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Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

This case is such an interesting crossroads. He has such insane support — I went to two improv shows this past week where he was the crowd choice for a topic and the shows received insane applause. But what he did was objectively what we consider to be bad… in our society, vigilante justice (especially against nonviolent offenders) is considered to be wrong.

I don’t know what SO should have done (well, probably not ban someone for asking questions, assuming we have the full story). But it’s so fascinating to see how companies have no playbook to work off of.

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“especially against nonviolent offenders”

Following the murder, I was thinking about how much non physical violence there is, that isn’t usually seen and judged as violence. Things like denying healthcare, shutting down companies and laying off people to benefit private equity investors, forcing people into bankruptcy, losing their homes, charging overdraft fees, etc.

The people behind that kind of violence can hide behind the layers of indirection.

Any healthcare system must deny healthcare. No healthcare system existing anywhere on this planet provides infinite healthcare to everyone. Denying healthcare is not violence.

In any economic system, units of economic organizations must sometimes dissolve, and people must be laid off. This is unavoidable. Laying people off is not violence.

In any society, debts are expected to be paid off. If people could just stop paying their debts, nobody would make any loans anymore. Forcing people into bankruptcy is not violence.

Frankly, your comment strikes me as exceedingly naive. "I only want ever nice things to happen, and bad things happening to people are violence". I suggest thinking about why these things happen, what would be alternative, and so we put up with these.

Ah, so it's the system that's bad. Can't do anything about it, only shrug and follow orders. Somebody else would have switched the gas chamber on anyway.

> Any healthcare system must deny healthcare. No healthcare system existing anywhere on this planet provides infinite healthcare to everyone. Denying healthcare is not violence.

It is when the care is necessary; when the denial is part of a strategy to goose profits.

There are similar issues with the other statements you made.

> Frankly, your comment strikes me as exceedingly naive.

Frankly, your comment strikes me as willfully blind.

> It is when the care is necessary

So when the insurance denies coverage, and so the doctors don't work for free on the case, and the patient dies, are the doctors perpetrating violence too?

In your contrarian urge to defend some of the worst of the status quo, you forget the insurance company's whole role is to pay for medical care.

I suggest you read up on this. IIRC, it was UHG's practice to deny claims indiscriminately to increase the personal burden of accessing medical care. Because, you know, if people pay their premiums to the company but it doesn't pay out, it makes lots more money for the shareholders.

It's weird how you seem to consistently elide motivations even when extremely relevant.

An insurance company's "role" is to distribute risk, not to "pay for medical care" without question. The perversion of what constitutes "insurance" in the US medical industry is the fault of our legal system and tax code, and the insane cost of medical care (which is ultimately the root cause of most of these problems) is down to the medical cartel (also legally enforced).

> The perversion of what constitutes "insurance" in the US medical industry is the fault of our legal system and tax code

The ACA's public option was killed by a Senator who had a lot Health Insurance industry backing and support.

> are the doctors perpetrating violence too?

No, the politicians who insist on keeping this medieval practice in place are.

> It is when the care is necessary; when the denial is part of a strategy to goose profits.

Denying claims does NOT increases profits, in the US it actually decreases them. Read more here if you like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42642405

> Any healthcare system must deny healthcare. No healthcare system existing anywhere on this planet provides infinite healthcare to everyone. Denying healthcare is not violence.

Nobody argues against that, but United Healthcare had a denial rate of more than 30%, which is the highest among the major health insurance companies in the US. Coupled with the fact that they make profits off of those denials, it's hard not to call this non physical violence with the aim to generate more capital for share holders and executives.

> In any economic system, units of economic organizations must sometimes dissolve, and people must be laid off. This is unavoidable. Laying people off is not violence.

Again, absolutely agree. But it can be argued that doing so without any regard for individuals, their history with the economic unit and personal circumstances, is non-physical violence. Look at e.g. European employment laws for how this can be mitigated (not without some drawbacks ofc).

> In any society, debts are expected to be paid off. If people could just stop paying their debts, nobody would make any loans anymore. Forcing people into bankruptcy is not violence.

In every just society, the debtor has a responsibility as well to not lend money to people who cannot afford it. Giving somebody a loan they cannot afford and then bankrupting them is definitely non-physical violence.

> I suggest thinking about why these things happen, what would be alternative, and so we put up with these.

You put up with these because the US is a violent society with little regards for individual lives. Great for entrepreneurs and people with access to capital, not so great for much of the rest.

