Top internet sleuths say they won't help find the UnitedHealthcare CEO killer
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Did this CEO deserve to be shot in the back? No, and vigilantism shouldn't be celebrated. Instead we should invest time in understanding why our laws and society structure allows (even promotes) the kind of corporate exploitation of the public that is enough to drive someone to murder.
We already know the answer to why. Its because corporate exploitation of the public is profitable. The US could at any time switch to a universal health care system like just about every other industrialized nation and the entire claim-denying middle-man financial parasite insurance model would evaporate.
I think we are able to kind of reduce the exploitation A BIT, via social norms and culture. And that too only in regions where resources are abundant and the environment isn't too chaotic.
What are you talking about? Isn't blatant corporate greed simply the product of the societal and financial culture that the country is practically built upon?
If you insist on playing naive, let me spell it out for you.
1. A corporation's main aim is shareholder value increase, at any cost that is a) legally permissible b) doesn't kill the company. For what its worth, #1.a is also negotiable now, see 2.2 below.
2. In order to ensure this:
2.1 They pay political campaigns to get the politicians in power so that those politicians can shape the laws in their favor.
2.2 They employ ex-government officials to incentivize them to be not too harsh with the corporations during their tenure at the government - you don't bite the hand that will feed you once you retire from your current government job.
2.3 They pay lobbying groups to influence the laws the politicians will make (most are already bought (see #2.1) but it is so much cheaper to lobby compared to the outsized payout that spending a bit more for maximum support is a no-brainer).
3. In order to maximize shareholder value, they need to maximize their profits. If denying claims helps them do it, they will do so. Who will stop them? Politicians? See #2 above.
4. How do politicians ensure they can enable #1?
5.1 By making it legal for corporations to pump cash via PACs and super PACs so that #2.1 can continue.
5.2 By pushing extremism (left or right) and polarize people into groups. It is easy for sharks to feed if the herring move as a group. How can they do it easily? Technology companies with the power of internet enable it greatly (they are also companies after all, see #1).
6. The cycle continues and worsens and people keep getting squeezed until someone says fuck it and does something like the event this thread is about.
PS: people get all worked up about Roe vs. Wade. The real cancer was Citizens United (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC).
Unless the law grants you a monopoly, relative competitive advantage is why.
The US system is one that is set up under a very different cultural system than what we currently have (in many ways). But one important release valve that the first generation had was duels. If you were being a shithead over and over, you'd be killed. Maybe not by the first duel, or even the fifth duel. But your luck would run out eventually.
Now, these days, we know that duels are just crazy, and the social effects of them are dumb. But we've also gotten rid of the shaming and shunning effects that came after them. Something else (white/blacklists, anti-NETTR, an anti-trolling league, etc) should come out to replace and gain these functions again. Our system really only works if done in good faith and requires an extra-judicial method of enforcement.
What makes the UH CEO so different is that he was, presumably, innocent. A bad person for humanity and the public, Absolutely, but legally innocent.
We have hundreds of analyses already and millions of hours poured into understanding this situation -- the corporate power structure and the unrestricted capitalistic growth of technology. Should people analyze until they are blue in the face?
At some point in many societies, a point of revolution happens because there is no other reliable option, and when such a thing happens, it overrides the morals of the majority simply because those morals only exist to keep a society functioning. But what to do when it no longer can function?
The American goverment frequently decides who lives and who dies and who to kill at war. When that sort of violence flows downwards to those who threaten the existing power structure, it is called policy. When the people take arms against corruption, it is called immoral violence and you bought right into it.
This is a story that , justly or not, unfolds hundreds if not thousands of times a day.
It’s not the first time, and won’t be the last, that the affected person has the right combination of dark triad traits and appropriate experiences to make personal vengeance a viable response.
As someone who recently lost their spouse of 16 years to cancer, I can say that in the right circumstances this might be an understandable, if not justifiable, response to that kind of stress.
Health care execs are always under litigation. They are the named officers of their corporate units and therefore the legal representatives of their entities.
Private health care aggrieves hundreds to thousands of people a day. It’s rather someone who lost a loved one or who is in financial distress due to decisions made by this corporation than some deep dark conspiracy.
That doesn't align with the characteristics of a typical personal vendetta.
