Only the CEO or everyone that works there?
These people make vast sums of money every year by asking the American people what it's worth to them to not be ruined by a chance illness or injury, then finding ways to make sure they don't have to save people from financial ruin or death. I don't see how that's really so different from a protection racket, except for the fact that most protection rackets were operated with more good faith effort towards the extorted.
This definition of a "protection racket" is a bit loose. By similar logic landlords are also a "protection racket" for having a place to hive.
“As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce.” - known Marxist-Leninist Adam Smith
It's also not an American's business to come in and tell India how to run its healthcare system.
(which is absolutely not universal in any OECD-country sense)
In stuff like drug crimes, US even has the death penalty as sanctioned remedy for quantities and enterprises of sufficient organization for mega profits. The thought process seems to be if you provide bad health care in the form of selling illegal drugs, at some level the death penalty is on the table.
Right, but only for financial crimes. You're not going to get off murder by saying you only got $100 for the hit.
If you sell $100M of fentanyl you can get the death sentence, since fentanyl is an element in inducing death at basically any sufficiently large quantity of a criminal enterprise.
It is not exactly the same, but it has a lot of parallels to the argument I see here. If you are an insurance salesman selling contracts you know will not be honored and such denied claims will be an element of death, many will not see it as serious as being the criminal enterprise leader who orchestrated it. Even in such case that the policy can be attributed to a single salesman, the executive is likely to be held more culpable just as the US code holds the criminal enterprise executive to the death penalty whereas it may not hold the low level guy who sold the fentanyl.
It is definitely a very strange one. The classical liberalism argument is that the most prominent aspect remains essentially a financial crime of failure to pay the licensing tax.
That describes a bunch of crimes? If you raid a drug dealer's house and kill a bunch of people in the process, you'll go to jail. If it's the police doing it with a "license" (ie. a warrant), it's suddenly fine. More banal is you driving along, following all applicable laws and causing no issues, but if you're doing it without a license or insurance, it's suddenly illegal.
I pointed it out largely because I find the drug laws to be particularly strange.
Financial crimes are literally crimes that deprive people of their financial property. They are crimes because property is understood to have utility. This isnt rocket science.
Under me is 1000 salesman. Every salesman knows and understands I am selling a plan that will deny or delay for some covered minor ailments that once in a million set off a chain inducing death.
As CEO of ICI I collect $300M in premiums and from that take $3M.
After selling a million policies, a patient dies as a side effect of intentional strategy of denying authorization to pay for care. That plan is traced to going through a single salesman, who collected $5 from that sale and $50k in all his sales. From that same sales, I, the CEO only collected $1. That is, the dollar profit for the death is greater for the salesman than the CEO.
The salesman and I are both direct paths in the death, in fact the salesman more than me, hell the salesman even made more of a commission than I did. The public will likely hold me more in contempt.
Can you explain what point are you making and how does it relate to what we were discussing?
As for where I started, my initial comments involved both financial crimes and drug dealing. Most but not all probably consider insurance fraud as a financial crime but one that some can only atone through vigilantism. The line to me on all accounts looks blurry.
Criminal consequences of a company collectively being responsible for the deaths of individual(s) shouldn't just disappear because no one individual ostensibly caused it. A company is a system of incentives and processes, and if those incentives and processes are leading to preventable deaths and suffering, those who benefit most from and are most responsible for perpetuating those incentives and processes should be held liable.
We know the crimes against humanity are bad and subordinates are guilty if they do them. We don;t just let everyone off free except the head of state.
Not to see that united healtcare (as bad as they are) are anywhere near that, but I am saying that its clear that we, as a society, already hold all people complicit in evil as guilty. Not just the person at the top.
The US as a society allows its citizens actions that the US as a country has prosecuted others for.
eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial_of_Henry_Kissinger