My Baby and AOL’s Bottom Line

[bethan_b_bad]

That “distressed baby” who Tim Armstrong blamed for benefit cuts? She’s my daughter.Late last week, Tim Armstrong, the chief executive officer of AOL, landed himself in a media firestorm when he held a town hall with employees to explain why he was paring their retirement benefits. After initially blaming Obamacare for driving up the company’s

Comments

[nesmith]

This whole mess makes me so angry I can barely think. Fuck this judgemental, greedy asshole and all the greedy assholes like him, who never even consider taking a pay cut themselves or telling the shareholders "Hey, our employees need our help so you're all going to get a little less this year." It's always the most vulnerable and the ones least able to afford yet another chunk of their earnings eaten away who are expected to bear the burden.

Just fuck all of them.

This story sounds so much like that of a friend of mine (her daughter is now a healthy, gorgeous 9 year-old), only her husband's employer benefits took care of their daughter without complaint and without their CEO showing his ass. This dude can damn well follow that example.

[hammersxstrings]

and this is happening to families who have decent incomes and, this is an assumption i'm making, considering her husband works for AOL, a middle class existence. What would happen to someone who had this happen during their pregnancy if they were an hourly worker, no health insurance, etc?

and yet, there are so many people in this country who hate the idea of more accessible healthcare for everyone. I hate everything.

[jocelyncs]

What happens to the baby of a lower-class family? The same thing that happens when an hourly wage worker gets cancer or suffers a major injury - the patient and/or his/her family struggles, goes into crushing debt until they can't borrow any more money, then the patient gets no more care and dies.

Welcome to America.

[hammersxstrings]

right, it was mostly rhetorical, but yeah. deplorable for a country that is supposed to be the richest, bestest, brightest beacon IN ALL THE LANDS

[mistress_infy]

This very thing happened to my parents with my oldest sister--she was only a few weeks earlier than the wee one in this article, and spent months in NICU. Parents didn't have insurance because of reasons (Oh, the joys of the late 70s), so they had to pay the hospital bills until she turned 16.

[qara_isuke]

She's a beautiful, glorious little angel.

And there is a very special corner of hell for people like Armstrong, who bring home millions every year while sneering at other people for daring to inconvenience him by existing.

Fuck him. Fuck him and every single other waste of space that thinks like him.

Maybe we should start some real class warfare, and go back to beheading selfish fucks like him.

[thelilyqueen]

I was a 'million dollar baby' 30+ years ago, and as with this case there were no preceding signs I might have major issues. Thank heavens my parents DID both have good insurance as public servants - it was still a major financial strain.

Now I'm doing pretty well, in professional school, and gonna be saving lives. Nie to know some people'd still say I wasn't 'worth it'.

[lied_ohne_worte]

And *this* is what the internet is really good for - neither his comments nor her rebuttal would have received even remotely the same publicity before internet days.

Nice how he managed to work "high-risk pregnancies" into his so-called apology, though - the implication that either the women involved shouldn't have had babies at all due to some condition or that they did something during pregnancy to drive costs so high goes right with it, so again women are to blame, while the company was charitable enough to allow them to not only have the child, but even try to save it.

How can someone like him, particularly as his yearly income exceeds what Obamacare supposedly costs them, even look in the mirror?

[moonshaz]

And *this* is what the internet is really good for - neither his comments nor her rebuttal would have received even remotely the same publicity before internet days.

Yep. Definitely an "oh shit the internet is here" moment!