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When this proves impossible, and a gun is trivially easy to obtain, what do you think happens? The president-elect himself is alive today only because a bullet was off-trajectory by a centimeter or two.
It remains to be seen whether this will be allowed. The jury may be unable to agree that this person should be found guilty despite the video evidence.
But, I also understand why this happened and frankly don't feel to aggrieved by the death of this CEO.
The issue with US politics is that no law is forthcoming to address anything that happened. We won't see silencers banned or gun control laws enacted. We certainly won't see regulations on health industry to stop them from bleeding leukemia patients of every cent they own.
So, I'm apathetic. If some of these CEOs are going to die as a result of their greed and the lack of justice against the wealthy, so be it.
But the purpose of courts is to substitute for private vengeance. If they are not willing to do so, this doesn't mean that you have a right to just roll over and die.
If a court says they will not hear you because the person who killed or severely harmed somebody has immunity, or because it has made itself some rule that it feels prevents it from hearing your complaint, then it has made itself irrelevant.
The fact that there's so little sympathy for the death of a CEO who, in their view, callously discards human life tells us the authority is a much smaller dealbreaker than the justification.
On the contrary, it's the crucial distinction. Without process and authority we have mob violence, vengeance killing, and vigilantism. Lynching, clan blood feuds, gang violence, all proceed from this same theory that "getting back" is more important than following the rules. In that world, Brian Thompson's killer should expect to be shot by one of his children for taking away their father.
The answer is easy for a serial killer (obviously responsible for willful murder), a little more difficult for a soldier in war (directly responsible, but perhaps defending themselves and/or under orders), even tougher for a surgeon (maybe they could have been better at their job), and very difficult indeed for an insurance executive.
Do you know why I don't work for a _for profit_ health insurance company, who's stated goals are explicitly to make profit by slicing out some amount of premiums that are not spent to provide healthcare in a world in which total health expenditures can be* effectively infinite? Same reason.
Also this tends to do it for me: https://arstechnica.com/health/2023/11/ai-with-90-error-rate...
Do CEOs run companies or don't they?
If the highest level of executive is not held responsible then who is? The regulation and law in the US is heavily influenced by these companies lust for money and power via lobbyists. They are effectively a cartel. Do people honestly think this dude lost a wink of sleep over all the people who suffered from their wanton greed? I think not. As barbaric as it seems, he got exactly what he deserved.
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
He has much closer culpability to the CEO of the company that sells me cigarettes than the guy who murdered my grandma. The world is a fallen place.
I thought the example up thread re: not being an animal trapper was a Jonathan Swift-esque send up of the whole idea though, so I might be missing a screw or two.
To believe in that, first you need to believe that somehow any executive of a company has no control over the company, does not have a duty to make certain things are done a certain way, nor is accountable for how the company is managed.
Nah, that's not true.
Chomsky would say "put to death, not assassinated."
I don't agree to the radical formulation "every Head of Government for every country is deserving of assassination", but I do believe that the weaker statement "for most Heads of Government of most country, there exist quite some people (even among the citizens) who would like them them to be dead" is very plausible.
His/her definition seems to be narrower than yours — namely profit over lives.
Their direct role in the deaths of others is usually more concrete than that of any CEO.
You monster! How many people could you have saved! Instead you spend your money on vacations, television, computer games, music, movies, coffee, whatever.
Oh, what's that you say? _You_ (who, I presume, do not directly save any lives yourself) are morally allowed to use the profit from your labor on unnecessary things for your own pleasure, but people who actually work in healthcare must not just dedicate all of their professional energy and effort to helping people and saving lives, but also must not take any profits from it either, is that right?
Healthcare can morally only be provided by charities?
This is not the own you think it is.
The person who was killed made $10M last year, while UHC provided care to 52 million patients. So, the CEO was paid approximately $0.20 per patient treated last year.
What part of all this do you believe is immoral?
It's functionally isomorphic to a black box where I make a deposit, every time it denies someone medical treatment I get back monetary reward and I can withdraw my deposit at any time. If we ask ourselves, "Should this black box exist?" I cannot reasonably expect people to say, "Yes." Yet, here we are.
