[flagged]
WTF? You can't do this here. I've banned the account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
The GP comment doesn't count as 'thoughtful' in any sense I recognize. What I see there is: (1) celebration of a murder; (2) denunciatory rhetoric; (3) a major assumption about what happened (in reality, none of us knows yet what happened there); and (4) a barrage of clichés ("justice has been served", "flag away", etc.).
The problem is that healthcare insurance is no longer connected to the value of protection against accidents and extreme, unforseen situations.
Until and unless we recognize that medical insurance only turned into an all you can eat medical buffet in the last 70 years due to government intervention, we will be doomed to continue to bankrupt society with money transfers to captive markets dominated by AETNA, CIGNA, UHC , etc
What, exactly, should this man have done differently? I guess you could say he should have gone above & beyond the law, maybe pushed that up to 90%, but how do we know that this would have been enough to solve the problems people are complaining about?
For example, perhaps the issue here is that UHC was undercutting competitors knowing that the vast majority of their fraudulent denials would go unchallenged -- they still meet the requirement for minimum spending on payouts, but they attract more customers[0] and in so doing distort the health insurance market.
[0]: Customers in this case are primarily businesses buying policies for their employees, rather than end users of the product.
The CEO sits in his office, looks at bunch of abstract spreadsheets saying that 80% of spending is going on healthcare, and pats himself on the back for doing a good job.
But what about the single mom of 3 whose claim was falsely denied by the AI he rolled out? Whose responsibility is that, and the thousands of other cases like it?
It's important to remember that HN isn't a monolith and most important of all, we all share in the virtue of "curious" discussion. Arguably this post was flagged because the discussion isn't curious enough and leads us down the same discussion lines that we've had previously.
Not my own viewpoint, FWIW, but definitely the sentiment shared by the moderation team here.
I'm still struggling with my desire to surprise people with the conclusion instead of including it at the front of the piece. Which tends to lead to people discussing the setup rather than the punchline.