The alternatives have of course their own share of problems, but don't act as if the system is the only reasonable one.

> Nobody argues against that, but United Healthcare had a denial rate of more than 30%, which is the highest among the major health insurance companies in the US.

As it happens, there will always exist a health insurance company with highest denial rate among all companies. That's a simple mathematical fact: a finite set of numbers has a maximum number. You need to do more legwork to show any actual wrongdoing on anyone's part here.

> In every just society, the debtor has a responsibility as well to not lend money to people who cannot afford it. Giving somebody a loan they cannot afford and then bankrupting them is definitely non-physical violence.

This is absurd. When your debtors go bankrupt, you lose money. Nobody wants to lend money to people who cannot afford it.

> As it happens, there will always exist a health insurance company with highest denial rate among all companies. That's a simple mathematical fact: a finite set of numbers has a maximum number. You need to do more legwork to show any actual wrongdoing on anyone's part here.

This isn't correct. Mathematically (as you say), you can have all health companies have a denial rate of 0%.

Realistically it's impossible, but you did say mathematically.

This is pedantry at it's finest, but at the risk of adding more... Wouldn't the mathematical maximum be 0 in that case?

Correct! I was more-so addressing the following statement, not necessarily the mathematical maximum one:

> As it happens, there will always exist a health insurance company with highest denial rate among all companies

If OP was going to start leaning onto "mathematical fact[s]" to support their argument, they should probably be accurate as well. Specifically there will be "multiple" health insurance companies with the highest denial rate (0), not "a" company.

> This is absurd. When your debtors go bankrupt, you lose money. Nobody wants to lend money to people who cannot afford it.

Weren't you just calling someone's comment "exceedingly naive"?

The poor and financially vulnerable (ie, most Americans) are at a systemic disadvantage when dealing with debt, bankruptcy laws, and the justice system. They are preyed upon by all sorts of people offering debt, at a higher rate than ever before, anywhere.

Not to mention government bailouts, which really changed the game with regard to balancing risk.

> This is absurd. When your debtors go bankrupt, you lose money. Nobody wants to lend money to people who cannot afford it.

That depends, amongst other things, on how much interest you charge in the interim. Payday lenders makes lots of money off of people who a) cannot afford their loans by any reasonable metric and b) default on those loans.

No. Whether you charge large or small interest, you never want your debtor to go bankrupt, because it means cessation of the interest payments.

If you think payday lenders care one iota about debtors going bankrupt after collecting multiples of the original loan amount in interest, I cannot help you.

Of course they care, they’d rather the debtor never go bankrupt, so that they can keep collecting. Do you understand how loans work?

I get that you have an ideological position to defend and, based on your other comments in this thread have either an inability or an unwillingness to cede any ground. So while, yes, I do understand how loans work, I do not have any further interest in talking to you about payday lenders. Have a nice day.

> Any healthcare system must deny healthcare.

And a healthcare system enabled by UHC will deny healthcare at a rate 3 times that of the rest of the industry.

So is every other insurer "under-denying" healthcare?

Or is UHC choosing to deny healthcare more than it needs to?

> In any society, debts are expected to be paid off. If people could just stop paying their debts, nobody would make any loans anymore. Forcing people into bankruptcy is not violence.

Insurance is the reason that these debts are so exorbitant in the first place.

Do you really think the ER trip and a few tests cost the hospital eighty thousand dollars, and UHC, magician negotiators that they are, managed to talk the bill down to $4,000?

And yet the hospital will charge you, the uninsured, $80K. Yeah, you might be able to negotiate it down some, but not like that.

The US is the only country in the world where deathbed divorce is a thing, so families won't be burdened with medical bills[1].

But I feel like you'd find that immoral, too.

[1] Lack of legal obligation to the debt (even beyond this, to family members in general) won't stop the hospital calling your family and heavily beating on you to pay the bill of your recently departed, even if you had no financial responsibility, using everything from appealing to a sense of pride, to outright deception and claims that they can sue for the unpaid bill.

I believe that healthcare is deliberately limited by insane policy. Contrary to opinion insurance is not the problem. It’s doctors charging exorbitant fees.

We allow this because we let them scare us into voting for strict education.

But the reality is education could be fixed to cut the price by probably 80% - making the much smaller insurance amount negligible.

I hate to say it but pinning it on a ceo doesn’t seem right. His job was to ration a scarce resource. But why is it scare? Because the authorities thru the police force puts an end to unlicensed people regardless of their skills.

