UnitedHealth's Effort to Deny Coverage for a Patient's Care (2023)
propublica.org
propublica.org
You could probably have gotten away with what UNH did if the money wasn't so ridiculous. Thompson himself had a compensation package worth $10.2 million[0] a year. It's reasonable to think that other c-suiters at the company, along with those of its parent organization, made similar amounts of money.
The company also has a 1.53% dividend yield[1].
The average American's lifetime earnings are $1.8 million for men, and $1.1 million for women[2]. That is to say, within five years, Mr. Thompson would likely have made ten times the average American's lifetime economic output, post-tax.
If you're paying a significant chunk of your yearly earnings to be covered by UNH, you expect the money you paid to go towards providing you with service. Instead, tens of millions of it goes towards a handful of individuals, and regardless of how the company does financially, participants in the equities market will get some of your money, and you'll possibly be denied the service you paid for in order to make that happen.
People will say that this is necessary to remain competitive, but it just isn't. People with severe health problems or loved ones with severe health problems aren't asking these executives or shareholders to live like paupers; they just expect the service they paid for. When there's something as life-ruining as chronic health conditions dogging you every single day, there's a chance you snap, and in the US, there's fairly trivial access to tools to help you do that.
[0] https://www.msn.com/en-in/health/health-news/the-salary-bonu... [1] https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/unh/dividend-h... [2] https://www.theknowlesgroup.org/blog/average-american-lifeti...
In other countries there are private health funds that return all of their profits to their members by simply covering more types of care and lowering premiums, all while still giving their staff very good, very attractive pay. That is clearly a win:win setting without being a government-run entity.
A person doesn't need to earn 100M-200M in a decade of company service. That is an obscene amount of money, and merely opportunistic payment from a system where the foxes are guarding the hen house. Unfortunately the US health system has this pattern repeated through it from insurers, to hospitals and beyond - the money is being funnel to those which can minimise, not optimise, care.
I believe these days most insurance companies farm out most of the risk to reinsurers anyway, so you could do it at a relatively small scale.
You may argue that you shouldn't offer insurance for a rate that doesn't cover actual incidence and I would agree but it seems to be their business model.
[1]: https://www.unitedhealthgroup.com/content/dam/UHG/PDF/invest...
The gastroenterologist is not the expensive part, either, the expensive part was the manufacturing process for the drug. It would be super cool to invest the billions of profit for this insurance company into developing more efficient ways to produce this category of drug. Alas,
Instead we are investing in finding the most underhanded ways possible to deny medical care for each patient, all the while pretending we are not making medical decisions for them.
Also I would agree the insurer is absolutely making medical decisions with its own definition of medical necessity. But the Doctor is also making financial decisions when he recommends a drug that pays him significant consulting fees every year. There's warped incentives all over.
This is the paradox of US healthcare: it's probably the most advanced in the world if you/your insurer can foot the bill, but that's an enormous if.
The situation at the moment is that routine, basic medicine is being denied, often algorithmically, along with "pharmabro" types buying up basic medications for the sole purpose of increasing its price. That's starkly different from the development of novel medications demanding high prices to reward R&D efforts.
[0] mhttps://www.tiktok.com/@theredcoquette/video/744542308485049...
[1] https://www.tiktok.com/@joysparkleshine/video/74460838068822...
[2] https://www.wfsb.com/2024/12/05/anthem-backtracks-anesthesio...
Perhaps it’s time for cleaners to clean
I don't get it, is the implication that it's too high? Too low?
>If you're paying a significant chunk of your yearly earnings to be covered by UNH, you expect the money you paid to go towards providing you with service. Instead, tens of millions of it goes towards a handful of individuals
UNH took in 371.6 billion in revenue and made 23.14 billion in profit last year. "tens of millions" is a rounding error.
If these companies paid less grossly-imbalanced compensation packages to their C-suite vs. the average employee salary, and they operated like an actual company vs. a rich person's piggy bank, I'd be sure willing to bet that profit margin would be a heck of a lot higher. They'd probably be more efficient and provide better service, too.
Instead of posting random conjectures with zero backing evidence, you could you know, actually do the research, because "burden of proof" and all. Anyways someone made a similar claim a few days ago, but about HP, and I debunked it with a 30 second search[1]. Unless there's reason to think that HP or united health are outliers in terms of corporate governance, I doubt the ratio between them will vary significantly.
Really, I think dividends should be illegal; so it's too high. They distort the true market performance of a company by guaranteeing returns when the company might not actually be making those returns in a sustainable manner.
> UNH took in 371.6 billion in revenue and made 23.14 billion in profit last year. "tens of millions" is a rounding error.
"Tens of millions" is in reference to the cost of their higher-ups' compensation.
Funny, because I often see people say have similar objections for buybacks. It seems like nobody is happy with corporate profits returning to shareholders. I don't think either the anti-buybacks or the anti-dividend side has a point though. Anyone doing a modicum of finance analysis would be able subtract the value of the dividends paid from the share price, or factor it into the price of the company. Indeed, you see that share prices in companies dip after the dividend ex date, which suggests the market takes this information into account.
Nobody is happy with corporate profits returning to shareholders at the expense of workers and customers, at least not as transparently as it is done now.
Wages have remained flat in the US for several decades now. It’s starting to have a real impact on the economic and social conditions of the country. “But what about the shareholders?” isn’t going to be a valid excuse to someone who pays for coverage against medical costs.
There is no economic system, or business model within said system, in which there is unlimited value to be transferred. Humans will assert their rights at some point or another.
How can you return anything to shareholders that's not "at the expense of workers and customers"? Each dollar paid to shareholders is going to be one less dollar that can be paid to workers/customers, so almost by definition paying anything to shareholders is going to be at the expense of workers/customers. Is this supposed to be a thinly veiled attempt at stating marxist ideology?
>There is no economic system, or business model within said system, in which there is unlimited value to be transferred. Humans will assert their rights at some point or another.
The current share paid to shareholders is nowhere near "unlimited". In the US labor's share of GDP stands at just below 60%.
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/b2774f97-en/1/2/6/2/inde...
I can guess the answer.
Mandatory binding arbitration is what you can get now.