I am honestly extremely baffled about what your mental model here is. When UHC doesn't deny a claim, who is paying for that treatment? You can't just look at one side of the ledger when deciding whether the system is doing good or bad! They deny some claims and they pay for others! You're leaving out the whole second half!
If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing, indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed.I think that, aside from the cost, this is probably the biggest issue most people have with health insurance in the US. UHC makes a lot of money specifically in part by not covering services you need, for example by having accountants override your doctors's orders.
If it were as simple as getting the services you need in exchange for money, I don't think as many people would hate the system as much.
That's exactly how simple it is to be uninsured. The problem is the risk is not something people can absorb.
No, it isn't, which is why people want some form of insurance, whether public or private. To mitigate risk.
I was entertaining the comment about something being as "simple as getting the services you need in exchange for money". Which one certainly could do, but imposing that on everyone would also be a bad system for other reasons.
In too many instances, people pay the premiums and then do not get the benefits of the insurance.
An analogy in the travel industry might be if we had a system where at random, a double-digit percentage of air travelers were denied boarding and not refunded their money. No amount of legalese would make it acceptable, and in fact Congress regulates air travel such that practices like this hypothetical are not allowed.
Yes, people should get coverage under the terms of their agreement. I'd guess that the reason this is an issue with health coverage is because the sums involved are great, and usually the people on either side of the argument are either (1) unwilling or unable to effectively argue their case or (2) nonexperts who lack full understanding of the subject matter.
These aren't really an issue with airline tickets, not because we don't regulate insurance, but because the contract is exponentially more simple and understandable.
But I do think more should be done.
I use the colloquial "cheat" intentionally, as it is a valid descriptor.
Notably, however: most insurance delays/denials will have in common that the patient is represented by an expert (a physician) on their case, while the insurer will be represented by a person who has typically never spoken with or examined the patient and may not have ever practiced medicine. The quality of the argument and expertise of the interlocutor are red herrings.
Correct. But it doesn't matter because the contract of carriage doesn't hinge on that. There's no confusion about what a ticket actually entails. If a ticket covers "one ride at the airport, from Cleveland to Omaha", it's pretty understandable what you are getting. If health insurance was just as simple, and covered "one ride at a hospital, from sickness to health", it would be likewise as accessible. But it isn't that way (although maybe it should be a lot closer)
> Notably, however: most insurance delays/denials will have in common that the patient is represented by an expert (a physician) on their case, while the insurer will be represented by a person who has typically never spoken with or examined the patient and may not have ever practiced medicine. The quality of the argument and expertise of the interlocutor are red herrings.
I understand but that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about a broader information and accessibility disparity.
Having a physician isn't any help if your insurer is deadlocking you on coverage you legally have coverage for, you need a lawyer. That's a contract law problem, not a healthcare problem.
But if you don't actually have coverage for what you need, having a physician argue that you need it, isn't going to help you. Most people buy their health insurance policy all by themselves, without any legal or medical help.
We're not in the situation we're in because anyone thought it was a good idea. We got here incrementally over ~80 years.
yes the design is a result of negotiation between countless people and groups of people, who all have varying power and responsibility and subjective consequence. yes all of these choices were made in context, but they were never the only choices that could have been made in that context.
this negotiation, and these innumerable choices, these designs have been a major if not primary concern of the past twenty years of american politics, economy, and millions of individual lives.
yes we have arrived at the implementation we see today, which seems ill-conceived, over-complicated, and pointlessly cruel. but at every moment that has passed and is passing now, different choices can be made, and a different system of different design can be implemented.
we are still in this system because there is infrastructure that prevents change to a more agreeable system. negotiation tactics may have just changed.
Technically all of the participants involved are a part of the system, yes, but my key point here is that none of them have the agency to change it.
The only people who can change it are voters and congress themselves.
Most of the participants in the system are eligible voters, so asserting that voters can change the system is very much asserting that nearly everyone in the system has agency to change it.
(The fact is “voters can change it” is optimistic, because the US is not a direct democracy and, due to gerrymandering, campaign finance, and other factors, only loosely a representative one, being functionally more of a plutocracy. The people who benefit from its inefficiencies and inequities have disproportionate power over its structure.)