Don't underestimate the amount of thought someone truly resentful will put to this kind of action.
> thousands of people a day
and this virtually never happens. Sure, on one side, it's bound to happen eventually, but from the other, "aggrieved loved one" is in good cover if you need that guy dead.
Not sure about testify, but there is a probe and he is not the only implicated exec.
The shooter is not twisting a pulling a welrod style action, they’re racking the slide every time because of the cartridges lack enough power to fully operate the gun’s action with the suppressor attached.
“He was in possession of a ghost gun that had the capability of firing a 9-mm round and a suppressor,” NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said at a Monday press briefing, adding that the piece “may have been made on a 3-D printer.”
Making it look like a populist vigilante to the point of staging a performative message would be a good way to confuse and throw the investigation.
We’ll see if they find the guy.
We invented rule of law and the ballot box to protect ourselves from each other. Yes it may be inefficient and may produce results we don't like, but once it becomes ok to murder people you disagree with, that legitimises killing anyone.
Put another way, how many Americans have cheered seeing Batman tackle an industrialist who killed a fraction of the number of Americans who die because they can’t get adequate healthcare? I strongly agree that gunning people down for perceived injustice isn’t anywhere we want to be but that means we have to actually fix the problems. Here’s a survey which found 34M Americans know someone who died because they couldn’t get healthcare, and 58M couldn’t get medication they needed – those numbers are very high if you want a peaceful society:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/268094/millions-lost-someone-co...
This word is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your comment. A parasite was terminated.
> Another popular TikTok sleuth, thatdaneshguy [said] that he wouldn’t try to identify the killer. “I don’t have to encourage violence. I don’t have to condone violence by any means. But I also don’t have to help,” he said.
Inaction can be condoning in some cases. If there is an element of duty it certainly is. But if volunteers choose not to volunteer in a specific situation that’s their right.
It can be hard to ascribe values when someone abstains.
He made his money killing and maiming people. Why would people mourn his death? — why would people be motivated to find his killer?
Criminals kill each other every day.
Are you helping sleuth for his killer?
There seem to be a few people online who mirror your sentiments about being shocked, what defenders of the crime would call pearl clutching. I'm fascinated.
From my perspective, the idea of a vigilante being so burned by health insurance companies he tracks down and kills the CEO is not a shocking premise _at all_. Yet some (particularly health insurance industry workers / professionals on LinkedIn) are so shocked by this that it makes me wonder if there's an insulated echo chamber effect going on here.
I mean - this is the country that literally has a whole Amendment in their Constitution dedicated to the right of the people to shoot other people, and which defines that capacity for popular violence as a necessity for a free state. The archetype of the hero patriot "watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants" goes all the way back to the guy who made that quote.
And I would bet money (if I had it) that a significant number of people expressing outrage over this were defending Kyle Rittenhouse and that guy who shot climate protestors in Panama, or making excuses for the killings of Jordan Neely and George Floyd, or gleefully hoping Trump would send troops in to shoot BLM protestors in the streets.
Because the "problem" here isn't the normalization of gun violence or the lionization of such violence as heroism - that's been normal for centuries, it's an intentional design feature of the American system. The "problem" here is that gun violence was being used on the wrong kind of people, and creating the wrong kind of hero.
The finance first group are sort of the opposite. They're doing everything they can to target Fraud/Waste/Abuse, not necessarily to the exclusion of patient outcome, but the priorities are 100% different. The problem is the output of their analysis tends to turn into inputs for the Prior Auth, formulary management, and claim denial logic, which, lets call that what it is: population scale social engineering to the end of nudging people to save money for the company.
The "surprised pikachus" are probably the finance first/raw number crunchers who have never had a number bite back in their life. The people who are actually concerned with patient outcome already know exactly what's going on, and are completely unsurprised.
It's really Upton Sinclair's wisdom at work: It is hard to get a man to understand that which his salary depends on him not understanding.
Americans dislike the American health care system as a whole, but actually tend to like their particular insurance company and doctors.
I checked United on the ACA marketplace in my state and United is rated 4 out of 5 stars, which is the same as pretty much every other offering except Kaiser (5 out of 5) and new plans that have not yet gotten ratings.
This is not actually surprising because most people only actually use their insurance for routine things like physicals, vaccinations, lab tests, common illnesses like flu, physical injuries like sprains and broken bones and household cuts and burns, and fairly common prescription drugs.