I myself don't agree to the death penalty or any killing if it doesn't serve to thwart an immediate and severe danger. We shall take it as a given that this killing doesn't fall under the latter, or perhaps even a somewhat more generous definition. But at the same time, it would be infeasible to have the CEO "brought to justice". To have him sentenced in court, his assets paid out, and the company reformed. Between nothing at all happening (except protests) and the CEO being killed, which is the better choice? If, all else being equal, you could choose one world or the other, which choice is better?
in fact the same drugs are sold 10-100x cheaper outside US
Meanwhile, the company they paid all of this money to posts record net income and its executives make millions of dollars per year. They scare people away from socialized medicine with phrases like "death panels" while in the same breath boast about using AI to automatically deny healthcare for their customers. It's so gross and reprehensible.
Only in the US....
Out of curiosity, What makes you think executive compensation can be easily cut? Wouldn't the shareholders happily do that if they could?
Please do not normalize premeditated murder, even if the culprit has good cause to be extremely angry.
It's not "just what happens". That's a politically opportunistic narrative that seeks to incite violence and murder.
No one knows why the CEO was killed.
None of this type of reasoning justifies or begins to explain the murder even if this were the reason in the shooter's head. Morals aside, it's nonsensical reasoning in total.
You're justifying and providing propaganda support for domestic terrorism in the United States.
Whatever the shooter's motive was, you can't deny that the public mood is ugly. There was scarcely any sympathy for Thompson, just an avalanche of gleeful mockery and complaints about healthcare claim handling. The problems are widespread enough that having someone snap because, say, their parents' claims have been denied, is completely believable.
Preach brother
[1] https://www.dolthub.com/blog/2022-05-31-hospital-price-gougi...
An example: about 20 years ago I had just a major medical plan and I was at urgent care for a problem. After diagnosing the likely problem and prescribing the solution, they were about to run some tests "just in case." When I told them I would be paying for the tests due to the major medical plan, they explained that the tests didn't have any benefit, so we didn't run them.
I don't know of a real solution to these problems.
A partial solution is exposing some of the cost to the insured to create an incentive to save (like what I had when I was paying for the tests). At my company, we fully pay for a high-deductible plan AND a give company-funded contribution to a Health Savings Account that mostly covers the per-person out-of-pocket max. If the employee does not spend the HSA money (which is their money in their account), it can be used for retirement savings... so they have an incentive to save. But once someone hits the out-of-pocket max, there is no more incentive to save.
Suggesting that the average person should be able to make medical decisions and override their health care provider’s recommendation is ridiculous.
The situation is similar to taking your out-of-warranty car to a dealer for repairs. Sometimes, you may suspect they’re not being completely honest with you. What do you do in that case? You get a second opinion before agreeing to a costly repair.
This is what we have to change. When physicians and hospitals know that patients are scrutinizing care plans they will find a new fairer baseline. That cultural change will subsume older practices.
Wish I can say the same about health. If the doctor who has my entire medical history recommends x procedure, yes I'm not going to risk potentially having irreversible damage to my body.
You think your primary care physician is the one that recommends surgery, and not a specialist?
Step 1: "The other 2 entities in the health industry are to blame!" Step 2: Profit, because no one is going to succeed a battle here that knocks down only one of these.
Every time, this is the response. In practice they are all to blame, and they could all be working to make this better. But none of them are incentivized to act in anything but their own self-interest. Insurance is definitely to blame, as are hospitals and pharmaceutical manufacturers. There's a reason the companies that ostensibly "save people's lives" are some of the most hated in the US.
I hope that Insurance companies have an epiphany from the public sentiment about this, that they're messing this up spectacularly. But honestly, they seem more likely to wait for this to blow over.
The high list prices you see are only exist there to scare uninsured/underinsured Americans and to force them to buy/pay more expensive insurance.
As soon as you get treated, these list prices magically get reduced on the backend by factor of 2-3x.
Doctors themselves cannot price gouge patients, but they can price gouge via middleman (insurance). The same procedure that costs $50 will be billed to insurance as $500 procedure.
same with pharma drugs, there is a very complex system in place to keep the face of expensive prices, while keeping a system of rebates/discounts/pre-negotiated contracts between each big player.
Americans are simply getting taken for a ride and their money being stolen by Pharma+Hospitals and Insurance is simply acting as a financial middleman.
Also insurance literally FORCES americans to work, because thats the only way to get affordable health insurance. Aint noone is paying COBRA (list prices). If you do you are stupid and throwing money away.
American population is being squeezed and extracted of their labor due to system that forces you to work to stay alive and healthy.
for comparison, just go to Thailand or Vietnam to any of the private hospitals: you can get the same western standard treatment but for pennies (the actual cost of care). This is the healthcare that Americans COULD have, but unfortunately the American system would lose too much money so Americans are not allowed to have affordable health care.
A lot of things in America is simply regulatory capture and requires Americans to keep ignorant of what they could have, what other countries enjoy, but Americans are not allowed to
This is really important. This system is artificially lowering the cost of labor and preventing people from immediately leaving workplaces where they are treated poorly by the employers or the customers.
The reason is if you want to live, you need to get healthcare, and for that you need to be employed by BigCorp (because marketplace insurance is overpriced and crappy thanks to OBAMA).
The system is set up in a way to keep extracting and exploiting people in their prime years of age
If health insurance typically only covers 150 dollars for a procedure, but one super duper premium plan may cover 600, you charge 600. End of. Because otherwise, what happens when patients with that super duper plan come in? You only make 150 instead of 600.
Would you want to get paid 150 instead of 600? No, you wouldn't. Survey every American. None would. We aren't stupid.
So, you charge 600, and by the shackles of capitalism, you have no choice. Your hands are tied - that decision is already made for you by the systems in place.
Many drugs don't work, they are expensive. If there are no voices in the room saying "we will not pay for expensive drugs that do not work", then healthcare costs will continue spiraling out of control.
Single payer healthcare will "solve" this by ensuring that the medications this guy was taking do not exist and are never prescribed in the first place.
Remicade is available in (at least) these countries: - US - Japan - Europe - Turkey - Russia
Entyvio: - US - Europe - Canada - Japan - Australia
Biologics are the first line of defense for anything over mild IBD. The only effective treatment for above moderate that isn't a combination of other meds is Rinvoq. The small dose items like Azith and Pred are just for flare management, and aren't maintenance medications.
For example, my father in-law had prostate cancer. His health insurance covers prostate cancer, so the doctor was able to prescribe any medically proven treatment he had access to. The first treatment they tried was the one with highest percentage of success, and then changed it to other treatments depending on how the cancer responded.
Cost was never brought up, and they never heard complaints from the insurance company.
Lots of insurances accessible to middle class families also cover in-testing treatments that have shown success in other countries, if the patient matches conditions for the trial and other approved treatments didn’t work.
