The problematic aspect of this argument is that if expanded to the whole society, it can lead to a very dark place.
I come from a place that has 40K+ murders per year [1]. People literally dies all the time there, and as much everyone is so fed up with corruption and inequality, I strongly believe that institutions, law, and order are the best solution once I experimented it in another place.
People all over the internet are using the narrative related to the insurance industry that let people die, and this CEO was the sacrificial lamb of this narrative. Its an easy thing to do since it's a direct cause and consequence thing.
But expanding the same logic, should politicians have the same treatment since their decisions have way more consequences [2]? Of course not.
As someone who saw civilization and savagery, I would choose the first in a heartbeat, and the main issue here is the incentive structure that rounds the health system in USA and why the political class does not take action to change it.
[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/312455/number-homicides-...
[2] - https://www.metropoles.com/brasil/eleicoes-40-candidatos-mor...
I think a lot of the terror and push back were seeing in these comments and discussions is just how completely detached rich and privileged people are from the lived experience of the majority of the country, and a corresponding lack of empathy that comes with simply not being aware of the class war that's being fought. I think these privileges people did not understand how much of the populace actively despises them for being so privileged and umempathetic. Most people working at wendys or target simply can't understand how this ceo could've lived knowing he was destroying people's lives. And now rich tech workers are looking at their own track records, seeing a few unsavory things, and terrifying themselves over a slippery slope that makes them the victim, when the real ground truth of what's actually happening is that poor people are victims every single day, they're being walked on by huge corporations and abused to feed corporate compensation packages for executives that were fired for embezzlement.
It's easy to try to make the story about ourselves and make up something that makes us feel scared and vulnerable, like we're next. But that's theoretical, and imaginary. There's real harm being done to thousands of people every day, done by massive corporations. If you're willing to attempt to turn the conversion to suit your imaginary persecution scenario, why aren't you willing to shift the conversation to the real death and depravity that real people face every day? If you're so scared, why haven't you done anything yet? Don't wanna be one of the targets? The fix your shit and start working to better the world instead of extracting from it. That's the power of this assassination. The legal system is only scary to the poors, Healthcare is only fucked for the poors, job security and stable income and housing and for prices are only fucked for the poors. Everyone is scared to die. Don't wanna be, better start giving the poors other ways to communicate, cause they're gonna get their message across one way or another.
Yes? Like not even a little bit?
The liberal ideal of Democracy is as an alternative to violence. When Democracy fails, you are expected to correct it with violence. The system doesnt work without this failsafe.
I really dont understand where this civility at all costs idea came from.
Shit yankistan was literally founded on this ideal. They venerate people like John Brown who got to the wetwork of abolition years before there was a civil war.
then don't be the CEO leading society to a dark place?
While nobody's shedding a tear here, we should be cautious about even softly embracing or downplaying vigilantism.
Worth remembering, and we've already seen it happen frequently: Vigilante justice can be wielded against controversial personas you support, and there will be just as much applause from the sidelines (from the other side).
That feeling can even extend to people you might consider innocent: See one of the other comments where someone is noting they wouldn't shed a tear over a particular company's *employees* being murdered.
There's just scads of historical evidence to support what a bad idea that usually is.
being legal doesn't make it right or ethical though.
the legislators clearly think the system is fine and workable as evidenced by the legislature passed to allow profits over, quite literally, anything else in this country.
whilst i don't condone murder or vigilantism, i fully expect more of this because this is exactly what the 'system' has wrought. when you have nothing to lose, all options are on the table.
But don't you think that a more civilized way to solve it is by voting and changing the legislators who think this is right?
I mean, the issue is when it goes from a sacrificed lamb CEO from a very disgraceful industry and replicates to the rest of society.
But don't you think that a more civilized way to
solve it is by voting and changing the legislators
who think this is right?
Rule of law is a precious thing, even if it’s imperfect, as all human systems will inevitably be. We shouldn’t be cavalier about discarding it. The alternatives are much worse.
Back on topic...
The relevant campaign spending figures here would be "minimum amounts of funding to run a viable campaign" and not "how much did the winner spend."
