There's No Denying (or Delaying)—We've Officially Progressed Into Pluto in Aquarius Terrain
The assassination of a fat cat healthcare CEO is the salvo for a new facet of Hunger Games America.
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YEARS AGO, I WORKED in a doctor’s office in Hawai’i. Part of my job description was pestering insurance companies to pay for the treatments we’d invoiced them for—a Sisyphean task. Submitted invoices were constantly ‘lost,’ challenged, delayed, resubmitted, and then—oops—misplaced again. Their unapologetic grift was shockingly bald-faced.
Eventually, the doctor caved and resorted to a cash-only practice. It wasn’t worth the time and effort to seek compensation, so the insurers triumphed again.
Last year, after seeing my doctor, I was prescribed a medication that he felt would aid my recovery. When I went to pick up the prescription at the pharmacy, I was informed that my insurance company had overridden and denied my doctor’s directive. And that was the moment I understood firsthand who oversees people’s chances for improved health in America.
This week’s assassination of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare in New York, didn’t phase me much. I’d read ProPublica’s massive expose last year on the means UHC used to keep their stock options high and the recovery rates of patients low. If data sets can depict a woeful story, the denial percentages from United Healthcare were damning.
The equation my brain formulated as I read updates on this week’s murder kept defaulting to: “Yes, right, I understand it, but can I condone it?” That latter part of the question still eludes me as I understand history and violence’s role in interrupting unmitigated greed from the overlords. Left unchecked, conditions devolve into increased and dire inequities. That condition usually leads to revolution.
As journalist Ken Klippenstein noted:
“No shit murder is bad. The [commentary and jokes] about the United CEO aren’t really about him; they’re about the rapacious healthcare system he personified and which Americans feel deep pain and humiliation about.”
Organized activism can combat some of the gross disparity, and Congress needs to become proactive in countering the abuse. But when corporate avarice hits a Hunger Games-like tipping point involving millions of citizens’ well-being and lives, well, here come the bullets.
Ordinarily, ‘off the chart’ percentages, like United Healthcare’s, would be lauded. And they most likely were this year until an avenging assassin took the life of their CEO. That shocking event inadvertently declared Pluto’s entry into Aquarius. An ingress that was exacerbated by Mars (the planet of guns and violence) in tight opposition to Pluto, the planet of plutocrats.
I mention the Pluto in Aquarius transit for two different reasons. Historically, this transit echoes back to the French Revolution, when Pluto was last in Aquarius (1778 to 1798). There again was a hotbed moment when the populace said, “No more.”
Of course, that resulted in mayhem, but the fundamental principles of democracy were hatched, which is very much how Pluto works—the rot is removed to make way for regeneration. The punchline, then (as is now), is that ‘something had to give.’ The accrued power of the ancien régime (“old regime”), within the natural law of give and take (and comeuppance), was destined to be checked; chaos be damned.
But Pluto in Aquarius also uproots the dark underbelly of technology. The Water Bearer is associated with all things inventive and futuristic, subjects that are presently being crammed down the populace's throats with the invasion of AI into every aspect of life.
That circles back to United Healthcare, where it was revealed that it wasn’t humans who primarily denied the needs of 32 percent of its policyholders but robots and the algorithms that ensured increasing profits for the corporation, regardless of the collateral damage to the sick and dying.
I want to pause here and look at the horoscope for the December 4 assassination in New York. As mentioned above, this can be read as a salvo for the 20-year Pluto in Aquarius transit that many of us will live and die under. Salvos, or as its root word reveals, salutations, are a birth of sorts, and astrology is the study of moments that act as beginnings. And so the chart can tell us a lot. I’ve overlaid the chart atop that of the United States as there are uncanny markers between the two, which are shocking in their exactitude.