THEY GET $7.3 BILLION, WE GET DEATH PENALTIES
These crooks stole $7.3B from dying humans, faced zero charges. Welcome to the peasant's guide to U.S. healthcare: Where price-gouging is legal but fighting corporate murder gets you terrorism charges
$7.3 BILLION stolen from cancer patients. Let that number sink in.
Not through armed robbery. Not through some elaborate heist. But through the absolutely grotesque practice of marking up life-saving medications by more than 1000%. That’s what UnitedHealth and its corporate buddies managed to pull off between 2017 and 2022, according to a Federal Trade Commission report that should make your blood fucking boil.
Let me break down this highway robbery for you: Patients with cancer, HIV, and other serious chronic condition who were quite literally fighting for their lives were charged up to SEVENTEEN TIMES the actual cost of their medications. While they were setting up GoFundMe campaigns and liquidating their life savings, these corporate vultures were marking up $2,000 treatments to $34,000.
The same drugs.
The same bottles.
Just with an extra zero or three tacked on because they could.
And what did these bastards get for this wholesale pillaging of desperate patients?
Bonus checks.
Stock options.
Corner offices.
Swimming pools full of Dom Pérignon while patients were drowning in medical debt.
Meanwhile, Luigi Mangione is facing terrorism charges and potentially the death penalty for allegedly shooting one CEO. The same CEO who presided over a system that, according to recent lawsuits, used AI with a known 90% error rate to deny care to elderly Medicare patients. The same CEO whose company denied coverage to countless cancer patients, including children with leukemia, while posting record profits.
So here’s the billion-dollar questions: When you deliberately price-gouge cancer patients knowing some won’t be able to afford treatment, how is that not murder? When you systematically deny care to the elderly through automated systems you know are broken, why isn’t that terrorism?
And speaking of terrorism charges, the legal machinery grinding against Luigi recently took an even darker turn. His lawyers and prosecutors have agreed to push the deadline for indictment to February 17, partly because the Justice Department in Washington needs to decide whether to pursue the death penalty. And with Trump taking office this month, that decision lands squarely in the lap of an administration that’s already promised to gut Medicaid and has deep ties to the insurance industry.
Let that irony marinate: A man might face execution for killing one CEO, while the executives who orchestrated a multi-billion-dollar scheme that potentially killed or bankrupted countless HIV and cancer patients won’t see the inside of a courtroom.
This isn’t just about UnitedHealth. The FTC report shows that three major pharmacy benefit managers — OptumRx (UnitedHealth), Express Scripts, and CVS Caremark — collectively pocketed $7.3 billion through these markups. That’s billions stolen from people fighting for their lives, people choosing between medication and food, people launching GoFundMe campaigns for basic care. And here’s the real punch in the peasant-guts: These same companies had the audacity to claim they were *helping patients save money on medications*. Like a medieval lord claiming he’s helping the serfs by not taking their firstborn. Like a lion helping an antelope by eating only three of its legs. The absolute fucking crown of corporate gaslighting.
And the systemic fuckery doesn’t stop at price gouging. While UnitedHealth was busy marking up medications by more than 1000% and deploying AI systems with a known 90% error rate to deny Medicare claims to the elderly, their *efficiency* measures included interrupting a breast cancer surgery — with the patient under anesthesia — to verify “medical necessity”. Simultaneously in the land of the free, the situation has gotten so dire that a YouTuber had to step in to provide 2000 Americans with prosthetic limbs because their insurance companies wouldn’t cover them.
Fellow peasants, this is what happens when we let corporations treat human suffering as a quarterly earnings opportunity.
And while all this corporate violence was going down, what were our elected officials doing? Why creating special hotlines for CEOs to report safety threats and writing blank checks to Israel, of course. Because god forbid our corporate overlords feel unsafe while they’re busy denying prosthetic limbs to amputees and interrupting cancer surgeries to verify medical necessity.
Here’s the thing about American healthcare fuckery: This isn’t just about Trump’s incoming reign of corporate bootlicking. For the past four years, we’ve watched Joe “I’m-a-capitalist” Biden bend over backwards to reassure his Wall Street donors that nothing fundamental would change. While Americans were rationing insulin and dying from treatable illnesses, Biden was busy reminding us — what, every three minutes? — that he believes in the free market. As if we couldn’t tell by the way he let healthcare executives continue their legalized murder spree.
The Democratic establishment has perfected the art of wringing their hands about healthcare costs while making damn sure their corporate donors can keep the money printer running. And now, with Trump returning to office, we’re not even going to get the courtesy of performative concern. We’re trading in *capitalism with a friendly face* for mask-off corporate fascism — though honestly, when you’re dying because you can’t afford medication, does it really matter which flavor of federal fuckery is in charge?
Is it any wonder that 48% of college students say they understand why someone might shoot a healthcare CEO? When peaceful protests are met with tear gas, when voting feels meaningless, when watching your loved ones die from treatable conditions becomes normalized — what exactly do we expect?
This isn’t about glorifying violence. It’s about acknowledging that we’ve created a system where corporate violence is rewarded while individual desperation is criminalized. Where stealing billions through spreadsheets is *business as usual* but fighting back gets you terrorism charges.
The real terrorism is forcing people to ration insulin while insurance executives toast their billion-dollar profits. The real violence is denying cancer patients care while marking up their medications by 1000%. The real criminals are the ones in the boardrooms, not the desperate people they’ve pushed to the breaking point.
As Mangione’s case moves through a justice system increasingly shaped by corporate interests, we need to ask ourselves: In a country where corporate murder is called business as usual, what do we call justice?
What really worries me is that this could be our future over here in England and Wales (Scotland, God bless it, has its own system) in the not too distant future. The NHS is being deliberately run down so people don’t trust it, and even our Labour government has moved to the right, and are lobbied and given donations from private healthcare companies and health insurance providers. I, for one, would never get health insurance at a reasonable cost as I have too many pre-existing conditions. I share your anger at how we are being exploited - and legally so - by big corporations and the belief in disaster capitalism. I recently read that over here there is a company that is basically an agency for gig economy workers. They match people to shifts in retail or coffee shops and these people would be paid for the shift they did within three days. They are now paid monthly and if they want their money sooner they have to pay a fee. Is there no extent to which people won’t go to extract as much money from us as possible? Thank you, Jo.
This makes my blood boil. Reminds me of a saying of one of my college profs: "the rich get richer and the poor get prison." (And death); or another: "the powerful make the rules to benefit themselves." How do we get the word out about the extent of these criminal and despicable practices? I don't see an option to post on FB, though I'm sure it would disappear in a matter of minutes.