For example, in Canada, the Ontario government refused to cover a cancer treatment that her doctors said could extend her life by a year or more: https://globalnews.ca/news/927721/milton-mother-devastated-a...
In the UK, two Cystic Fibrosis drugs were rejected for not being cost-effective even though they were clinically effective.
https://www.cysticfibrosis.org.uk/news/nice-rejects-orkambi
https://www.fiercepharma.com/pharma/nices-trikafta-snub-coul...
You will of course stick to your principles here? The single-payer healthcare systems in Canada and the UK are irredeemable and it's morally repugnant to look at any good they've done for anyone?
...and nothing of positive value would be lost. For a paradise predisposed on the infliction of suffering on another is ill-gotten, and taints anyone that avails themselves of it once it's true nature is known.
Our birthright is to toil to elevate one another; no more, no less. Omelas is a blight, a perversion, deserving of being scoured from the face of the Earth no matter where it pops up.
Glad to see someone else was touched by that work. Greetings fellow wanderer.
Do you honestly, after reflection, think this comment is fair?
They don’t only deny healthcare to people - if that was true no-one would pay them money because having healthcare would be no different to not having healthcare. Therefore they are not functionally isomorphic to a black box that collects money when it denies medical treatment.
If you want to make a mental model and then ask questions of the model you should have the confidence to make your model robust enough to approximate the “other side” of whatever argument exists on the topic.
Most insured individuals in America don't choose their health insurance provider, they just get it from their employer where they might have a choice of plans. The closest thing to an actual competitive insurance market we have is that provided by the ACA, and though that act did many good things the disappointment of the marketplace has been well documented.
I live in the UK where we have universal healthcare that is free at the point of need. We also have private healthcare. In most countries in Europe both private and public healthcare exist side by side. Per capita spending on healthcare (across the private and public provision) in the UK is a tiny fraction of what it is in the US and outcomes in terms of quality adjusted life years and measured in individual life expectancy and patient outcomes for given conditions were significantly better than the US last time I checked (which is admittedly a while ago).
The US healthcare system is definitely expensive and delivers a poor outcome, but you’re not convincing when you try to make a pastiche of the system that paints it as purely bad and say that health insurance simply should not exist for pure moral reasons.
As if systems always do as intended? If that were the case, my code would never have downtime!
The interactions between intent and results in any sufficiently large system is inherently complex.
If a system constantly fails to do what it was intended to do, then we should consider that what it does in reality is its true purpose. Basically this is functional structuralism.
Yes, if we could wave a wand and delete the fact that it ever happened, that would be ideal. But the problem is more difficult to solve now, because we have the problem of the health insurance system, and the problem of drastic systematic and economic change.
Perhaps we should ask borrow the "magic wand" that seems to exist for every other country. Maybe they can lend us theirs since that's apparently how realistic a system that does not bankrupt people is.
Sadly, it doesn't seem equally possible or realistic to build a system where CEO's aren't revenge murdered.
That's not to say it's impossible to do, or that we shouldn't. But, an economic, political, and social mass of this magnitude doesn't turn on a dime.
Other places had the luxury of solving the problem much earlier and on much smaller scales.
[1] In mathematics the meaning is somewhat stronger. In maths, two things are isomorphic if they cannot be distinguished in terms of structure in a particular context.
People just want to complain about not being able to afford something they want (American healthcare).
While UNH does some shameful things, even criminal things, the celebration of a public execution of a second in command guy is embarrassing for HN.
Pharmaceutical companies 20%+
Healthcare software companies (based on other software company margins). 20%+
Healthcare providers (doctor groups) Hospitals (HCA, tenet, etc) 10%+
Managed care organizations (MCOs, health insurers), retail pharmacies, and medicine distributors at the very bottom. ~2%
Legal is also up there. Those millions and tens of millions of dollar judgments don’t come from thin air.
Go ahead and get rid of MCOs, and at best you will reduce costs by 5%. Their medical loss ratios are 85% to 90%.
They are just allocating the very limited resources among more and more demand. Someone is going to have to be the bad guy unless supply of healthcare is drastically increased and tort reform happens to bring down liability costs.
Are you saying that the same populations are getting more and more sick and ill? Citation needed for that. Or are they costing more and more money? And if so, why?