That's exactly why his doctor wanted to do it, because it had worked in the past. This wasn't some insane lab experiment done by a fresh grad gastro doctor.
I’m saying that in many countries, like Brazil, an insurance company can’t deny a treatment for a covered condition because it’s too expensive.
So, for example, if the insurance covers prostate cancer, the doctor can prescribe any medically proven prostate cancer treatment and the insurance company can’t say they’ll only pay for a cheaper treatment.
It's at least $60,000, not $60.
Just one of the biologics is 500k/year
The prednisone still had him shitting blood 20 times a day. Cheap indeed.
How do we even have a conversation if you take drugs that are approved for treating a condition and just hand wave that they are "not tested"?
https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2024/76...
https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/drugsatfda_docs/label/2013/10...
I'm not against experimenting with new drugs, I just don't think we should force insurers to pay since 99% of the time the experiments will not work
We should move toward a pay for performance model but not torch the cost controls while we're at it
After one round of physical therapy for tennis elbow, which made some progress but didn't completely clear up the issue, I got denied my insurer (not UHC) for the additional physical therapy that the PT recommended. The problem resolved itself on its own in a month without additional therapy. Seems like they may have been right that it wasn't medically necessary.
The Mayo Clinic runs different trials all the time that involve multiple biologics being used at the same time, AKA "off-label" and they can have great results for the individual. Rinvoq + Skyrizi is a newer combo, but it can be any number of them as different patient's disease can affect them more severely through different pathways.
If a medication combo is approved by a doctor for a patient, and they've even done the worthless dance that is required to try the drugs they already know aren't going to work, then the patient should be allowed it off-label. Especially so if it's proven to be working (lower c-reactive & calpro levels). Tapering off of prednisone in this situation is a massive success. You literally do not know if a biologic will work for a specific case of IBD until it is tried as each patient is different, at the same time these drugs all passed FDA approval and show stats of 40%+ remission after 12-18 weeks.
Also, medication like prednisone can't be prescribed long-term, massive health issues will follow like diabetes and bone density issues (among others highlighted by the article).
And of course the patient should be allowed to take it! It just shouldn't be required that the insurer pay for anything at any price.
Nothing about this is exotic or an experiment. This isn't some doctor who had a crazy idea he wanted to try, these trials have been run all over the place for 10+ years and show a large amount of success in resistant patients.
The only reason the drugs cost that much is because of how it's designed in the US. Foreign countries (Europe, Australia, England) pay under $1000 per vial / shot for most of these medications, while one shot of a drug like Stelara is $50,000 in the US. Remicade is even cheaper, usually $500 a vial overseas.
The insurance companies want to play this game. They're either in the business of saving lives or they're not, and if they're not, they're actively impeding care to sick individuals. By extension, they are contributing to their deaths if they aren't able to receive the medication they require.
In the US, these pharma companies make multiple billions in revenue from one of these drugs, whereas their overseas sales are in the mid to low millions. It's just the game being played in the US, and there's no reason to let someone die over it. Can't believe someone is actually advocating for this guy, who finally after years found a drug combo that worked, to just die. As there's zero way for an average American to afford 1.2 million dollars a year. Insurance is a risk pool, that's what it's there for.
https://eastkentformulary.nhs.uk/media/1868/pr-2022-25-dual-...
It does state that there was a request received, and it would fund it. Dual biologics usually isn't considered until all the regular biologics have been tried by themselves. You don't seem to understand that biologics and surgery are literally the only things to combat this disease, and surgery can end up just being a bandaid:
"The only formulary identified with a policy on dual biological therapy for IBD was South-East London which fund dual biologic therapy for severe, refractory CD in certain circumstances."
In fact I am certain you did not read it, as no decent person could read it and say "but it's crazy to me that people can read this and come away thinking the insurance companies are the bad guys."
These drug combinations are mostly not approved outside the US because of a lack of data
This means he most likely had already tried them alone. Remicade especially, as it's essentially been the most popular biologic (aside from humira) for the last 15 years. Do you need to see his full medical history before you have a little empathy? As a person who isn't a gastro doctor I'm sure you'll fully understand it.
How do we allocate resources? Who gets to decide? These questions don't disappear when you change policies, it's just the answers that change
Doctors, Nurses, service providers, entrepreneurs, etc, all routinely have to deal with these insurance companies who refuse to pay for things, negotiate rates post-hoc, and generally engage in extremely unethical business behaviour.
That seems to have become normalized and I personally won't do any work with anyone in the US Healthcare industry any more unless it's paid up-front.
I had a relative visiting from Europe and they had to go to the urgent care for some blood and urine tests and consultation. They received a $2,500 bill!
My relative told the hospital that they are leaving the country and offered to pay $250 or good luck collecting from abroad.
Then something magical happened. The hospital just told them that they found a special discount and the deal was closed at $250.
What a sh**show.
I have very good insurance. The price of the medication without insurance was about $5000, the price with very good insurance was about $1300. After redditing i found a thread where you can find a manufacturers coupon on the manufacturers website. After knowing this seemingly secret hidden trick the medicine was $50. My doctor didnt know about that, my insurance didnt either. Absolutely insane. Absolutely arbitrary.
[1] https://www.healthcare.gov/health-care-law-protections/rate-...
This is GoodRx's business model in a nutshell. I used them when I didn't have insurance and saved a ton on medicine.
Those ones work like this: HelpfulDrug costs $2000/month. Your insurance company will pay $1500/month, and wants to pass the remaining $500 onto you, but that's too expensive for you to pay.
The manufacturers of HelpfulDrug see this and would rather not lose our on a deal, so they make you an offer: as long as your insurance pays the $1500 as promised, they'll tell insurance to waive $450 worth of your portion. You only pay $50, and the HelpfulDrug manufacturer still earns $1500, most of which is pure profit anyway.
https://gmmmg.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Fidaxomicin-...
My bit of anecdata is the insured price of $1249/month for a drug whose manufacturer would sell me for $40/month - if only I weren't on Medicare. $14,988/year vs. $480/year. Sucks.
I called before hand, trying to figure out what I would owe afterwards.
No one could give me a price. It’s all vague, we don’t know answers.
It’s absurd.
I basically got stern - eventually somebody is going to send me a bill with a number on it, so someone knows what this will cost.
Still never got a solid number out of them.
That doesn't change anything, but FYI it's not just doctor being shady.
I founded https://rivethealth.com to help providers estimate patient liability.
