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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

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As an American the most surprising thing about the reaction to the CEO being killed is supposedly the system is bad enough where killing people is okay but I don't know many people who vote in primary elections or care about local elections (which are where many people have the most influence on the system) and I also know some people who didn't even vote in the general election.

To be clear: This isn't me saying we shouldn't kill CEOs, this is me saying I think more people should vote in primaries and also try to make change on a local level

> This isn't me saying we shouldn't kill CEOs...

You probably should be saying that. As you point out, people haven't really exhausted the reasonable recourses so there is no reason to resort to unreasonable ones. Gunning people down on the street to exercise political pressure is barbaric and intolerable.

I'm not saying we should either, it's more that discussing it on the internet feels like a waste of my time and the morality of it isn't my point

I think the political pipeline is too slow for local activism to meaningfully impact state and national politics. People want to see change now, or at least progress in a 1-2 year timeframe.

> overwhelmingly — positive — reaction

Be careful extrapolating from what you see on social media or—even worse—from news outlets' coverage of social media content. Social media is not representative of the real world, and the news media isn't incentivized to accurately describe the reactions on social media, so taking news stories about social media reactions is seeing the world through two bad filters, both of which will tend to exaggerate extremes.

Not two bad filters, just one. The mainstream media is not acknowledging what is going on in social media. One is a vox that can be target of suggestion, the other is outright instruction. So mainstream media will never be a good indicator of what people think and social media sometimes can be. It's important to ask: "who would feel the assassination is bad? Why would they feel that way? Who would share those principles?" I think the answers at the end point towards the assassination being a popular act. That should be raising hairs.

I would hazard a guess that most Americans or someone they know have had a negative brush with healthcare, and that CEO was an ideal personification of the cause of their troubles, so the social media picture is probably not that far from reality.

Because of the breakdown where insurance companies have separate per-state operations with varying amounts of independence, it’s hard to come by agreeable numbers on who is largest, but UHG covers about 50 million people, and depending on if you lump all of the blue cross umbrella or not, UHG is either the #1 or #2 largest health insurer in the country.

> most Americans or someone they know have had a negative brush with healthcar

This can be much more specific, most Americans or someone they know have probably had a negative brush with United Healthcare specifically. (they also have the highest rate of claims denials of any of the insurers)

Case in point: the alleged killer was caught because someone recognized him in a McDonalds and called the cops.

There is a $10k reward by the police for leads, so it could have also been that.

My manager made a joke about it, and then later I had a discussion with another coworker who the worst CEO in the UK is.

Have you really not talked to anybody in real life about this? This is a case where the online reaction matches IRL. I've never seen such universal adulation across the spectrum. Everybody in the USA's been fucked, knows someone who's been fucked, or has lived in fear of being fucked by health insurance. It's as bad as it's ever been, and it's certainly not getting better with the Oompa-Loompa grifter in office.

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