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this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2026
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The health insurers employ millions of people in the US.
That doesn’t make them good, just that there’s millions of people who will be really mad when the checks stop coming.
If people not going bankrupt and dying because of treatable illness bothers you personally because you have a financial stake in their exploitation, that's your moral failure.
Yeah, all those people cleaning offices or answering phone calls at health insurance companies are all immoral pieces of shit.
It's neat how they're not numbers when you want to use them as human shields for a deeply immoral industry. They'll be numbers again as soon as they get sick.
I’m not defending the industry. The industry is bullshit. I’m pointing out that there are people who depend on it for food.
Now if we want to get into the immorality of jobs that’s a whole other discussion.
When they get sick, they're numbers.
When you want to preserve your favorite industry, they're conveniently and temporarily people.
You’re just full of bile and bad faith today, ain’t cha?
I think an industry built on exploiting the sick and the dying should not exist. You're the one saying that people are numbers so exploiting them is ok, as long as doing so employs erstwhile numbers who could work anywhere.
This wasn't a problem when we decided that manufacturing jobs needed to go away. Or when mining jobs got outmoded. This wasn't a problem when automation replaced workers. This wasn't a problem when the gig economy turned jobs with benefits into contract work with none. This wasn't a problem for decades while wages didn't kept pace with inflation, by design. It's not a problem until some reprehensible industry needs to go away for the good of humanity. Then it's "Oh no think of the workers!"
As time progresses, the industry isn't going to get smaller or less exploitative. It's not going to have less money to buy politicians with, or fewer of the workers that can bask in the comfort of being the one group of workers you are willing to handwring about, at least until they can be replaced with AI. This problem will only become more intractable, killing more people and destroying more lives (sorry. numbers), increasing year on year, as it goes, if we let it persist like you're arguing for.
There's a cost, yes. But the status quo becoming worse and more entrenched will extract a greater cost over not a lot of time. I'd like to buy a better future for humans. You're arguing in favor of spending more to rent a better future for corporations, with other people's (again, numbers') blood.