Wouldn't be health insurers setting up middlemen of their own (PBS, etc.) to get around legal caps on their own profit margins, would it?
> Legal is also up there. Those millions and tens of millions of dollar judgments don’t come from thin air.
Malpractice payouts are by and large a boogey man. Texas has had them capped for years and shockingly, malpractice insurance costs are effectively identical to what they were before. As an aside, malpractice insurance in itself isn't typically as onerous as people believe it to be. What is onerous, and what that industry does differently to most other insurance segments is "tail insurance".
Tail insurance is the concept that major malpractice suits may appear well after your claims-made liability policy has ended. In most cases it's actually DOUBLE the premium you're paying for malpractice insurance, implying the insurer believes that your coverage is less than one-third of the claims they expect to pay. What -should- happen is that you carry "claims-made and prior acts" coverage. The challenge there is that in many cases your employer will cover claims-made as part of your compensation or part of their insurance, but don't elect prior acts coverage (and because of the way they do it, I suspect it's not as simple as "let me pay the difference").
But in general capping malpractice payouts has done nothing to offset malpractice coverage costs, let alone flow-through to end consumer costs.
The citation is the population pyramid flattening out and turning upside down eventually. That means more and more old (and hence sick) people, and fewer and fewer care providers (young people). Also, there are a lot more treatment option, and sick people being kept alive longer.
> Wouldn't be health insurers setting up middlemen of their own (PBS, etc.) to get around legal caps on their own profit margins, would it?
No, absent enormous fraud, all revenue and expense is reflected on a company’s 10-K. UNH/Elevance/Cigna/Humana/CVS/etc all have multiple lines of business (like most other large businesses), but the final profit margin figures are what they are including all lines of business.
Thanks for the info on tail insurance, I didn’t know that.
2. Profits to shareholders and other people contributing their time and resources are also "needed", as without profits the only incentive to provide healthcare is charity, and charity has not proven to be an effective organizing principle to allocate the time and attention of millions of individuals in a complex society.
> Everyone is going to die eventually
So why provide healthcare at all?
And health insurers don't increase shareholder returns by denying claims. Due to the minimum medical loss ratio it's rather the opposite. Most of the pressure to tighten coverage rules actually comes from large self-funded employers who use those insurers not to provide insurance but rather to administer their health plans.
https://www.cms.gov/marketplace/private-health-insurance/med...
When the decision maker is accountant, RN, or AI versus physician, I know who _shouldn't_ be deciding it.
The two experiences I've seen first hand (coincidentally both UHC):
A willingness to deny vastly improved QOL for a simple surgery unless I spend an extended amount of time to determine whether somehow, a nasal spray would straighten the cartilage of a 95% deviation to the septum.
As a paramedic, the realization that UHC routinely denied paying for HEMS (air ambulance) for serious car accident patients to trauma centers because of "lack of pre-authorization".
Insurance companies have too much power in this dynamic, and there should be limits to what they can deny once doctors deem it needed.
Now that’s definitely a lot of money, but as far as industry masterminds go it’s not indicative of being top tier at all. Second or maybe third tier really.
Is it the sort of situation where the company has 10 people all labeled “CEO” of different functions? Or was the $10M salary alone?
A healthcare provider makes a very important but simple offer: you pay us,and in exchange you grant you access to the medical treatments you need when you need it. They commit to provide that service.
If you meet your end of the deal without any flaw and, in the very moment you need them to comply with their own offer, they deny you the service they promised you that you would have, do you agree the are responsible for you not having access to that treatment?
Let's put it another way. Let's say you want to travel to some other place in your town to attend a meeting. You look up a taxi company advertisement, and you call them to arrange a ride. They say sure, you just need to pay us and you'll be taken from point A to B. You arrange your payment and wait for the cab. The cab arrives, but the driver tells you "well, I was looking at the travel plan and I decided I don't feel like driving you there", and drives off with your money. Is that taxi company responsible for you failing to attend the meeting?
A healthcare provider has a special responsibility because of the nature of their work. By definition, their role involves providing essential care to those in need. Their professional mission and the ethical codes guiding them (e.g., the Hippocratic Oath for physicians) emphasize patient welfare above all. An average person, while still morally capable of altruism, does not have a professional, codified duty to care for others’ health as a primary function of their life. They are not the designated or societally recognized gatekeepers of life-saving services.