I was talking to a friend/acquaintance. Her dad was a doctor did all kinds of innovative surgeries on animals. But wasn’t licensed. She said he’d be called in by doctors to do surgeries all the time because he was the best.

But he wasn’t licensed. So California shut it all down.

The price of healthcare is 5x because we let people go to jail without a crime. If they went to jail for reckless I e untrained practice of medicine i understand. But seriously right now the problem is lack of supply that has to be rationed.

Thank you for your comment, I thought that there's nobody left here who understands this.

> Thank you for your comment, I thought that there's nobody left here who understands this.

Dude, plenty of people understand that. However, it's no good playing the circular pass-the-buck game, where the insurance apologists blame the doctors for everything, then the doctor-apologists blame the insurers for everything, everyone blaming someone else for everything, ad nauseam; with the end-result of the status-quo being defended by mentally exhausting everyone.

Bro the numbers don’t lie. Look at the average income of doctors and price of medical equipment. Then look at % profit of insurance.

Insurance makes 20%. Doctors and suppliers make 5x what normal people make.

So the problem is with the laws preventing folks from becoming doctors.

I’m gonna fix this, it’s actually so easy, just need people to trust me.

I’m really good at this kind of stuff I just hate dealing with people because the average person is so certain the world can’t get better.

And why do doctors make 5x what normal people make? It's because they have to pay off a million dollars in school debt and risk ruining their entire lives if they fail.

btw is that doctors or hospital administrators?

There are systems that cannot deny life saving care, and where everyone is necessarily insured.

It’s facetious to compare those to a system where 30 million have zero coverage and the rest are systematically denied life saving care as a profit making mechanism.

And yeah letting someone die when you could help them live is violence. When it’s baked into the rules it’s called systemic violence.

There are no systems anywhere in the world which don’t deny life saving care. All systems make life and death decisions. British NHS, for example, will generally deny life saving care, if such procedure will cost more than 30,000 pounds per quality-adjusted year of life you’re expected to gain as a result of the procedure.

Again, my point is that denying healthcare is not automatically something wrong or evil. This is something that must necessarily happen, and so the details as to why some healthcare was denied are very important. You can’t just say that someone being denied care is basically murder, like some people here, or point to some percentage of denied claims and pretend that this is prima facie evidence of wrongdoing. No, you need to actually do some legwork, and the haters of murder victim are not interested in that, they just want some release by dunking on a literal scapegoat.

I mean it seems you’re dunking on a strawman yourself. Like if I said Denmark virtually denies no life saving claims, and when it happens it’s due to edge cases, you’ll insist just because it occurs it’s indistinguishable from a system where it happens systemically and regularly?

Name one.

This is an insane comment what you wrote.

I live in a European country with public free healthcare. Sure, you pay a portion of your income towards healthcare, so it's not really free etc. etc. If you don't have income, the state pays it for you.

There isn't any denial of healthcare. I never heard about anything like that. Sure, there are limits on availability of healthcare, particularly if it's some advanced or expensive procedure. For example, there is a place where they do radio surgery on the brain. There may only be one such place in the country (it's a small country). If you need that kind of procedure done, obviously there is a waiting list. And certainly some of those on a waiting list must have died.

But there is no denial of healthcare per se with someone making a decision to deny healthcare.

I'm confused, you said that there isn't any denial of healthcare where you are, but then described very clearly and explicitly how some people are denied healthcare, and they sometimes die as a result. Maybe you understand the word "deny" differently?

I think you understand the word "deny" differently.

Accepted but didn't happen in time doesn't equal denial.

Of course it does. The patients wanted care early enough to save their live. They denied them that care. Hypothetical care after death is worthless.

Whether they denied that care by not paying for it (which means people could have gotten that care if they would have had the means), or by limiting the amount of care in a period of time, doesn't really matters for the person who didn't get it.

Why do you think the healthcare resources (number of beds, hospitals etc) are limited? Why isn't there a second hospital?

By the way, would they have paid for an operation in a different country if space would be available there? No? So they denied that healthcare.

Except it just doesn't, denial of claim has a very specific meaning, there's no reason to go all philosophical.

I'm sure there's plenty of cases where United health approved the claim and the patient also didn't get treated in time, it doesn't count as a denied claim.

