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Comment by cruffle_duffle | Hacker News Reader

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For clarity, are you talking about the dead UHC CEO? You're right, I nor anyone I know ever gave him the authority to lead the highest healthcare claims denial rate in the industry and it's super gross that this kind of thing is allowed. If you pay for insurance, you should be able to use it.

Health insurance relies on young people subsidizing old people. If you lose enough young customers, you end up in a "death spiral" where you can't afford your claims, but if you raise rates more customers will leave.

There are a lot of problems with the healthcare system, but it's reductive to point at this one guy and say "you're evil".

> If you pay for insurance, you should be able to use it.

For what? The insurance company has to put some guardrails on unnecessary treatments or else the rates for everyone go up even further.

I don’t want to be pooled with a hypochondriac that hits up 30 specialists in a year.

Doctors should make that determination, not insurance companies.

Doctors are paid for the service they provide so they are incentivized to prescribe things that arent effective. This is a large part of why americans consume so much more healthcare than other countries where doctors get paid per patient on their panel. I agree doctors should determine health care prescriptions but we need to align incentives first.

I think doctors' incentives are more aligned with patients than the incentives of insurance companies. I agree that incentives aren't perfectly aligned, but I'd rather a doctor decide whether I should get a treatment than an insurance company, given the system we have.

There is literally zero incentive for a doctor not to over recommend procedures. That’s why no medical system in the world works that way.

Of course it's gross, so change it via the democratic process. You can't seriously be arguing that murdering individual CEOs is a better course of action.

Think of it like our current criminal justice system. It's easier to get one criminal off the street than it is to make systemic changes. At least this guy won't be committing any more crimes. Isn't that how it's usually described?

The killer didn't have the right or the authority to kill the CEO, and he'll likely spend a very very long time in prison because of that, but that doesn't make the CEO innocent.

You're just imputing different meanings to what people said than what was actually said. The claim was about whether the CEO was innocent or not. Not whether there was authorization, moral imperative, or moral justification to kill.

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