United Airlines' Compassion: Profit Over Pancreas?
A United Airlines technician, Hasan Syed, suffering from Stage 4 cancer, was reportedly fired while undergoing chemotherapy. The Independent's exclusive highlights the egregious timing, but the deeper context of American corporate 'personhood' and its legal shielding from basic human ethics often goes unmentioned. This isn't an isolated incident; it's a feature, not a bug, of a system where profit
trumps all, and 'healthcare' is a privilege, not a right. While politicians endlessly debate the cost of universal healthcare, corporations like United consistently prove the necessity of robust employee protections. How many millions does United spend annually on lobbying efforts to maintain 'business-friendly' regulations that allow such cruelty? (One might wonder if the concern for corporate
'shareholder value' ever extends to human 'stakeholder value' when it involves a cancer patient.)