Opinion | The ‘Silent Violence’ of Company Greed and Energy

For many years, client teams have made clarion requires motion towards the “silent violence” that causes mass casualties ensuing from the unbridled energy of company greed, prison negligence, or indifference. They cite statistics and case research that the media and lawmakers have largely ignored or relegated to low ranges of enforcement.

Company bosses simply let their company legal professionals and public relations hacks brush off such warnings and pleas. Sometime tales they knew wouldn’t have any legs if they simply shut up or mumble a number of generic phrases of remorse, promising some obscure enhancements to their services and products.

However, 12 months after 12 months, the loss of life toll goes up, not down, and the horrors proceed. For instance, a minimum of 5,000 people a week die in US hospitals due to “preventable issues,” peer-reviewed research by Johns Hopkins College College of Medication medical doctors concluded in 2016. This is only one of many such studies of hospital-induced infections, overuse of antibiotics, medical malpractice or so-called “medical error,” prescribing batches of medicine that backfire, “accidents,” de-skilling, and understaffing.

There was no mass mobilization by authorities officers or business executives to deal with this staggering toll of a minimum of 250,000 deaths per 12 months!

Behind these numbers, actual folks with households, mates, and colleagues are shocked, outraged, or disheartened by avoidable lack of life and preventable harm. A few of them little doubt knew the particular causes and demanded redress and compensation in useless.

“Just under the floor is a seething maelstrom of resentment, anger, frustration, and bitterness over company abuse.”

Avoidable accidents additionally result from the blanket denial of insurance coverage protection to sick or injured sufferers by grasping unregulated or underregulated medical health insurance firms that maximize earnings and bonuses for CEOs. Many insurance coverage firms at the moment are utilizing AI to assist with client attrition.

About two thousand people per week lose their lives as a result of they can’t afford medical health insurance to cover immediate analysis and therapy prices. System-driven patterns of denial of advantages by well-being insurers additionally trigger deaths and accidents. The businesses have algorithms that mechanically delay or deny crucial procedures without first seeing a affected person’s medical information or talking to the affected person’s physician.

Insurance coverage insurance policies are stuffed with high-quality print co-pays, deductibles, waivers, and exclusions that drive shoppers and their medical doctors up the wall. Insurance coverage premiums are paid prematurely by sufferers or employers with marketed insurances.

For the previous two months, shoppers have been overwhelmed by a barrage of TV promotions by large insurers, e.g., Aetna, Cigna, and Humana, for their Medicare (dis)benefit plans aimed toward elderly beneficiaries. The advertisements are loaded with “freebies” that paint the businesses as charities as an alternative to sleazy industrial entrepreneurs. The truth is, the denial of advantages is greater for these plans than for conventional Medicare. Furthermore, these plans squeeze sufferers into tight networks of medical doctors and hospitals and topic them to horrible “prior authorization” overuse. The latter implies that some distant firm physician or medical skilled decides whether or not a physician with an affected person will be compensated for a particular therapy. This results in overwhelming paperwork for the medical doctors, big earnings for the businesses, and degraded therapy for sufferers.

An October 31, 2023, NBC investigation titled “‘Deny, deny, deny’: By denying claims, Medicare Advantage plans threaten rural hospitals and patients” by star reporter Gretchen Morgenson uncovered one other lethal influence of Medicare (dis)benefit applications on rural hospitals in America.

These firms are so entrenched that they’ve developed into largely proof against publicity. They gamed the system to straitjacket each sufferer and healthcare employees. The healthcare business will get away with about $360 billion in computerized billing fraud and abuse every year. (https://scholar.harvard.edu/msparrow/license-to-steal). Prosecutions are minimal, and lawmakers are principally detached as they depend on their marketing campaign money donations. Did you see any of the key get-together politicians on this 12 month’s election campaigns even point out the harmful influence of the medical business’s greed on harmless folks or the taxpayers?

Simply beneath the floor is a seething maelstrom of resentment, anger, frustration, and bitterness over company abuse. Such reactions are sometimes most pronounced in poor areas or workplaces, where persons are subjected to suffocating air pollution or publicity to carcinogenic toxins that result in most cancers, coronary heart illness, and different organ illnesses.

Nonetheless, the company perpetrators are far away from the influence of their operations and insurance policies. Their grossly overpaid bosses rule from elaborate suites and revel in unimaginable luxuries. Only a few folks know the names even of the CEOs of Fortune 500 firms like ExxonMobilAetna, Humana, Duke Vitality, Bank of America, and so forth. The lethality, the theft, the dominance, and the escape from the rule of regulation are rendered impersonal by the corporatists, who at the moment are investing big sums to go much more summary and distant with tyrannical generative AI algorithms.

This week, a person, nonetheless on the run, made his anger very private. Round 7 a.m., in the entrance of a busy midtown Manhattan resort, he singled out the CEO of the large UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, and shot him. The murderer fled on an electrical bicycle. The police eliminated the bullet casings from his pistol. On these envelopes had been the phrases “deny,” “delay,” and “deposition.”.

As information of this deadly taking unfolded throughout social media, a flood of offended or morbid feedback flooded the web. The New York Instances reported a number of, specifically:

“I am an ER nurse, and the issues I’ve seen dying sufferers denied by insurance coverage make me bodily in poor health. I simply cannot really feel sympathy for him due to all these sufferers and their households.”

“Ideas and condolences to the household,” one observer learns under a video of a CNN photograph. “Sadly, my condolences are out of community.”

Tragically sufficient, Mr. Thompson, in line with an organization worker, was one of the few managers who spoke of adjusting the tradition of the corporate.

However, company tradition, marinated to the core with infinite urges for ever-growing straightforward earnings, may be very troublesome to alter, particularly when it is really easy to extract increasingly more premium {dollars} from powerless shoppers who lack satisfactory regulatory safety.

And so the social media explosion included this typical touch upon TikTok: “I pay $1,300 a month for medical health insurance with an $8,000 deductible. ($23,000 yearly) Once I lastly reached that deductible, they denied my claims. He earned 1,000,000 {dollars} a month.”

The New York Instances described a “surprising outpouring of sufferers and relatives who posted horror tales of stagnation and denial of insurance coverage declare reimbursement.” The ugly actuality will proceed to erupt exponentially with volcanic fury because the media receives extra public reactions.

One wonders in regards to the response if this had occurred 4 months earlier than the November election. Might the uproar have modified the slimy rhythms of the Harris marketing campaign, orchestrated by the Democrats’ company embattled political consultants who handle the candidate messages and who actually don’t hearken to the warnings and in-style strategies by Senator Bernie Sanders?