Then the bill came and it was 3x higher. I wanted to know if it was the doctor's error or the lab's, so I asked for any paperwork requesting services submitted by the doctor, and they ignored me and sent it to collections, where it has been for the last 2+ years.
In any case, best of luck with your surgery:)
Here's a good example. Duexis is a combination of two over the counter drugs except medical providers bill $2500 a month for it even though it contains less than $5 worth drugs.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/articl...
The way that healthcare companies have been dealing with this is to post indecipherable price lists in a place that's buried within their websites. [0]
[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/01/new-hospital-price-l...
That must be signed off by a conscious capable representative.
Yeah how does that work for emergencies and other situations?
It doesn't! Just like hospitals unable to or refuse to disclose prices.
The system isn't working, it's a steadily sinking ship that the four pigs of medical care: doctors, insurance companies, drug device makers, and trial lawyers feast at while they can.
With political parties in realignment, you'd think that Republicans who are pro working class under trump (allegedly) and Democrats who are pro poor (allegedly) could enact real reform, but I stead the chaos of current politics means corporate even more control
Because corruption is definitely up on both parties since the advent of trumpism.
Yep or they give an estimate which explicitly says it can change based on the procedure's outcome and then your real bill is 3x the estimate even though you have signed paperwork from a doctor saying nothing out of the ordinary happened so you call your insurance company and mention this and they immediately deny your grievance form and say you're responsible for the full amount that's not covered.
Then you bring this up with the hospital and they say "an estimate is what it is, there's nothing we can do" and then you ask for them to assign you to someone who can walk you through the itemized bill which says stuff like "Code 0234 Unknown" and explain why it costs $6,354 dollars and they don't comply.
This is all after you've called half a dozen departments ahead of time to try and get an accurate price quote but were denied by everyone. It's no surprise that bills get sent to collections.
For anyone out there in the US, I highly encourage you to record every single phone conversation you have with anything medical related. It will save you.
What are the top issues as perceived by Republicans and Democrats? They range from gender equality, race, immigration, crime, trans issues - basically anything controversial.
Healthcare is less controversial. And there's big buy-in for change by Americans. So what's happening? Are the two parties so bribed by lobbying efforts that democracy is canceled on this topic?
Those are the issues that will drive votes either distinctly, Democratic or Republican.
Neither are the Democrats or the Republicans are actually interested in healthcare because the powers that be and their funders don't want it to change
In the vast majority of western countries, a tourist would need to pay more than 250usd to receive the services described by GP. Even when a country has UHC it rarely(never?) covers tourists. A quick google suggests prices in the 1000-3000usd range for Canada, the UK, and Germany, for example (an ER visit with blood tests + follow up).
It's just expensive to provide urgent care and tests. Not having travel insurance (fairly cheap!) and then refusing to pay for services is, indeed, a dick move.
Saying that they are linked, then it is interesting that we are falling back on why we have a lot of regulations and protections. While you can make a legal system where exploitation is legal (as some would argue the US health care system is), there is a breaking point where it will result in civil unrest.
I am curious to see if that is the point we are reaching now.
But the CEO's wife has said that there were threats, possibly related to lack of coverage: https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/05/us/unitedhealthcare-ceo-kille...
> In an interview with NBC, Thompson’s widow, Paulette told the network that “there had been some threats” against her husband.
> “Basically, I don’t know, a lack of coverage? I don’t know details,” she said. “I just know that he said there were some people that had been threatening him.”
And the shooter wrote the words "deny", "defend", and "depose" on shell casings that were found at the scene: https://apnews.com/article/unitedhealthcare-ceo-shooting-del...
These words are reminiscent of the terms "delay, deny, defend", the title of a book about how the insurance company tries to avoid paying out on claims: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay,_Deny,_Defend
So, one of the leading theories is that the shooter was motivated by some kind of case involving a denied claim. Obviously, there's not enough evidence yet to be sure of that, but that same frustration over insurers' failure to pay for necessary, life-saving treatments is part of why there's so much sympathy for the shooter and so little sympathy for the CEO who was shot.
Of course, there are also other competing theories out there; it's possible that the whole bullet casings thing is just a ruse to distract people. But anger about how health insurance companies rack in record profits by denying life-saving healthcare to people has become a large part of this story.
The Internet is not reality and online posts are not a representative sample of the population. Instead, every survey of Americans shows around 80% are satisfied with their health coverage.
Please don’t cherry pick misleading data.
https://www.kff.org/private-insurance/poll-finding/kff-surve...
There's nothing misleading about the KFF data, which has been going for quite some time now. If you recall (I know it seems like a lifetime ago), Obama got in trouble for lying that people could keep their plan if they liked it. If so many hated their plan, why did he pay such a heavy political price? Why would he even have to lie in the first place?
Everyone I have spoken to has no sympathy for him as a CEO but sympathy for him as a human. He is wrong and the healthcare system is broken. But this was also murder. If your sense of empathy is so fucked that you’re pro murder, you need to speak to a professional.
(If you’re struggling with this and don’t want to let hate turn you into a monster, consider the difference between believing someone deserved what was coming to them and supporting that which delivered it.)
A quote comes to mind - “I do not wish death upon another human, but I have read some obituaries with great delight”. This is one of those instances.
I have more sympathy for his family than him - he did not have to choose this line of work. Do people have sympathy for Bin Laden or other terrorists? If they don’t, do they need to see a therapist?
Anecdotally, the only people that I’ve spoken to who has sympathy are other extremely well off individuals who have questionable ethics. I also think it’s interesting that because the victim is an elite, there’s a sense of justice from other elites that is not there when a common man is shot and killed.
The whole thing is a double standard on multiple levels.
Not really. The double standard is in excusing murder as a political tactic because you don’t like the victim.
In this case, the Twitterati will hold their court. And then a real court with real people on the jury will convict. There may also be an inquiry into UnitedHealth, but it will be able to be bludgeoned into partisan death by the law and order bloc.
> only people that I’ve spoken to who has sympathy are other extremely well off individuals
The ones I’ve seen who sympathise with the killer are largely college educated, urban, active on social media and make more than the median wage. If you’re only seeing one side of this, you’re in a bubble, because the truth is it’s not top of mind for most of America.
One, it doesn’t. Two, this applies in loads of cases depending on your individual morality. (Intentionally-spicy takes: abortion providers. Medical researchers who experiment on animals. Farmers. Meat eaters. Anyone American because of our foreign military interventions.)