Even the most extreme cost cutting insurance company is usually going to pay for those without question.
Money is a weapon of vote too, if you don't subscribe to UnitedHealthcare, in the long run the corporate should eventually disappear as a whole no ?
If you dislike Uber, then don't buy Uber.
In Switzerland they have such capitalistic system where you can pick your private insurance provider. So the most expensive / worse ones, gets less revenue.
In France, they have a socialo-communist monopoly, no choice, only one choice, and you have to be happy with it, no matter what.
I guess that's the main promise of capitalism; voting with your money (money that is supposed to come proportional to your efforts, though it is warped by crime, cryptos, inheritance, etc).
For example, if you stop buying meat, and convince others to stop buying meat, then there will less people investing into meat.
EDIT: Users explained (thanks!) that it was not really a free choice.
In the USA, most health insurance plans are through private companies that have group plans with employers.
This is a terrible system, because many employers just want to check the box of offering plans, so do not negotiate good plans for their employees (the best / most profitable companies might have good health insurance, but most not so much).
It also very famously ties your health insurance status to your employment status, which gives a whole tone to the American discourse of labor laws. People are desperate to keep their jobs to keep their medical coverage.
The US gov is trying to make it more competitive with healthcare.gov, which really only highlights how bad the situation is (you're hard pressed finding a healthcare marketplace plan for less than 200$/month without income tax credits).
So the average American is stuck with plans they didn't negotiate for, with limited options for choosing better plans, and insurance very often deny coverage / include hidden fees / are generally inept at providing any type of service beyond taking your money.
There's no way to vote with your wallet, when everyone in the business seems to be a crook at worst and an uncaring suit at best.
The problem is often that there is no really good option. And in places like Switzerland, there is often much more regulation to prevent all options from becoming bad. For example, the E.U. has many consumer rights laws that the U.S. does not have.
The problem is unregulated capitalism. At a large scale, over time, people will find ways to take advantage of the system and exploit the people due to their greedy nature. And insurance is an industry that naturally tends to that end without regulation.
In no place does unregulated capitalism give good results at scale.
It sounds very offending to my anarcho capitalistic world view, where poor people should suffer more than I do, but does it actually produce more suffering than US or less?
Neighbouring countries are trying to match )
This is why if you are poor France and can get state help is an excellent choice.
Once you start to pay taxes, or you fit in-between the criterias for eligibility to state help, the costs are much higher than in the neighboring Switzerland for example.
- Did Starbucks bill Thompson for his drink before the shooting?
- If so, did they refund any charge (since he presumably did not pick up the drink)?
- Can Starbucks legally refund money to a credit card account knowing the account owner is deceased?
I think we will find that first it was awful for the killer’s family.
Looking back at this time we will just say "yeah, these were the different times" and shrug.
(a) If more CEOs are targeted, it will modify their behaviour, and make them more likely to tone down their ruthlessness.
(b) There is already a lot of news coverage and attention on the horrific nature of U.S. healthcare. If some policies change more rapidly, then I think some might consider this killing an effective action in saving hundreds of lives.
So it kind of worked
I've worked in the space. Most people don't care about denials that are reasonable. I.e. escalation through "lets try these first drugs" when there isn't an established history of use. Ruling out less expensive problems before approving the most expensive operation. Thise aren't generally issues.
It's capricious denials happening over and over and over again, despite well established case history. Denials that clearly don't make sense. Prior Auths being used as financial "nudges".
That type of thing can screw right off. It's why I left the space after it proved absolutely impossible to get through to people that these measures were costing the lives of our customers. I bloody tried; and in the end, left for the sake of keeping what was left of my soul intact.
As far as I'm concerned the industry has made their bed. They can now sleep in it.
It's not simply approval or denial. In the US, you can still get health care for conditions the insurance company decides to deny payment for after the fact. The "insured" is then financially ruined. This is so exceedingly common in the US. It's far, far, far, far, far, far, far less likely to be financially destroyed by a health issue in the UK or any other industrialized nation.
Total revenue (all money brought in) – $389b
All money paid out in claims – $303b
Money left over for running the business $85b
Cost of running the business – $69b
Profit – $14b
So it basically appears that for every $1 us customers pay to United Healthcare, $0.75 goes to medical providers, $.21 to running the business, and $.04 to profit.