In short, it’s not just about the availability of money; it’s about the nature and structure of the activity. Healthcare isn’t merely a commodity; it’s a critical social good. The moral expectations for an industry entrusted with people’s lives are and should be different from those applied to random private individuals.
Healthcare providers, especially large corporations, control access to life-saving goods and services. When such entities profit substantially, they do so from a position of gatekeeping essential health resources. They often have significant market power and can influence prices, accessibility, and quality of care. This is categorically different from an individual’s personal discretionary spending, which does not impose direct barriers between people in need and the care required to save their lives. The moral outrage about profit in healthcare often centers on the idea that unnecessary suffering or death occurs not because of a lack of resources in general, but because of a deliberate choice to prioritize profit margins over patient well-being. When an individual chooses to keep their discretionary income rather than donate it, that is not typically a case of withholding a life-saving resource they directly control. It’s a missed opportunity for altruism, yes—but it’s not a systematic withholding of lifesaving treatment from a dependent patient population.
The more direct your ability to help and the more acute the need, the stronger the moral obligation. A hospital that can provide a life-saving drug at a lower price but chooses not to, in order to maximize profit, is directly and immediately impacting patients’ lives. In contrast, an ordinary person’s failure to donate their personal entertainment budget to global health charities is morally less direct and involves a much more diffuse causal chain. The responsibility is mitigated by lack of proximity, lack of direct obligation, and lack of any professional or social contract stating that their role is to provide healthcare.
Your argument tries to equate personal, optional altruism with the professional moral obligations of healthcare providers, but these are not parallel situations. The ethical landscape is more nuanced: Institutions and professionals whose entire function is to safeguard and restore health must be held to a standard consistent with that mission. This does not require expecting every individual to donate all surplus income, nor does it demand that healthcare only be provided by charities. It simply recognizes that the context and nature of healthcare services place a different and higher ethical obligation on those who profit from them.
"Proximity". What evasion. Apparently healthcare workers are responsible for dedicating their entire lives to saving others, profit be damned, but you aren't culpable for depositing money into your savings account becuase you went into software. Hahaha, how absurd. At least the EA people/Peter Singer are consistent.
We have moral concepts to figure this stuff out and to avoid worrying about a "diffuse causal chain". Concepts like an "action" or "intent". When you apply these concepts to this situation, it becomses clear that neither insurance companies nor healthcare providers are going around murdering people. But the guy waiting outside a conference with a gun did.
In that case, I don't care about your opinion very much.
Do you remember a couple of years ago when grocers were still operating when everything else was shut down because they were considered critical workers during a global pandemic?
I mean come on, it wasn't even that long ago did you forget?
To a degree yes, absolutely. If moral actions “improve the valence of conscious experience” in some utilitarian sense, most people take a lot of immoral actions every day. When you think of morality as more of a direction rather than an absolute “you either are or are not a sinner,” you can view the average person, and yourself, as deeply immoral, yet still get value from the understanding because you know the correct direction to move in if you want to improve yourself or society.
With this definition, it’s easy to compare the morality of two people. To what degree did each exercise agency in order to either neglect a responsibility to do good, or to actively do harm? The person who deliberately did more harm could be said to be worse in their moral character.
Now imagine a person chooses to become the head of a health insurance company in order to make large amounts of money, while aware of the fact that their industry produces profit by minimizing the coverage they pay out and that this will inevitably deny some people who ought to get coverage coverage; and, furthermore, that this wrongly denied proportion is much higher than it needs to be in order for their company to exist and pay its costs.
Now imagine that, in response, this person actively uses their agency to worsen their company’s contribution to this situation for the gain of themselves and other relatively wealthy higher-ups at their company instead of taking any action within their means to better the situation. We can reason that this person is, when you sum up the raw quantity of harm they’ve deliberately caused, morally worse than the average person, who will likely have done vastly less deliberate harm over their life. Is an extrajudicial murder the solution? Probably not, in that it won’t directly produce the needed changes to move society in a marginally more moral direction. That being said, I sure won’t be shedding any tears, and I’ll shed much less than I would for an absolutely morally mediocre Joe Schmoe.
