Total revenue (all money brought in) – $389b
All money paid out in claims – $303b
Money left over for running the business $85b
Cost of running the business – $69b
Profit – $14b
So it basically appears that for every $1 us customers pay to United Healthcare, $0.75 goes to medical providers, $.21 to running the business, and $.04 to profit.
Those numbers don’t seem like gouging to me, what do you think?
Complete and utter bullshit. That's the amount they listed as the cost of revenue yeah, but I'm willing to bet that a large chunk of that isn't being spent on claim payouts. Given the complete and utter lack of transparency into that number, neither you nor I can rightly claim that's what its spent on.
In any event, I don't care how profitable they are. I'm not looking to play that game. Their business model requires them to MURDER their customers in order to maintain their profit margin. This is what they are doing, day in and day out.
The fact they are making any profit at all, acting solely as the gatekeeper between people and the medical care they need, should be an indictment which strips them of the moral high ground... yet in this diseased and ass-backwards economic system (which has turned more into a religion than anything else) people like you actually have the nerve to claim it as a defense.
What a lot of people are missing about this killing is that it signifies the potential of the American public to finally go against the corporate controlling forces of the Western World. But taking even one more step back, it may be the start of a realization that technology is not a completely beneficial force, as it is the only thing that allows the destruction of communities, which forces people to in turn rely on health insurance companies. (The Amish, with a very strong community, don't rely on insurance. They have their own collective sort of insurance: they just pay each other's medical bills.)
Here's my advice to you: this is part of a much larger scheme than just health insurance. What we need after this event is not a mere release of emotions, but a sober philosophical analysis of this event and its placement in the greater scheme of things. If we focus too much on the emotional, we will in a sense be playing into the system, because it will make the killing about revenge. Instead, attempt to understand why this happened and the greater systemic illness in modern capitalism and spread that message.
"Capitalism is inherently immoral. It pits us against each other. It posits that the accumulation of money and resources should be our ultimate end-goal. So it’s no wonder that over the hundreds of years we’ve had to figure out how to exist within its confines, some of us have become exceedingly good at it. So good in fact, that others are forced to do without basic necessities and aren’t even afforded to the dignity to die comfortably."
The root problem is actually technology, and the accumulation of wealth by the rich is only the best mechanism technology has right now to grow. In the future, I expect with more centralized AI and even more efficient communication, capitalism might not even be necessary, but we will be enslaved regardless in a very similar inhuman fashion. And that is just because technology may find even more efficient means to build itself than just capitalism.
In a way, capitalism is a red herring, and our immense dissatisfaction of it may even indicate that we are not far off from moving to more socialist tendencies (c.f. the EU and UBI, etc.), but at the same time, we will be all the more ensared by technology due to it discovering even more efficient ways to grow.
For more information, I suggest "The Metaphysics of Technology" by David Skrbina, but other philosophers such as Heidegger have also explained this nicely.