Those numbers don’t seem like gouging to me, what do you think?
$3,000 a night for a hospital bed, $350,000 a year on average for a doctor, and double profits being made by pharma and medical devices companies. Abolish the patent system, allow unlimited new doctors to train instead of a specific number of annual seats, and reduce the regulations on building and operating hospitals and prices will fall.
Currently we give 27% of US GDP to doctors and hospitals.
Yeah, the enemy is the industry players, who we are talking about. The industry players are the ones who institute the regulations that have captured the industry, and they don't cease to exist after deregulation. Unless your deregulation proposal also includes regulation of their ability to expand, you're just giving them more power to do regulatory capture.
They get even richer by creating new hospitals that now cost less to build and hiring physicians (and PAs, NPs, RNs, and so on) whom they can now pay at lower rates.
And then, because they have been lobbying this whole time (unless deregulation means regulating lobbying?) they have just done reg 2.0... regulatory capture but it uses AJAX
It’s a religious drive if you believe that a CEO should be the sacrificial lamb for the systems politicians have set up.
Are you implying the CEO is a victim of the system? If so he decided to further victimise dozens of thousands further, just like a murderer-robber is also a victim of the system, nonetheless their lack of morality made them perpetuate the system's violence.
in fact, it signals to me how the market and incentive structure dogma can be a harmful and destructive ideology to follow.
Being morally corrupt is kinda the point, less educated people manage to maintain a sense of morality while living under this system, they aren't rewarded for it but still have character enough to not be corrupted. His choice of participating on a clearly immoral scheme is conscious, responding to the incentives comes from a failure of character.
It is much better if the gen pop is the sacrificial lamb.
There are a couple of pivot points that could fix things now that we have the data.
The system wasn’t set up by accident but at the specific behest of the affected companies. When the prospect of Medicare for all was being discussed a decade and a half ago, look at where all of the money decrying it as socialism came from, and who was funding the politicians talking about things like “death panels”. That proposal was estimated to cut U.S. healthcare costs almost in half, which sounds great as a consumer but represents hundreds of billions annually which is not generating profits for the insurance industry and large providers.
The exact same story played out in 1993 when President Clinton tried to pass healthcare reform, down to the year-long advertising campaign featuring actors pretending to be normal people concerned about bureaucracy which only made sense in a parallel universe where people weren’t having even worse experiences with private bureaucrats every day.
Now that's a strawman. No one believes the CEO should be a sacrificial lamb. But I think many do believe that his killing is justice and may even effect some change due to an intense investigation into American health care.
There are old school web sleuthing forums filled with people taking this case seriously.
My comment was made on the side of the public majority, be it meat space or the ether, holding little regard for a man who’s responsible for policies that have denied care that they payed for. Believe it or not, actions have consequences.
As to comment on “TikTok sleuths”: I would doubt their prowess and abilities to maintain any level of professionalism. They are on a website that is targeting your short term attention span. Long, drawn out, in depth analysis and (what is it) 1 minute max length videos don’t seem a positive mix. Just as I am now, I would assume they are merely speculating. This just seems like another “we did it Reddit!”.
Distributed search through multiple contacts does not always provide tangible evidence. I, personally, would not take random sources over first hand evidence. A thousand monkeys on type writers and only a dozen providing credible information.
Have you ever noticed the large amount of people that will take an influential persons word at face value? What ever happened to trust but verify.
If you look through old logs of a certain bulletin board how many did you see providing useful information? The 80/20 rule applies to this.
Ever heard of the game “telephone”?
Everyone celebrates "justice" against the "bad guys" via vigilante violence until they are next against the wall.
You don't have to justify anything by not wanting to help catching the killer though; it's their choice.
I have never been in this situation (not allowed here), but as I said before, I find the restraint amazing; if a family member would have paid for 30 years in some insurance and then gets denied because some AI said no, I find it hard to imagine this type of vigilante stuff is so rare. And the ceo really knows this is happening so he should go to jail, at least. Not just a slap on the wrist.
I think there's a general sense among the owning class (who largely inherited their ownership from their daddies) that the only rational and moral response for somebody who can't pay their societal rent is apoptosis.