This sub-thread is about denying healthcare. Not about denying claims. In fact, denying a claim (i.e. payment for healthcare services) has the moral implications discussed here mainly if not only because denial of payment is tantamount to denial of healthcare.

the big point you are missing is the denial of paying for treatment after it has been applied.

in germany (and probably most other european countries) you can be denied treatment if it is deemed unimportant and it is known that insurance does not cover it. you will never be put in a situation where treatment is applied but then the insurance doesn't pay leaving you with the bill unless you were made aware that the treatment is optional or you specifically chose a treatment that you could not be sure would be paid. payment for any treatment that is not optional can not be denied. if there is uncertainty you can also ask your insurer in advance, and they must give you a binding response whether the proposed treatment will be paid or not.

most importantly the doctors must inform the patient in advance if the treatment is insured or not. if they don't tell them that something is not insured then they can't demand payment from the patient.

you will never face a surprise bill.

Because you mentioned Germany and surprise bills...

My partner suffered a medical episode while we were traveling in Germany. Bystanders called an ambulance which turned up and checked her out and asked her to be taken to hospital for more tests.

She/we elected to not go with them.

To our surprise, about 6 months later after we returned home (to Australia), we received a letter in the mail (in German) that said we owed something like $500 for the ambulance, I forget the exact number.

How does that line up with "you will never face a surprise bill" in Germany? Or is it because we are foreigners?

We never paid but I sometimes wonder if something would happen should we return to Germany.

it's most likely because you didn't have insurance at all. if you had travel insurance you should have forwarded that to them. (but see below about calling an ambulance that is not needed)

if you don't have insurance you have to pay for everything of course. the surprise in your case comes from the unusual situation that the people who called the ambulance didn't know that you had no insurance, or more likely and you weren't even aware of how your situation is going to be handled.

it's unlikely that anything will happen if you return since the ones issuing the bill would not be notified in any way that you entered the country.

it is also possible that you could have disputed the payment since you didn't call the ambulance yourself (and i assume didn't ask anyone to call them). on the other hand if you had insurance you should have gone to the hospital because apparently insurance doesn't pay if an ambulance is called but not used. so actually, you didn't receive a surprise medical bill, but a bill for calling a service that was not needed (and potentially inconveniencing someone else who might have needed the ambulance, but now had to wait).

however, if you didn't ask anyone to call the ambulance then the bill is inappropriate because the law here is that if you call an ambulance but you don't need it, you pay, but if someone else calls the ambulance without you asking them, and it turns out to be unnecessary, then nobody pays.

since i lived in china i also don't have insurance in europe, so when we were visiting and needed treatment for a burn we had to shop around different hospitals to find out which one charged the least. costs for an ER visit ranged from 80€ to 250€ if i remember, and later we found a special hospital that was funded by a charity for the uninsured were we could go for after care for free. that works because the number of people without insurance is extremely small. mostly foreigners who somehow fell through the gap.

Interesting.

We didn't ask for anyone to call the ambulance, although personally I am happy that it was called and she was checked out.

indeed. while i was reading up on this i kept wondering if there is no way to call a doctor without calling an ambulance. i know there are private doctors that you can call (i recently saw a report about a doctor who said that he gets called specifically because his patients do not want to be taken to a hospital (and don't need to)), but when you call emergency services then an ambulance seems to be the only option.

Here in Australia we have a line you can call, I think it was started during covid.

No idea how useful it'd be for non-covid calls though. Probably not very.

I live in a Nordic country and the state-owned insurance provider often denies healthcare, much like health insurance companies in the US.

Denying healthcare doesn't necessarily mean "leaving someone bleeding to death on the street" but rather refusing to provide certain treatments or medications. This issue isn't unique to the US. Granted, the healthcare system in the US is, in my opinion, significantly worse but claiming that healthcare denial doesn't happen elsewhere is simply incorrect.

In the US they deny treatment that is considered essential by their own doctors. I know you were saying the same thing, but your comment seems to minimize the difference.

It’s impossible for all instances of these things to constitute violence. I do, however, find the idea that they are sometimes akin to violence very enticing. Can you argue that? Can the actions of a stereotypical slumlord, one behaving within local law and never physically touching one of his tenants, potentially constitute violence? If not, how are you defining it?

What are stereotypical slumlords and what have they done?

Just a wikipedia definition of slumlord https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slumlord#Operation

Running a shitty business, even an exploitative one, isn’t violence.

> Running a shitty business, even an exploitative one, isn’t violence.

You know, it just hit me: the issue here might just be a semantic one, where people feel the need to lump very unacceptable and wrong actions into the category of "violence," because of the consensus belief that violence is almost always wrong.