What I, unlike our recently deceased strawman, was pointing out is that without backing from corporations and the people who own them, your chances of winning elections to higher offices (congress, presidency) are close to zero. And the odds of enough similarly-untainted, like-minded people getting elected concurrently (or at least running campaigns popular enough to pressure those in office) is even more astronomically low.
But....
Campaign funding issues only scratch the surface of what it would take to achieve any kind of real reform re: freeing the government from corporate influence.
Because even if you, say, pull off some kind of underdog miracle and get elected to Congress without completely selling out... you're not going to accomplish shit without political capital, somehow bucking the other 534 members of Congress who have sold out.
I guess the truth of that statement depends on whether or not you consider the $36 billion dollars that Musk has lost on Twitter to have been "spent" or not.
It's also not just funding. It's funding, gerrymandering, the electoral college, lobbying, the Supreme Court, voter suppression, etc.
Agreed. However, there's been kind of a lot of noise being made the last year or two about "it's time to sharpen the guillotines" WRT the concentration of wealth, and as a society in the US our collective reaction seems to be "let them eat cake".
I hope people on both sides of those phrases remember how many benign people were killed during the French Revolution, to say nothing of how many "true believers" were as well (Robespierre was also executed by guillotine).
Whatever you think of Jan 6, we clearly haven't deposed the President nor has any vocal section of Congress formed their own legislature so any argument that the revolution has actually begun seems specious or is stretching the definition of the word "revolution" so much as to be meaningless.
Revolutions usually involve going through a door of no-return, and there's little evidence to suggest we've hit that point. Congress could, tomorrow, announce a wealth tax and sweeping reforms and etc and most aggrievances would be resolved.
We don't say a ball is on the ground just because it's in freefall and likely to be on the ground shortly barring any last-second intervention.
Hopefully when the glorious revolution comes, it’s the one people are hoping for and not one of the other ones.
There are plenty of people who will find this murder and the reasoning behind it abhorrent but still support violent overthrow of existing power structures.
― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinzo_Abe#Assassination
> Abe and his family were known to have long-standing ties to the Unification Church, dating back to his grandfather Nobusuke Kishi; Abe himself had held speeches in support of the religious movement.
from the same article
> the killer thought he was associated with a church that left his family destitute
The killer certainly thought that. Also it was true!
Going after Abe is like going after Tom Cruise if you want to take revenge on the Church of Scientology.
"I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure"
The main way normal people have heard of him was that he was the defense attorney in the Scopes monkey trial.
Killing the system is much harder. If you want to go the murderous route, the idea would be to murder random shareholders, not necessarily the CEO, based on how much share they have. It may include the CEO, directors, or maybe you if that company is part of of your portfolio, directly or not.
The most effective way may actually be the most boring and frustrating: financial sanctions or outcompetition by a government elected by people who actually care. A systemic solution for a systemic problem.
Society has no shortage of nihilistic parasites, in fact normal people can act like this in the right circumstances. And by normal people I literally mean you and me. The problem is addressed by avoiding such circumstances.
Just wondering how will people react to mass unemployment resulting from AI/Automation.
There better be lots of affluence going around. Food, Healthcare, and Fun. Or things will get ugly fast.
$20 million -> 60%
$200 million -> 70%
$2 billion -> 80%
I think that would bring things under control without resorting to extrajudicial means. But apparently, that's completely impossible to achieve in the US, so here we are...
Considering how many people have had their identities stolen and suffered considerable financial damage thanks to sloppy programming and IT practices, I really would not cheer on the pursuit of that line of thought if I were you. The software industry is not exactly loved by the public right now.
Vietnam recently sentenced someone to death for embezzling ~$12 billion[1].
For example, I believe in peace and wish peace upon the world but I am not a pacifist and believe that a variety of techniques are necessary to prevent the world from becoming a techno-tyranny.
I get the point you're making. But I suspect it might just as easily go the other way: the 10% chance of assassination would justify having your security detail, probably paid for on the company dime, but affordable even if you're "only" making $10M/year. And once you have that candy shell and the "me against them" mentality, you might just go further with the bloodsucking.
IOW: Maybe the current situation IS tempered already. :-(
--Gandalf
Regardless of your personal feelings if you kill someone in defense of yourself or your property it’s going to matter a lot what state you did that in.
Your post is ironically just a pro-terrorism argument. You want terrorism targeted at CEOs to change their behavior.
