Corporate Arrogance and Greed Doesn’t Always Pay Off

As the story of Brian Thompson, the late CEO of United Health, ripples into and ultimately out of our news cycle, the subject of corporate greed resurfaces once again.  It’s clear that this guy’s organization, known for its exuberance in denying healthcare claims, pissed off one too many of its customers with its avarice and lies.

There is so much wrong with the way that corporations interact with us, it’s hard to know where to start.  Here at 2GreenEnergy, we tend to focus on environmental sustainability, where we routinely point out that Big Oil, the most profitable industry in human history, bolstered by tens of billions of dollars in annual subsidies from the U.S. government, is in the process of purposefully baking the planet, so as to profit to an even greater degree as global warming due to fossil fuel emissions roasts us alive.

Private healthcare is a different animal, but only slightly.  Like Big Oil, it works by lobbying (bribing) public officials to create legislation that enable it to profit from public misery.  This system results in the fact that the United States, the only developed country on the planet without universal healthcare, has the most expensive and least effective healthcare on the planet.  Ask yourself how it’s possible that people in other countries have far longer life expectancies, lower incidents of infant mortality, and far better outcomes than we do across dozens of different metrics, given that our country is by far the wealthiest and most powerful on the planet.

If I were the CEO of one of these corporations whose profits derive from the suffering of its neighbors, I’d have personal protection so robust that it would make the Secret Service look like a few Boy Scouts with bean-shooters and slingshots.