They both do and don't simultaneously. Schrödinger's Responsibility. When the company makes money or does something good, it's because of the CEO's leadership...they are responsible because they are in charge. When the company loses money or does evil/bad, then the CEO has nothing to do with it, and instead it's either the fault of government, lone wolf low-level employees, customers, external factors, "economic trends", anything but themselves
I wish I could say I got out of there for ethical reasons (there were good reasons, but if that was the only...)
We did a LOT to be ethical. The amount of requests we turned down from our customers - "If we have a database of familial relationships (who knows what, or from where, be it public records or 23andme), how can we mine the database with that information to determine people's predisposition to certain conditions based on familial diagnoses?"
"You can't."
"Why not, it's in the database?"
"Yes. But that is federally illegal for you to do. And if it's illegal for you to do, we are not going to facilitate it either."
But the writing was on the wall, I'm sure at some point there would be more and more "grey areas".
... Now that doesn't mean it is true, and health insurance in the US is completely broken, but it is not at all obvious who is at fault here.
Ethical:
He was the CEO of the company and ultimately the buck stops with him on company policies. The company he lead has the highest number of insurance denials (double most other insurance agencies). That has almost certainly lead to death as people not being able to afford treatment is a great way to die. Consider, for example, if someone has cancer and insurance denies coverage of chemo medications that they are supposed to cover. Well, now the covered person is in a battle with the insurance company to pay for the medications (which they say they cover) that works as a ticking timebomb against them. They could pony up the bill while they wait for coverage, but that's not going to be within the means of many people.
> what framework and criteria is it evaluated under?
One of responsibility. Surely the CEO of a company must know that the policy the company he runs and owns has lead to industry leading denial rates. That's exactly the sort of statistic CEOs track and have influence over.
And when dealing with health, the outcome is simply obvious. By increasing the amount of denials you know you are harming legitimate claimants.
This is not a soldier or a serial killer. It's worse than both. It's an uncaring individual optimizing profit over people. Unlike a soldier who likely can't avoid killing or a surgeon who makes mistakes, this is more akin to a general positioning wounded soldiers on the frontlines so the army doesn't have to pay their salaries or feed them. Not for pleasure or psychosis in the case of a serial killer, just for simple banal resource optimization.
No, it didn’t. He had the title of CEO due to title inflation, but UNH’s real CEO is Andrew Witty. The buck stops with Witty (and the board that votes for Witty).
How can you be so morally clueless?
When an insurance company denies coverage, it isn't killing someone. It didn't make anyone sick. Rather, it didn't pick up the bill for their treatment. That may have been wrong, it may have been an evasion of responsibility, but it is not comparable to someone who goes around killing people.
I have to understand comments like this (there are a lot of them) as some kind of morbid performance art. Either that or severe mental illness.
It is absolutely killing multiple people yearly.
If I withhold water from someone dying of thirst, who I promised to give water to, who paid me for that water, I've killed them when they die. I may not have plunged a knife into their heart but they'll be dead all the same directly from my actions.
If an insurance company does not pay for the medicine and treatments they say they cover, that they payed to cover, and people die from that, they are responsible for those deaths.
A serial killer kills less than the medical health industry does. That doesn't make them moral, it highlights how immoral the current healthcare system is in the US.
Do government healthcare ministers and other administrators responsible for single-payer systems deserve to die too? What about legislators who limit healthcare budgets to below 100% of GDP (which is to say all of them); should they be summarily executed?
No, because as you point out there are legitimate reasons to deny coverage.
However, when your competitors are denying at a rate of something like 10->15% and you are denying at 36%, that goes beyond just managing resources or fraud prevention.
Your question is a false dichotomy.
> What about legislators who limit healthcare budgets to below 100% of GDP (which is to say all of them); should they be summarily executed?
Again, false dichotomy. Primarily because it's not even provable that 100% of GDP going to healthcare would actually save more lives than 99% or 50%. Further, unless you have a very expansive definition of what healthcare means (food? housing? etc?) then putting 100% of the budget towards it would ultimately starve out necessary industries for life thus causing death.