There are a million different viewpoints on what acts are harmful and how to minimize or prevent those harms. It's better that we use things like voting and laws and courts to collectively reach consensus on when to use violence, rather than individuals killing people who disagree with them.
You can argue that this CEO should have been arrested for some crime and you can argue that said crime should carry the death penalty upon conviction. But that doesn't mean it's valid for a random person to be judge, jury and executioner based on their own personal concept of justice.
Not endorsing the practice, merely pointing out that to put someone to death in the U.S. defined notion of due process, no more than about 2 dozen key people's assent/cooperation need be attained.
Surely you mean no less than two dozen?
sure looks personal
If the evaluation is flawed... do you see why it's not a good idea?
Examples from the healthcare, banking, pharmaceutical (notably Purdue) or petrochemical industries might be particularly appropriate.
My read of the street is that the institution of law and courts has been assessed as insufficient and/or terminally dysfunctional.
What's the view you're defending? That CEOs should be murdered when some arbitrary citizen ready to do murder thinks the CEO is guilty enough?
I totally think law and order is dysfunctional. I don't know if people will actually resort to murder, but I could understand why they would do it. (It's far easier to talk about it than to do it.)
But it is not a good solution to the problem. The system of "murder people when we are upset" will certainly be at least as dysfunctional as the current one, if not more. Law being taken into the hands of whoever has weapons and the will to do it is what happens in narco states. Who prefers that?
One would think that this is a target-rich environment, and yet there don't seem to be many cases of that occurring. You've not answered my own question (choosing to rather spectacularly misinterpret and misstate my comment instead). I've put the question (phrased several ways) to an LLM which first responded with a set of decades-old fraud (e.g., creditor/shareholder victims) cases, and then point blank refused to suggest who might be prosecuted, or even who has been discussed as being plausibly prosecuted (interesting set of guardrails).
The law for whatever reasons --- I can think of several and there are many which have been expressed both recently and going back through time, Anatole France's observation of the law and its majestic equality would be among the classic and better known --- seems not to take an interest into affronts against the public at large.
I think my point was clearly expressed as originally put, if you've any difficulties in interpreting this, please say how and where: My read of the street is that the institution of law and courts has been assessed as insufficient and/or terminally dysfunctional.
The alternatives are not good, a point on which I suspect we're agreed. But they'll be reached for where institutions consistently fail, if I read history correctly.
And to draw on another recent HN thread, if the purpose of a system is what it does, then the system isn't broken but is performing as intended. Which would itself be a problem.
(See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42313947> among numerous others: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=stafford%20beer>.)
> If you can fairly and correctly evaluate which CEOs are especially blood sucking, simply taking their money and sending them to prison for a while will have the same effect and be far less ethically dubious.
But that would require the buy in and cooperation of the state, which probably wouldn't work any better than the current political/judicial system, because elites like CEOs have disproportionate influence in controlling state behavior. The system is setup to primarily protect and serve people like them.
I think the GP's idea was to add an extra-judicial check on CEO behavior that could be implemented by a motivated individual, and thus would be much harder for CEOs to subvert. Even the threat of assassination could have a restraining effect, because who wants to live in a bunker surrounded by guards? The blood-sucking CEO wouldn't be able to enjoy his ill-gotten gains.
One (somewhat small) problem with the GP's idea is its focus on CEOs. One feature of capitalism is how it can obscure culpability and create scapegoats to misdirect anger and protect the principles. A CEO definitely has fault and responsibility for the company's actions, but he's ultimately a minion of the company's owners. Above the CEO things often get shadowy.
Courts and laws have become corrupted, but you tink letting people at random make their own justice will not be corrupted?
One of the reasons this even sounds remotely possible to you is we have not abandoned the idea of the rule of law. If it were abandoned outright, the CEOs (or whatever) would never be outside of protected areas and without guards and such. Ordinary citizens however, would not afford protection.
Perhaps the exception that proves the rule.
I know nothing, but reading the news "CEO assasinated" my first thought is he was murdered by a rival organisation.
CEOs are not martians. They're some of "the people" we are talking about. They rose to the top through ruthlessness and disregard for laws and such. You think giving up on laws will make them less powerful?
I.e. yes, we absolutely should prosecute more white collar crime.
