That is a really depressing read. A person shot and killed in cold blood, and these online heros pretty much condone it. This will be awful for his family.
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.
This word is doing a lot of heavy lifting in your comment. A parasite was terminated.
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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.