I’m personally much more interested in why people are so uncaring about a bad system that kills a ton of innocent people, than in why people don’t care about the murder of someone who got wealthy making it happens.
A narrow slice of social media is losing its mind. It’s New York. It’s unusual. But there are a lot of gun deaths in America every month.
You’re right, it’s not unusual. So not unusual that this wasn’t even the only murder in Manhattan that day. There was at least one other. Only one is getting a massive manhunt and media coverage for some reason.
I love this dismissive attitude that anyone who fails to empathize with someone who makes tens of millions a year AND denies health insurance claims is somehow mentally ill. Get real.
I’m not saying feel sorry for him. I’m not even saying don’t indulge in schadenfreude. Where you should know it crosses the line is in celebrating the killing and the killer. Because I promise you that someone with equal or more conviction in their righteousness would similarly take pleasure in the murder if someone you find, if not virtuous, not deserving to be murdered.
My insurance doesn't cover it.
Everyone who has stepped in a hospital as provider or patient knows an insurance executives job is to quietly kill hundreds to thousands of people a year and profit from it.
Of course there's oil companies, cigarettes, alcohol, guns, weapons, and a lot of other industries that do this.
Because the real quiet part of capitalism is that its valuation of human life is very very very small unless they have money. Have many criticisms of economics, but this is the biggest one. Capital owned/controlled by a human is all that is valued, otherwise you are zero or negative.
You have the incentives backwards. Nobody is thinking of the collective. The story that sells today is David v Goliath. If you want a speaking gig on cable television, you need to help turn this murder into a symbol. (And no judgement. Media is media.)
There’s a huge difference between how people view health care in general, and their own health insurance. According to the linked survey, in 2023 it was notable that only 72% of people had a favorable view of their own health insurance. In recent decades that has indeed sat around 80%, as OP claimed.
Again, that’s their _own_ insurance, while views of health insurance in general are quite worse, similar to how most people think congress is a shitshow yet rank their own representatives much higher.
It’s an interesting dissonance.
https://news.gallup.com/file/poll/654047/2024_12_06%20Health...
On page 5 you can see 79% are dissatisfied with the cost of health care.
I'm pretty well-off, so I can just throw money at my problems, and avoid dealing with insurance nonsense (denials and delays). So I'm fine with my health care coverage.
I'm not at all fine with my insurance company. And I'm actually in a very privileged position because I helped select this insurer for my company.
Still, that’s a huge dissonance between personal experience and opinion on the nationwide state of things, and I find that interesting because I doubt we can fix it unless a significant majority of people find it enough of a personal priority to vote that way.
Weird how heath coverage is the only thing in America 80% of the people are satisfied with. It's such a nice round number, too. I'm assuming it's men only, or were women polled before Roe v. Wade was dumped?
I'm assuming this is like calculating unemployment rates, where you need to play around with your definitions. Like, services no longer being available can't factor into "satisfaction" in any way.
More concretely, if you have two pharmacies in town and one of them closes, will polling accurately reflect the 0% satisfaction rate engendered? Or is this where we start splitting hairs.
https://thehill.com/changing-america/3870943-americans-large...
> Although personal life satisfaction varies based on income, age, marital status and education level, between 81 percent and 90 percent of Americans are satisfied with their own family life, current housing situation, job, education, community and personal health.
> Slightly lower levels — between 71 percent and 77 percent — said the same about the amount of leisure time they have, their household income and standard of living.
So, ya know, lots of things that aren't super politicized.
> Why didn't this number change after women's healthcare took a massive hit?
(1) This question is asking about the quality of healthcare you received, not your perception of healthcare for others. A minority of women are directly impacted through the healthcare system by Dobbs (2022) (as opposed to indirect or non-healthcare effects).
(2) Some of the novel abortion restrictions post-Dobbs happened later? The most recent point on this graph is 2022. So it may just not show up yet until 2023/2024 numbers.
(3) The 2022 satisfaction number is slightly lower than the 2021 number (72% vs 76%). You could plausibly attribute some of that to Dobbs.
Tha kind of flexibility is the point of a jury. Laws aren't purely mechanical in most countries, for good reason. There's a lot of complexity and nuance, especially when some people have political power.
I don't have enough background here to make a judgement about what a jury should do, but I do have enough background to know that things like jury nullification are important to a well-functioning justice system.
In which case the prosecution will have plenty of grounds to screen for that in the next trial, that next trial will happen, and then the guy gets convicted of first degree murder. Presuming he's found in the first place.
There's no world in which all twelve jurors vote not guilty if the defendant is demonstrated to be the assassin beyond reasonable doubt. That simply won't happen, it's a delusion. Hanging the first trial would merely delay the inevitable, and I don't expect that to happen either.
No matter the evidence.
You're right, I do find it less likely that the murderer of a CEO would get the same kind of treatment as murderers of civil rights protesters, but there are examples in recent history of people walking free despite unambiguously murdering people in broad daylight for political reasons.
Now, it's definitely true that getting a jury to nullify a murder charge is significantly different, but I'd argue there is a lot more anger about the healthcare system and CEOs making huge profits from human suffering in the US than there was about that statue, and much more generally too.
You also have a climate where a convicted felon just got made president, and another in a long line of presidents pardoning people they have close personal relationships too with clear conflict of interest. If you wanted to pick a moment where people in the US were losing faith in the justice system, now seems like a good choice, and if you believe the system is rigged, are you going to judge it on technicalities, or how you feel?
Do I think it is likely? No.
"No world it could happen", "delusional", and "won't happen"? I wouldn't be so sure.
Most people are probably somewhere in the middle.
Even if a jury does convict, he's in a state with no death penalty and the notoriety and nature of his crime will likely gain him support on the inside. Plus, all the press coverage of the trial gives him a podium...
I'd be stunned if he makes it to court.
If there's one thing that crosses almost all class and racial divides, it is our shitty medical care system.
My (now passed) uncle was in jail to challenge drug incarceration laws back in the 60s, since the opposition needed a case that wouldnt settle to reach the supreme court.
No one would touch him in jail.
Mostly you're seeing accounts/sites you follow and choose to view and often those accounts have a consistent set of commenters. It's not like you log and the internet shows you entirely random things every time.
Equally importantly, the content that gets produced is subject to this same filter. If you think the killer was justified, or you think the impulse to justify the killer shows everything that's wrong with America, you'll be excited to go write out a banger Tweet on the topic. If you have the boring, conventional view that all murders are tragic and you hope killers are brought to justice for the sake of the victim's friends and family, it's not going to occur to you to comment on this particular one.
