#AssholeOfTheDay AOL CEO Tim Armstrong wants employees to blame two new moms for his 401K cuts. Seriously. http://t.co/DZB32j3A5r
— Some Asshole (@assholeofday) February 8, 2014
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 health care costs, he pointed the finger at an unlikely target: babies. Specifically, my baby…. “Two things that happened in 2012,” Armstrong said. “We had two AOL-ers that had distressed babies that were born that we paid a million dollars each to make sure those babies were OK in general. And those are the things that add up into our benefits cost. So when we had the final decision about what benefits to cut because of the increased healthcare costs, we made the decision, and I made the decision, to basically change the 401(k) plan.”
When I first read about Armstrong’s stunningly tone-deaf and heartless comment, I was almost speechless. Blaming two seriously ill (or “distressed” in Armstrong’s vernacular) newborns for driving up AOL’s health care costs is…well, I lack the vocabulary to adequately express the epic arrogance and world-class ignorance behind the words. As if having a child born gravely ill and requiring specialized care isn’t difficult enough for a parent, now they have to deal with their employer holding them responsible for reduced benefits for everyone in the company.
Wow. Just wow. What a thoughtless dick.
It would have been easy for the parents- one or both sets- to react angrily to what can only described as unfair scapegoating. To Deanna Fei’s credit (her husband is one of the AOL employees in questions), she took the high road. In a piece she wrote for Slate (never piss off a writer), she could have ripped Armstrong a new one…and no one could have credibly called her out for it. Armstrong chose to use her daughter as a scapegoat for reducing benefits for AOL employees, which is about as reprehensible as it gets. Fei laid out the situation that led to her daughter’s dire predicament calmly and rationally. In so doing, she still managed to paint Armstrong as an insensitive, callous dick…not that it was a particularly difficult challenge.
Well played.
I take issue with how he reduced my daughter to a “distressed baby” who cost the company too much money. How he blamed the saving of her life for his decision to scale back employee benefits. How he exposed the most searing experience of our lives, one that my husband and I still struggle to discuss with anyone but each other, for no other purpose than an absurd justification for corporate cost-cutting.
Fei and her husband had no idea that anything was amiss until one morning five months into what had until then been a blissfully uneventful pregnancy. What happened next was the stuff of any parent’s nightmares. You spend months looking forward to meeting your newborn child, and then for reasons no one can explain, things go from Heaven to Hell in a heartbeat. Fei and her husband were forced to travel a road no one could wish on their worst enemy…and Tim Armstrong decided it was perfectly appropriate to use their daughter as a scapegoat.
Class personified, eh?
Armstrong finally apologized, but by then the damage was done. The Internet had figuratively hung his lifeless carcass in the village square, and now he gets to live with the stigma of being an insensitive, mean-spirited asshole.
[E]ven with the best medical care available, we had no warnings, and we will never have an explanation for what went wrong. This is why the head neonatologist referred matter-of-factly to our daughter’s birth as “catastrophic.”
In other words, we experienced exactly the kind of unforeseeable, unpreventable medical crisis that any health plan is supposed to cover. Isn’t that the whole point of health insurance?
Fei’s argument could be boiled down to one question: Aren’t situations like what she and her husband faced the point of health insurance? It’s not as if they planned to have a baby born with health issues that would require expensive and specialized care. They, like any other parents, were looking forward to greeting their perfect baby…and then life intervened. I get that catastrophic health care is expensive; that’s why it’s called “catastrophic.” But an insurance plan should be designed to account for worst-case scenarios…unless that worst-case scenario is holding you personally responsible for the need to reduce employee benefits.
Our daughter has already overcome more setbacks than most of us have endured in the span of our lives. Having her very existence used as a scapegoat for cutting corporate benefits was one indignity too many.
There appears to be a happy ending to Fei’s story, in that her daughter just celebrated her first birthday, appears to be healthy, and just took her first two tiny steps. That was made possible by AOL’s health care plan; that’s what Fei’s husband and other AOL employees pay their premiums for. To hold parents responsible for bringing a gravely ill child into the world is about as insensitive and callous as it gets.
It should go without saying that a human life is of far more important than AOL’s bottom line. Only the most monstrous among us could see their way clear to blaming parents for having the temerity to bring a seriously ill child into the world.
I guess that would explain Tim Armstrong.
