if that bothers you we don't care one of the greatest tweets of all time and came from one Carl Marx he says we have no compassion for you we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we will not apologize for the tear. Now our time hasn't come.

This is a one-off incident, and it should be understood as such, right? No real change is going to come about from a one-off instance, but our celebrations bother them. It disturbs them, and they should be bothered, and they should be disturbed. And when our time really comes, when we really get a chance at power, we're going to use it mercilessly in favor of the working people of this planet and against those who spent the last couple of centuries brutalizing, murdering, extorting, and exploiting those that we love. Love and solidarity.