This whole celebration of murder thing is so bizarre. The fact it seems to be the default “way to get upvotes” and speaking out is “downvote city” is… well… disconcerting to say the least.
What do find troubling is the glorification of the killer. We know nothing about his motives, might be a paid hit, whatever. But I attribute part of that to being basically drunk on the fact that people really enjoy that this CEO -- as a faceless representative of a whole class of people -- got killed. And they genuinely do enjoy he did, not necessarily for noble reasons, but it's not "really about something else".
The problem boils down to the abuser reacting in shock at backlash, instead of realizing they've abused people into genuinely hating them this much.
CNN: "Some social media users seem to lack sympathy for the UnitedHealthcare CEO’s death"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcY38-ILjos
top voted 10 comments as of now:
> A "civilized society" doesn't allow its citizens to suffer and die needlessly so that insurance CEOs get filthy rich.
> CNN doesn't get to dictate how people should feel.
> How many people died to fund the CEO's lifestyle?
> You can see how fox and cnn suddenly have the same opinion when it comes to safety of elites
> Shut up, CNN. Your days of being relevant are running out anyways. The people have spoken.
> I love how the media, complicit in the war against the poor, tells the poor how they can and cannot express their anger.
> We're giving back the same sympathy that was given to us.
> No. You’re not going to tell me I need to have sympathy for someone who spent his life and career without sympathy for others. Not being sad a bad person died does not mean something is wrong with me.
> Finally, something all Americans can be UNITED against
> You're morale grandstanding for a mass murdering pyschopath. The CEO was a monster.
MSNBC: "What the online reaction to CEO's killing reveals about America"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zY1phtEuT4
top voted 15 comments as of now:
> So the problem is social media? Why aren't they talking about the real problem? The appalling US healthcare system.
> Celebrate murder?? normalizing insurance companies is celebrating murder, you hypocrites.
> His $10 million salary was $10 million of healthcare that was denied. How many people had to die for that $10 million. Healthcare should not be for profit. Do you get it now?
> This clip is all the proof we need that corporate media is more out of touch with the average person than ever before.
> 3:50 So you want to censor valid public opinion rather than address the root issues leading to such opinions? Good to know.
> These elite people sitting at a round table discussing how the peasants are behaving! Not once did the hint at that just maybe the insurance companies should evaluate their policies
> The only people who are surprised by this reaction are the talking heads. The media is more out of touch than ever.
> We keep being told that the deaths of poor and middle class people (old and young) is not a problem for the system. Then a fat rich man gets killed because of his greedy actions and the upper class is shocked that we say “it is not a problem”. That is part of the problem.
> So the lesson we learned is to silence people online? Get a grip. People aren’t upset that he was murdered, because he runs a company that denies care that leads to people’s deaths. “We’re normalizing murder”… well we’ve already normalized it for companies like UHC, why is this so different? Because we don’t have it on video?
> this woman says we should be outraged at the murder of a human being, ok, then why are we not equally outraged at the murder of thousands caused by the frivolous denial of life saving care by these insurance companies? Where is the outrage at that and why are those deaths acceptable?
I haven't visited twitter in ten years or more so can't comment on that.
I swear, users of a site have no kind of memory. Literally a month ago everyone on reddits jaw was agape as trump was declared the winner. After months of redditors telling each other Kamala would win in a landslide and Trump was floundering, and no one was coming to his rallies, etc.
And now they're doing the same thing, telling each other that everyone in America loves that a dude was murdered in the street of NY(with a gun, literally 3' away from a random individual)
I also have a basic modicum of common sense and the ability to observe my environment.
I felt the same way about the American election. Yet, Trump won. Online consensus on social media means nothing.
if there is a single issue that unites all Americans, this is it. Insurance is by design an incredibly evil extractive racket that only steals from people's pockets
This was not an employee carrying out orders from corporate, it’s the guy who is directly responsible for these deaths. This CEO is as much a mass murder as any other tyrant who commanded soldiers to commit atrocities.
That will be part of the defense argument presented to the jury. Intent matters tremendously in the legal system (mens rea). This isn’t random, this is very, very targeted.
Likewise, the lawyers this guy can afford after his GoFundMe legal defense fund raises millions will be top tier.
It does, but “he did bad-but-legal things that morally justify my client’s premeditated homicide” is only legally relevant to proving premeditation, which doesn’t help the defense, and which the prosecution will be more than happy to stipulate to rendering the evidence irrelevant.
> This isn’t random, this is very, very targeted.
That’s not a fact in the defense’s favor, legally.
That evidence wouldn't be admitted. There's no “the guy deserved it” defense for murder, it's always illegal to kill people.
Any healthcare worker at least deserves to be punched in the face for involving themselves in our broken system.
Anyone got a cite for that? I want to know how that number was measured or calculated.
I'd much rather not have to test either of your theories. One thing I learned about civilian populations during the Iraq war, if you're going to force someone to get down off the fence, you'd better know what side of the fence they're gonna jump down on.
If you don't know, then for the love of whatever you deem divine, just leave them on the fence.
I would say that our leaders would quickly start to address some of the inequities throughout our legal system that allow people to be taken advantage of in egregious ways. But our leaders are not like that. They'll likely do nothing about a lot of the unfairness in the laws out there. There is in fact, unfortunately, a distinct possibility that many of our leaders went into politics to increase the unfairness.
I just kind of get the sense that we're at a point in our history where we're already sitting on a powder keg. We shouldn't play with fire while we're sitting here. Let's at least get rid of some of the powder first.
https://www.wfsb.com/2024/12/05/anthem-backtracks-anesthesio...
But I agree with you, I think most new Yorkers will convict someone who killed a CEO. Also I bet they'll let go someone who killed a homeless person. I don't know a lot of new Yorkers but petty bourgeois are the same in every countries.
I also think it’s impossible to predict any way. But I can definitely see that nullification is a real possibility.
subsonic low calibur suppressed rounds don't cycle well. going for the slide without hesitation means the shooter has had weapons training imo.
Anything routine is so expensive in the US because regulation's gone completely out the window.
An area I'm familiar with for example: in Canada (where I am now) Salbutamol inhalers cost about $20-25. In California I was lucky to find it less than $100. And this is for a well-known decades old generic.