The real question to ask is "Can an insurance company be moral if it denies legitimate claims" my answer to that is no. Pragmatically, I can excuse some of it to human error as that'll happen. People will die from accidents and that's just a part of life. However, let's not pretend that there isn't a massive incentive for these large companies to deny as many claims as possible with no market forces and few regulations to impede them.
A government denying a liver transplant to a 90 year old is quiet different from a health insurance agency blanket denying cancer treatment because it costs them too much money.
I can contend that United's denials are responsible for killing people because they are denying at 2x the industry average. To prove me wrong, you'd have to show that actually the rest of the industry isn't denying enough and that United has somehow stumbled upon the real rate of spurious insurance claims.
And for the 100% of money to healthcare that makes the assumption that we have that much healthcare need to spend that much money on. There are limits to needs which is why the argument you make is flawed.
Also, I wouldn’t have to prove than increasing healthcare spending to 100% of GDP would be optimal, just proving that there is some incremental gain by spending a tiny bit more than is currently spent by a single-payer would justify the murder of one or more legislators (by your logic).
I'm not, nor have I ever.
And with that I think this conversation is done. If you won't engage with any point I've made and instead are just here to insult me there's no point in continuing further.
With the caveat that this isn't a representative sample (people appealing likely have the denials most likely to be overturned), 30% at the low end still feels too high.
This rate is even higher for prior authorization denials. Those get overturned on appeal more than half the time.
Probably safe to assume that if your denial rate is 2x competitors, those numbers would be even worse.
Remember Asimov's rules? A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. They are one and the same.
Asimov’s rules don’t work; that’s the whole point.
He definitely has a yacht or two.
It's not performance art, just empathy.
I have a friend who they tried to kill this year. His doctor recommended going in and removing an area they thought some skin cancer had spread to. They performed the surgery, biopsy confirmed their suspicions.
After all that, the insurance company (too late thankfully) came in and said they didn't think the cancer had spread, so no need for surgery.
I hope you never have to deal with this, but if you live long enough you or a friend / family member probably will.
There's countless amounts of blood on their hands. It's not about bills coming in and getting uncovered, it's about life saving surgeries being delayed till the patient dies in hopes that they can avoid covering something they're supposed, or avoiding paying for a medication in the hopes that the patient dies before they can litigate.
I don't really care how you want to spin things, that's murder, and thankfully most folks agree with me.
Killing someone is an act of violence. That is easy. But how about ruining someone financially? Is this an act of violence? Could it be an act of violence under certain conditions?
How about letting someone die in order to make more money? Let's say the decision is about the price for a certain treatment and you are balancing profit expectations from investors. Is this an act of violence? I'd imagine that the outcome of deaths could probably estimated quite reliably in this instance. And you would need to justify the various salaries and profits along the way and weighing it up against number of people suffering. Does this sound violent to you?
You can look up the definition of the word "responsibility" to clarify what it means.
You can complement that understanding with the understanding of what are the most basic responsibilities of a CEO, and all the reports about how this specific insurance company implemented official policies to automatically reject access to medical treatment that those who trusted their healthcare provider would desperately need.
> So I would think more likely it was somebody with a particular grudge that had access to inside information to know where to be and when to be there.
it's usually somebody close to you.
Need to look at the wife, they had recently separated, and she likely had access to the curious information about where he was and would be at specific times (wouldn't you expect him to stay in the hotel where the meeting was to be held? this plot was based on that not being the case.)
She stated to the press there were threats against him. When asked for specifics, she was suddenly too busy caring for her family to answer.
They lived in CT and for a time it seemed the gun had come from CT, despite the killer arriving from Atlanta; but I saw an item that said the CT gun had been accounted for, but I'm not sure the status of that. The bizarre messages on the bullets? to throw investigators off the scent.
"it's important to lead your life in such a way that when you're gunned down in public by an anonymous hitman on a New York City street the country at large doesn't react like the Ewoks watching the second Death Star explode."
Because all I'm saying is that unbalanced systems are untenable and will seek to right themselves. The classic soap box, ballot box, jury box, cartridge box applies. People losing faith in the courts was a bad thing and its only gonna get worse from here. Deleting that observation helps no one.