HMO Guilty of Accelerating Death of Terminal Patients with The Offspring’s ‘Greatest Hits’

The Hospital Corporation of America (HCA) was ordered to pay the full $1.6 billion of a class action lawsuit yesterday after being found guilty of conspiring to accelerate the death of hundreds of their terminally ill patients. According to the suit, the HMO played the rock band The Offspring’s ‘Greatest Hits’ album incessantly through its public address system for several months in order to strip the will to live from their infirm long term patients as part of a scheme to hasten their deaths and reduce operating costs.

Although the vast majority of the estimated two hundred victims of the Offspring mediated euthanasia could not be unequivocally linked to the band’s bad music, the testimony of a whistleblower inside the company combined with evidence taken from two cases of suicide where notes were found citing the constant background of grating pop-punk songs made the case for the prosecution.

“The agony in my bones continues to intensify, and yet it has been dwarfed by a new pain in my head,” read a barely legible suicide note left by 73 year-old Nathaniel Harris, who was suffering from advanced bone cancer when he killed himself by blowing into his IV line July 8, “It is hell. I am in hell. I hear its sounds. The infernal noise permeates these walls - it envelopes me. I can hear the tortured cries of the damned as Satan himself issues orders, separating the condemned… keeping them always separated. As my soul is gone I have nothing left to lose. Goodbye my sweet Agnes.”

One of the whistleblowers, Laura Weissman revealed, “The absolute callousness upper management exhibited towards these people, and by extension their own staff, was shocking. This album was used in Iraq and Guantanimo Bay to break the will of war prisoners of all things - that’s where they got the idea from. Battle hardened Muslims literally chewed the veins from their wrists to escape its horror – just imagine what it did to these poor men and women already crippled by cancer and other diseases.”

Weissman added: “When the albums arrived they didn’t even listen to them themselves. They jokingly referred to the CDs as Raid. As if these patients were fleas and the atrocious noise contained on those discs was the audio equivalent of pesticide.”

Despite the victory in civil court, many family members of those subjected to torture under HCA care remain dissatisfied by the failure of obtaining any criminal convictions in the case.

“They say that technically there’s no law against playing one record over and over, no matter how lousy it is. Well, there should be. Just the thought of my dad lying on his death bed in tearful delirium, counting in Spanish, shouting that he was ‘Pretty fly for a white guy’, then pointing to things in the room that could be used as implements of suicide and screaming, ‘Give it to me baby, uh-huh, uh-huh’ over and over drives me into a rage. I want justice!”