See also: insulin. It's making headlines[1] that companies are finally dropping prices down to roughly in line with the rest of the world (starting in 2026). And this is after other measures have already been taken -- it used to be much worse.[2]
Worth repeating: this price gouging is for generic and old medication.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/novo-nordisk-to-cu...
AFAIK, SG&A is the number that groups criticizing pharmaceutical companies look at, even though it includes a lot of money spent on things like paying lawyers, which any pharmaceutical company that actually wants to make back the billions spent on developing drugs will have to do.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/269499/merck-and-co-sgan...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/282738/expenditure-on-re...
[3] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/ABBV/abbvie/sellin...
[4] https://www.statista.com/statistics/417068/r-and-d-expenditu...
The fix here would be to remove the middlemen (insurance companies) and pay hospitals what Medicare/Medicaid pay them, which is typically a much lower negotiated amount.
My mother underwent chemotherapy for her cancer.
According to the statements from her insurance company, each round of chemotherapy cost as much as a new luxury car before hospital vs. insurance negotiations. Yeah.
The value of health insurance isn't just the offloading of expenses, it's also their power to tell hospitals to get fucking bent with ludicrous bills.
That leads hospitals to 1000x every treatment price so when insurance companies come to negotiate they can negotiate down to 100x. It causes hospitals to understaff because is cheaper to pay for legal staff to handle malpractice claims than it is to not work your nurses and doctors to death.
It causes drug companies consolidate and then charge through the nose for drugs that cost them pennies to manufacturer (for example, penicillin or insulin) drugs that, everyone should be aware, all of the R&D and FDA approval has been done. The most expensive part of drug development is done.
There are solutions. It's regulations. Hospitals regulated to minimal coverage. Drug/hospitals hit with anti price gouging regulations. Insurance companies hit with coverage regulations.
That's all something doable and probably with enough political will to be done.
An even better idea is simply nationalizing medicine, top to bottom. That's unlikely to happen, but would result in the biggest drop in healthcare costs.
In the immortal words of President Ronald Reagan: "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
Which is to say, no. Obviously this is a long-brewing problem in need of a solution, but more government is not it.
Every semi functioning healthcare system has more government involvement than what the US does.
Reagan was wrong.
It's a lot like "Black Friday" sales where retailers jack up their shelf prices in the preceding days and weeks so they can mark them down and persuade the customers they're getting attractive deals.
Public healthcare, of any sort, should not involve working with third party insurance companies.
In any case, this is also why medical tourism is a thing - you could go get the exact same treatment, to completion, half way around for far less than what you the cost you were quoted for a single round in the US - including housing and other costs.
Companies providing medical Care have to spend 80% of their costs on actual medical care, not marketing and executive compensation.
The only way to make the 20% that really matter to the decision makers larger is to make the medical costs larger.
It is one reason people on United healthcare get $100 gift card to see their primary care provider each year.
It's also the reason why there's no real pressure to reduce drug costs.
That requirement was imposed on insurers in response to already-exorbitant medical costs. It does create a perverse incentive, but it cannot be the root cause of the issue.
The exorbitant costs arose with the provision of private medical insurance in the 1940s but only really took off when Medicare and Medicaid came in the 1969s with, essentially, a blank check for cost.
Things weren't improved in the 1980s when emergency rooms were required to provide care regardless on a patient's ability to pay, leading to another perversion that for a significant group of people the only way to get medical care was when it was too late and most expensive.
ACA is just another example of the US government doing stupid.
Note that this changed in 2022 for the most-bought drugs.
https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/fact-sheets/medicare-drug-price...
Too bad the hospitals don’t figure out some way of providing preventive care to the uninsured to reduce these costs.
I firmly believe that was a poison pill put in the ACA intended to drive prices up enough where people got so upset we end up with single payer. The alternative is that the people that penned the ACA have absolutely no understanding of economics, and I’m not sure which is worse.
The sad thing is for medications all it would take would be a simple bill that says that medications in the US will cost the average of Canada, Japan, The UK, and Germany (or whatever).
That percentage will grow for the next few years as boomers migrate to Medicare
Unclear from the article, but it's quite possible that UHC was _forcing_ him to use the more expensive name-brand drugs due to an agreement that they made with their pharmacy benefits manager (PBM). Some name-brand manufacturers will see generics on the horizon and throw in a clause that obliges the PBM to continue exclusively covering the name-brand drug for X amount of time. UHC specifically fucked me over this way by refusing to cover a widely available generic drug, insisting that they'd only pay for the name-brand stuff, but no pharmacy on earth seems to carry the name brand stuff and couldn't even source it to order it, so UHC effectively denied me the drug altogether.
I feel for the guy in the article because the drug that UHC fucked me over about (mesalamine/Lialda) was keeping my Crohn's in check, and after the ensuing flare I had to switch to Remicade, which isn't totally working for me—I'll be switching to something else soon.
Obligatory link about PBMs and how they suck: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/inside-the-mafia-of-pharm...
And being on Remicade myself, albeit at a lower dose (and without Entyvio like he's also taking), I was curious enough to check the EOB for how much my current insurance pays for it. I have Anthem BCBS and here's the breakdown of my last infusion. For context, this is a drug where you have to go to an infusion clinic for administration because it's delivered intravenously.
Doctor/facility charges:
$21,420.70
Your discounts: -19,563.26
Due to your doctor/facility (max allowed): $1,857.44
Anthem paid: $1,857.44
Drugs
Provider charges: 21,020.70
Plan discounts: 19,226.20
Anthem paid: 1794,50
Infusion center
Provider charges: 400.00
Plan discounts: 337.06
Anthem paid: 62.94
And for reference, that's name-brand Remicade too, because it's what Anthem's PBM requires. I'm on 7.5mg/kg every 8 weeks, and the highest approved dose is 10mg/kg every 4 weeks. So even if he was on, e.g., 20mg/kg every 4 weeks, that would be maybe $4k worth of drugs once a month, which is $48k a year. Unless Entyvio is way more expensive than I realized, I have no clue how that would add up to a million dollars a year in costs, unless they're sending him to an infusion center that charges crazy high prices (which, if it's part of UHC's Optum network rather than an independent clinic... maybe they do :P)
Big pharma disinformation? Perhaps most new treatment research is government funded (and by governments of other countries).
Clinical trials are incredibly expensive but also comparatively straightforward and require a very different set of facilities and skills from basic research. Pharma mostly could not recruit away the people with these skills from academia- they can’t offer the same freedom and job security, but the academics often found startups they work for on the side and ultimately sell to pharma if it works out. So comparing money spent isn’t the entire picture of relative contribution- as they are each doing parts the other is not equipped for.