And the "let whoever is upset try to murder the respective CEO" analysis has no problems? I think it has more.
If we’re in a world with such lobbying... do you see why prosecution might fail despite its merits?
Stated another way, society's end of the social contract is to make sure that people generally aren't upset enough to commit murder.
> Imagine a world where the especially blood-sucking CEOs have a 1/10 chance of being assassinated.
Assassination isn’t prosecution.
My point is, it’s the fantastical world that actually prosecutes corporate managers for their criminal decisions. Shit, it’s the fantastical world that has American laws which make it illegal for UHC to have the business practice of denying claims by default unless/until they’re positively proven necessary beyond any sliver of doubt.
I am not trying to say murder will work to correct corporate behavior, I’m saying that it’s the thing we can see actually happens as an attempt to correct the behavior. It’s not hard to find many examples in this thread of people who think corps get away with too much. That is how one can tell there is a lack of prosecution and/or protection laws.
The real world has unfortunate circumstances that encourage this kind of crime because America does not have effective laws/enforcement which curtail the power of the corporations who write said laws. That’s the fantasy. We don’t live in a world where execs can be prosecuted for most of their anti-social decisions, let alone are.
I never made a value call about what’s fair, I only pointed out that the idea of prosecution in this context is a fantasy.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_of_Saddam_Hussein>
I'm not claiming that the trial / execution adhered to any particular standards, just that as an example of an extrajudicial killing the story's a bit shaky.
There are other examples to choose from, including the utterly nonjudicial killings of Osama bin Laden (by US forces) or Muammar Gaddafi (by Libyan rebels with at least notional US support). There's a long list of US targeted assassinations as well, from Anwar al-Awlaki (2010), with another 35 intended targets and 200 killed, see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_killing#Use_by_United...>.
(I'm also not litigating the appropriateness of those actions, rather they're offered as instances where the US government has acted within recent memory to kill designated enemies without judicial process.)
You're talking about civil disobedience here, which typically doesn't involve murder.
> (how is lethal injection different than assassination? I think it's basically the same)
I'm opposed to capital punishment, but I see a huge difference between the two even though they both involve killing someone. The death penalty only comes after a legal process and court deliberation. Assassination is unregulated. That's a pretty large distinction.
> Don't you think that the regular expectation of this might make them a little less blood-sucking?
No, I don't. It would make them do their bloodsucking differently in order to minimize their risk, but I don't think it would make them cut back.
True, there is a distinction but in some cases since there is no alternative, it might be the next best thing.
Because what you are describing is literally anarchy. It’s antithetical to our foundational principles as a society.
> I bet not many Americans would object to taking out terrorists, especially some who have caused a lot of damage like 9/11.
Opposition to the war on terror is not a fringe position in the United States.
> What about Timothy McVeigh? The U.S. assassinated him basically (how is lethal injection different than assassination? I think it's basically the same).
Well you’re wrong. Timothy McVeigh was tried and convicted. That’s literally the difference between assasination and the death penalty. Opposition to the death penalty is also not a fringe position and many states no longer practice capital punishment.
> And what about this? Imagine a world where the especially blood-sucking CEOs have a 1/10 chance of being assassinated.
How do you identify the 1/10?
> Don't you think that the regular expectation of this might make them a little less blood-sucking?
I don’t know what the effect would be, why are you so confident you do?
> I wonder why it's morally acceptable for a country to send an army to assassinate some guy causing trouble or for the police to kill a terrorist holding hostages, but when another rich guy takes charge of a machine killing many more people than the average terrorist, assassinating them is taboo?
Do you really wonder? Do you really, honestly not know the difference? I find that very hard to believe.
A little anarchy now and then may not be a bad thing if it upsets the exisitng power structure. And the founding principles do not imply that the current society is what the founding principles were meant to imply.
> I don’t know what the effect would be, why are you so confident you do?
I am not completely confident but it's a reasonable assumption.
> Do you really wonder? Do you really, honestly not know the difference? I find that very hard to believe.
Of course there is a difference, because they are different situations. But I don't think there is a moral difference.
If the society has failed, people will use violence to build a replacement. This is the system. Its always been the system. What you are saying here, is that stability is more important than fixing a system that is killing people.
