From Medical Gaze to Death Stare: Corporate Healthcare’s Murder Machine
The death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson highlights public outrage against a healthcare system driven by profit, dehumanizing patients, and prioritizing greed over care.
In The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault introduces the concept of the "medical gaze," describing the shift from a holistic, patient-centered model of care—where a person's lived experience and narrative were central—to a biomedical framework that prioritizes clinical observation and objective data.
Foucault argues that this shift depersonalized medicine by reducing patients to objects of study, sidelining their humanity, and framing their stories as irrelevant.
This dehumanizing shift, supposedly intended to enhance the precision of medical care, has clearly spiraled into something unimaginably more sinister in today’s profit-driven healthcare landscape.
The system tasked with providing care to humans has become a capitalistic weapon of corporate greed, wielded with cold precision by faceless algorithms in the service of profit-hungry executives.
In UnitedHealthcare's case, the medical gaze has evolved into a veritable death stare. Their AI-powered algorithm, nH Predict, allegedly denied life-saving care to elderly patients with a staggering 90% error rate.
This exploitative and unethical use of technology is but one example of a system that reduces human lives to data points on a balance sheet. Of course, it’s not just United Healthcare; through and through, the industry is built on maximizing profits by limiting patient access and raising premiums.
In fact, even the emerging trend of using AI-powered technology to achieve such goals is hardly limited to United Healthcare (or CVS or Humana, for that matter). The practice has become widespread.
The Dehumanization of Healthcare
The decline of American healthcare can be traced through decades of policies that prioritized market interests over patient care. Whether Nixon’s Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973, which proliferated cost-cutting HMOs, prioritizing profits over people, or Reagan's Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981, which slashed Medicaid funding and dismantled mental health services, each administration has contributed to the erosion.
Bill Clinton's market-driven reforms led to significant disadvantages for Medicare beneficiaries, including reduced access to high-quality care, decreased availability of home health services, and limited plan options under the Medicare+Choice program.
Meanwhile, George W. Bush's Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 prohibited drug price negotiations and funneled public funds into privatized Medicare Advantage plans.
Even Obamacare, while expanding coverage, inadvertently accelerated super-mergers and consolidations, creating monopolies that further limited competition and drove up costs for patients.
The Systematic Erosion of Care
The lack of the integrity in American healthcare is seen in virtually every aspect of the industry. Consider the skyrocketing cost of insulin, a drug that has existed for over a century. Despite its low production cost and the fact that patients in neighboring countries pay a fraction of the price, pharmaceutical companies have inflated prices so dramatically that many patients are forced to ration doses, sometimes with fatal consequences.
Similarly, emergency care in the United States has become an exploitative business. Stories of patients receiving exorbitant bills for basic treatments—like a $629 charge for a band aid—highlight the egregious profiteering that dominates the system.
Moreover, the rise of private equity ownership in healthcare has gutted community hospitals and nursing homes, prioritizing profit margins over treatment outcomes.
A 2020 study found that patients in nursing homes owned by private equity firms were more likely to experience neglect, understaffing, and inadequate care compared to those in nonprofit facilities. This trend is exacerbated by the closure of rural hospitals, leaving vulnerable populations without access to basic medical services.
Artificially Intelligent Arbiter of Death
The integration of AI into healthcare decision-making represents a dangerous new frontier in the objectification of patients.
These algorithms, divorced from human empathy and ethical considerations, render life-altering decisions with cold efficiency. The result is a system where the value of a human life is determined not by medical necessity or ethical imperatives, but by an algorithm's cost-benefit analysis.
The execution of Brian Thompson, while seen as extreme to some, is symptomatic of a broader societal rage against a healthcare system that has failed its most fundamental duty: to care for human life. It's a stark reminder that when institutions become so corrupted that they actively harm those they're meant to protect, societal backlash becomes inevitable.
The time has come to seriously discuss dismantling the healthcare "industry" as we know it. A system that prioritizes shareholder returns over human wellbeing is not just broken—it's morally bankrupt. We need to envision and build a new model of healthcare that returns to the fundamental principle of healing, free from the corrupting influence of profit motives.
From Death Stare to Life-Affirming Gaze
The path forward is clear, if challenging. We must disassemble the structures that have turned human health and wellness into a commodified industry and rebuild it as a public good. This can be achieved by:
Eliminating the profit motive from essential care decisions
Removing corporate intermediaries that add cost without value
Empowering medical professionals to make decisions based on patient needs, not financial constraints
Investing in preventative care and public health initiatives that benefit all of society
The tragic trajectory of healthcare in America has transformed a system of healing into a machine of exploitation, where human lives are weighed against shareholder value. True reform begins with reclaiming healthcare as a fundamental human right, untainted by the corrosive influence of corporate greed.