Honestly, this just seems like incompetence at multiple levels in a highly complex system. All it takes is one bad apple paying more attention to the bottom line than client care, for the entire system to magnificently cascade into an absolute shitshow.
If you read through the entire article without prejudice, most of the decisions made along the way make sense, with a couple of process failures and incompetent or indifferent individuals sprinkled in along the way, and the end result is a client who has to plan bathroom stops for a 5 minute walk, being told to take a treatment they know will kill them, or pound sound.
This is the kind of systemic cascading failure that can only be addressed by the person at the top having a come to jesus moment.
All healthcare systems ultimately have to make cost-benefit tradeoffs, and in the US system those tradeoffs are generally represented as insurer coverage policies. I don't mean to suggest that this justifies the story in the article, where it really sounds like the treatment did fit the policy and UHC worked hard to avoid seeing that. But there's no system where a doctor dreams up an arbitrarily expensive treatment protocol and a patient gets it with low out-of-pocket costs and no questions asked.
I just don't understand why the reviewing doctors report is required to take into account the policies of the contracting insurance firm?
This conflict is why I've always subscribed to Kaiser when I have the option. It's much less headache for me if there's no distinction between what a doctor wants to prescribe me and what they're allowed to prescribe. (Would I feel differently if I needed some crazy custom treatment protocol? Perhaps.)
Then an insurer can go about negotiating the prices of treatment with health care providers to determine payouts.
Could they eg. Give my employer a lower rate as an incentive to do that?
I imagine insurance companies have other easier tricks to delay or deny treatment before considering something like this.
It is no coincidence that universal healthcare was introduced during a time when the elite were recovering from WW2.
Au contraire. In America, homeless people are afraid of going to the hospital lest they accidentally recieve the same quality of care as a Google employee without the Google copay.
Those "elites" woiuld still get better treatment in the private sector.
I used quotes because SE at google are not really elites.
I’ve also been to the Mayo Clinic quite a few times as just a standard appointment and any time you go there you’ll see people from other countries coming for better care than they can get.
If you want faster non-emergency care from a private hospital, you can purchase health insurance. Doctors don’t need approval from the insurance company to perform treatments or prescribe drugs. If the drug or treatment is listed on the insurance’s website as covered, it’ll be covered if prescribed by a doctor.
Since public hospitals offer almost all treatments and drugs for free, private hospitals and insurance companies are forced to offer lower prices and support more treatments to compete.
Non-essential surgeries like LASIK are very rarely supported by health insurance in the US, but are covered by most in Brazil.
Despite all of that, the average Brazilian only pays 27.5% in income taxes vs 37% in the US. The US government’s health expenditure per capita is $12k, versus $1.2k in Brazil.
It isn’t perfect, but people in Brazil don’t go bankrupt because of health problems. They don’t have to fight the insurance companies for coverage, they don’t die untreated of cancer, they aren’t afraid of calling an ambulance, and they pay less taxes for it.
> Most patients (n = 172, 83.9%) reported at least one failed delivery of biological medicine in the last year, with a single shortage in forty-two patients (24.4%), at least two shortages in forty-seven patients (27.3%), and three or more shortages in seventy-eight patients (45.3%). The average time to regularize the distribution was up to 1 month in 44 cases (25.6%), up to 2 months in 64 cases (37.2%), and more than 3 months in 56 patients (32.6%)
I've had a broken bone that was visible in an xray and told to go home.
Then the state tried to hide it by playing all sorts of weird games to prevent me from getting the ER xray.
Please tell us more. Which country would this be in? What bone was broken?
The idea that a state engages in some grand conspiracy to spare the expense of a gypsum cast is ludicrous to me. Yes states engage in cost-benefit analysis of treatments but the contentious bits are not around broken bones. More along the lines if particular cancer treatments are worth it or not, or if the state can pay for super expensive advance treatments.
For privacy reasons I refuse to say the country apart than saying it was in Europe.
As for the bone, similar. It was a small bone, common for the trauma I received and clearly visible in the xray.
The private doctor immediately said fractured in a fraction of a second when I eventually was able to get the original xray.
Later on I became quite knowledgeable in this specific fracture and it was obvious, though with no displacement.
What I mean to say is the treatment you get is still highly dependent on your "status", how you look, or weather the doctors like you.
And now I have a titanium screw in me inside a joint for life.
If you sympathize with or outright support this, you are either clinically diagnosable as a psychopath or are under the sway of one or many.
If you are a psychopath yourself, your worldview is rejected in-full by anyone with normal psychology. Stuff your psychopathic attempts at persuasion.
If you are generally a normal person but found yourself swayed by the techniques of psychopathic people, many of whom exist in society's institutions and who do not have your best interests at heart, you should take some time, deeply rethink this, and then reject it.
If you do not reject this, ultimately, you belong on a number of watch lists, full stop, as you are a supporter of domestic terrorism that seeks to murder people in cold blood.
But reject it.
This pseudo-hysteria is a criminal trap, and beyond that its logic is complete nonsense.
If this man was guilty of anything, then the law would have held him accountable. He was not guilty in terms of how he delivered service, and anything further that he may have been guilty of his murderer deprived society of finding out. Officially, he's innocent.
Every time that a citizen is "removed" by psychopaths by reason of their perceived arbitrary complaints, immediately there is another person who meets the same or arbitrarily adjusted criteria. The criteria will be adjusted to target people. There will never be even-ground for the psychopaths, and their follower-victims, who are justifying this.
In this discussion, I was asked if the murdered CEO didn't share responsibility for the supposed fact that UH is "the hardest to deal with and rejects the most claims". For one second, let's ignore that denying claims is a part of the root health insurance business model that every single payer advocate wants: only to be run by the government. For one moment, let's ignore that the CEO did not invent the health insurance industry, nor is he responsible for its continuity. Let's assume that UH soon "reforms" and is no longer "the worst". Immediately, there will be a new "worst". Is the CEO of than new low ranker the next target? Now model this situation across other industries.
Brainless, soulless psychopaths do not serve logic, morality, nor society's interests. They serve their own bloodlust. Which can manifest in any number of ways, but sometimes it manifests in actual murder.
Stop being persuaded by their nonsense.
This is a crazy thread to have on HN. It's widely supportive of domestic terrorism and murder, seeks to perpetuate support for it, and the Mods should take it down. It's shameful, horrific shit and HN should be fully embarrassed to host it.