>Opposition to the war on terror is not a fringe position in the United States. And non violent opposition didnt really end it in any reasonable time frame.
>How do you identify the 1/10? The bullets and blood will be a pretty good indicator.
>Do you really wonder? Do you really, honestly not know the difference? I find that very hard to believe.
The difference is that foreign murder doesn't challenge the stability and comfort that the state provides you, where as local murder might spread to you, and you might need to change your behavior to avoid it. Its just plain old discomfort and hypocrisy. To paraphrase a common internet saying, the f*king around is fine, you simply dont want to find out.
Is it fixing the system or replacing it? You can’t have it both ways.
I'm not sure it actually is. The foundational principle of society is basically the social contract "Individuals give up the right to exert violence in exchange for society providing safety and benefit."
If society fails to uphold its end of the bargain, then it seems logical that the individual is no longer obligated to hold up their end.
Yes, the healthcare system has flaws. But those flaws are fixable. In living memory we have seen dramatic improvements in the healthcare industry. Murder isn’t the solution here.
Unemployment. Render the entire concept of being an executive for a for-profit healthcare organization moot.
This can be accomplished with legislation. There's already plenty of established laws that prohibit non-profit organizations from doing (or not-doing) certain things[1], so it's not a stretch to have laws that prohibit for-profit organizations from doing other certain things.
...I'm only saying "legislation" because, by all reasons the free-market cannot support a for-profit health-insurance company: how can they exist at all when they're competing with non-profits for the same customers but who (like BCBS) don't have shareholder dividends to pay; so for UnitedHealthcare to somehow be both more-attractive to customers than BCBS (presumably by being cheaper) and still being able to pay dividends with whatever's left leads me to some very dark conclusions about how they operate internally. There's gotta be something the SEC can find and charge them with?
[1] https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz...
And organisations like Uber, Microsoft, etc. flagrantly broke the rules, got hugely rich off that, and all they got was ... a corporate fine. No personal consequences at all. Corporations aren't a force of nature, it's run by people and those people looked at the rules and said "fuck those rules, I'm going to break them for my personal enrichment". Bill Gates and that Uber asshole are still hugely rich.
We're letting the exploitive nihilists run the world, and all the lawmakers do is shrug.
Building a system that prevents sharks from getting a hold while also not preventing well-meaning people from building seems incredibly hard.
- Don't shoe-horn "free market" into absolutely everything, recognizing that in some areas you need more regulation than in others.
- Reasonable anti-trust with reasonable enforcement.
- Personal responsibility instead of corporate responsibility (which is very rare today except in cases of outright fraught such as Enron, VW Diesel, etc.)
You can argue a bit about the details, but I don't think any of this is hugely controversial and has broad support across the political spectrum.
Bilzerian have a famous son who squandered the hundred of millions he stole and put in a trust before getting arrested, but I'm pretty sure defrauding people and putting the money in a trust, getting out of low-sec filled with other people like you after 5-10 year then living like a king shouldn't be possible.
In places like China people in power who enable massive fraud have been executed or imprisoned for life.
If there’s a problem people should be tried in court, not killed
Not one of them - but you might be shocked by the amount of people that would say yes.
> If there’s a problem people should be tried in court, not killed.
Agreed - but what happens when the courts are corrupt? At least the thinking among these types is that the rich are above the law, so the only way to achieve justice, is to take it into your own hands.
Maybe our problems are only perceptive, or maybe there's something to them.
I don't know.
But what I do know is there's a pretty big divide.
Is is a different world than should, though. In the world of is, there are a large number of people who feel that the system is rigged against them, that they're never going to get justice, that the courts are bought by the rich and powerful. In the world of is, that creates the grounds where vigilante "justice" will be used.
Whether you agree with it or not, whether you think it's right or not (I don't), we live in a society with a large number of people, with guns, who feel that the legal system has failed them, the political system has failed them, and this is the only course left. That feeling, in enough people, leads to some of them taking action.
So let the rich and powerful beware. I don't agree with it, I don't advocate it, but it is. If you're powerful, and you live in a world with potential vigilantes, you'd better make sure that not very many of them feel like it's time to become a vigilante. The rich have ignored that bit of practical wisdom; yesterday may have been the chickens coming home to roost.
Hackernews is my fav forum.
Also, why are we so afraid that millionaires and billionaires might be a little afraid of the populace? Shouldn't they be? Shouldn't we live in a world where we care for each other and help to improve the world? Shouldn't the people that abuse that system to kill for profit be scared? I think they should be terrified, it might convince them to treat their fellow man better.
There must be real consequences. There is a group of people in America right now which can simply never face any real consequences for anything they do. They have enough money to survive being fired, they have enough lawyers to never go to jail, and if they do they'll get a cushy cell in a fed block for a year or so, followed by still having millions of dollars when they get out. What can we, as a populace, do to keep these people from destroying our society for their personal gain (deteriorating the conditions of normal life continuously will lead to revolt and unrest and destabilization). All we have is fear. That's the only option they've given us. So we should use it. Don't like it? Maybe start listening when the entire populace of the country is screaming at you every hour of every day that you're actively and intentionally killing them. It doesn't matter if it's just a system that you oversee, it's your responsibility. Your can change it, and you aren't, and we're begging you to. That state can only last so long before something breaks. The millions of furious people will not break first
While the weapon itself was certainly expensive, I don't know how anyone can tell the price of the fairly generic clothes from the blurry footage.
What the recourse should be for those at the top of corporations whose decisions negatively impact millions of people is far less clear. "Voting with your wallet" isn't really a thing if you only have bad choices.
The other is more like a school shooting. Unless we really want to talk about the causes and access to guns, thoughts and prayers are enough.
You cannot compare that to this tragedy in any way/shape/form...
If Donald Trump really had the 2020 election stolen from him i'd support the jan 6 people because they'd be right. But they're not, they voted and they lost, it was not stolen from them. On the other hand, who exactly is disagreeing that this health insurance company is hurting all of us? What evidence do we have that they're not actually denying necessary care and, in fact, are actually the only person that can save us from the evil other insurance companies that actually provide insurance to their members? I don't see that rhetoric here. The situations are very different.
It sounds like you're saying people should have the same attitude towards a mob storming the capital on the claim of a stolen election vs a man who systematically oppressed those who are ill, and arguably stole from them as well?
I don't wish harm on anyone but these are two very morally different situations, which require very different responses.
Also it is not clear to me that those who are outraged at the CEO is on the left. I'd imagine that the right is equally denied of health coverage while ill, and it seems plausible that they would be just as angry as those on the left.
Edit, source: https://news.gallup.com/poll/327686/americans-satisfaction-h...
It's almost as tone deaf as telling someone who'd just been in a car accident that "I'm fine, and you'll be fine too".
Imagine if I wrote "70% of Americans don't really experience racism or discrimination, so it's all fine" ?
Health care is a good or service that depends on other people's labor. People do not have a right to other people's labor (no matter how much they insist otherwise). It's entirely reasonable to bring up the fact that most Americans are happy with their health care.
Oh god not this nonsense "you're enslaving the doctors" argument.
By the way, insurance companies don't provide health care. They're a financial layer set to extract profit from those who need it, and United Healthcare seems to be the best at it.
As statistical multiplexing usually does, it improves things somewhat when you can't grow things larger, but when done for-profit with dividends, often disincents actually solving the capacity problem.
Racism is a lot like classism, though, and the distribution of health care is a consequence of structural classism of capitalist society.
I'm not sure what your second clause means other than "currently, people with more money can buy more health care". Of course it would be nice if the supply matched the demand r.e. health care. But neither single-payer systems nor more radical "restructurings" have solved that problem.
You can bring it up and it very well may be factually true, but it's irrelevant to the discussion.
I fell prey to their AI that (definitely unintentionally) denied 90% of claims. I required surgery for a repetitive stress injury. I fought it and got the surgery done, but it pushed the surgery into the new plan year which I suppose was the original intention.
If this was a family member with cancer being treated the same way I'd be significantly more sanguine.
Did you mean to write a different word, or are you saying "if a family member dying of cancer had their treatment delayed, I'd feel more positive"?
It got called "medically unnecessary" because apparently the person processing the claim couldn't read the fact that the organ was already dead and stopped at the line "stomach pain".
I had SIRS/sepsis right after that, it was fun.
How many Americans were unable to answer the survey at all because they died from a treatable condition that was denied by their insurance company?