There are things that are as unacceptable and wrong as violence but are not violence.

I really don’t think it’s that simple. The violence we’re talking about might be most easily defined as a particularly extreme form of coercion, one which causes deep trauma and/or physical harm. Doesn’t this capture the nature of a lot of violence? Isn’t it also evident that this wouldn’t always require physical contact by the aggressor, or even a single, tangible aggressor at all? I’d argue, for example, that whether or not hitler personally pulled the trigger on holocaust victims, he absolutely did violence against them. The level of indirection doesn’t preclude this.

People lump the inappropriate denial of necessary resources into "violence", as well as actions which happen because of the threat of physical harm.

For example, if a slumlord wants to evict me, even though I'm still paying the rent, the eviction is violence. It can either go two ways: either armed thugs will come to the building and physically grab me, rough me up and throw me on the street (at best) or in jail (at worst). Or I'll anticipate that happening, and lock myself out of the building in advance. In the latter case, is it still violence? Many people say yes, a shortcut around violence, coerced by the certainty that violence will happen otherwise, is still violence.

Or consider an abusive relationship: she knows he will beat her if she doesn't obey, so she obeys. No beating actually happens. A lot of people consider this violence too.

And consider a siege on a city (there's at least one happening right now). The people try to grow their own food in city parks, but whenever they do they, the parks are hit with big bombs dropped from planes. So they call on their allies to deliver food in. The first food trucks are also bombed. The second food trucks don't go in, they try to negotiate safe passage first. Is it violence against the people in the city (who have never been hit by a bomb)? Many people say yes.

In the narrow definition, violence is only when my fist hits your face, but in the broader definition, violence is whenever I use the laws of physics to force something to happen to you - whenever I take away your agency.

Nice job. You articulated it more clearly.

We can define violence as “that guy hit that guy,” and leave it at that and you’d be right. I think this alternative view is a recognition that a lot of other behaviors look very similar in how they work, like when the slumlord chains the emergency fire exit and a family burns alive because of it (an extreme example, but I do recall reading about a case along those lines). I feel like calling that sort of thing violence perpetrated by the slumlord is accurate to everyone but the pedant. It captures the essence of the behavior to me, this bringing about of great personal harm through either malice or sociopathic apathy.

“Social murder” is the term

> Things like denying healthcare, shutting down companies and laying off people to benefit private equity investors, forcing people into bankruptcy, losing their homes, charging overdraft fees, etc.

These things are objectively not violence. Violence isn't a word for "things that harm people", it very specifically means direct, purposeful physical harm. Don't distort the meaning of words for rhetorical flair.

Definition 3: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/violence

Distorting the meaning of words is how these people justify their actions. Not giving them what they want? That’s violence now! Thus justifying retaliatory - or even pre-emptive - violence.

This is the same 'get out clause' that the antagonist in the Saw films uses: "I didn't harm those people directly, I only created the conditions under which they would be harmed."

The WHO defines four types of violence: a) physical, b) sexual, c) psychological, and d) deprivation. Denying healthcare feels incredibly close to d) and — semi-indirectly — involves a bit of c) and a) too.

> These things are objectively not violence.

Semantics cannot possibly be 'objective'.

Structural violence[1] and institutional violence has been concepts in academia for ages, even if you don't like it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_violence

By your strict definition of violence (direct harm) Hitler would walk free because he didn't personally gass the jews. Luckily we had trials[2] to determine that we still hold indirect perpetrators responsible.

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trials

"The people behind that kind of violence can hide behind the layers of indirection."

>[B]ureaucrats can be expected to embrace a technology that helps to create the illusion that decisions are not under their control. Because of its seeming intelligence and impartiality, a computer has an almost magical tendency to direct attention away from the people in charge of bureaucratic functions and toward itself, as if the computer were the true source of authority. A bureaucrat armed with a computer is the unacknowledged legislator of our age, and a terrible burden to bear. *We cannot dismiss the possibility that, if Adolf Eichmann had been able to say that it was not he but a battery of computers that directed the Jews to the appropriate crematoria, he might never have been asked to answer for his actions.*

Neil Postman, Technopoly (Emphasis mine)

Extremely pertinent in the age where civilians are routinely slaughtered by AI targeting systems.

His case shows that people do not believe that their society is a just one. If the high class do not act on this signal, they leave space for further radicalization and even more disruptive actors will utilize the discontent. Currently, they are attacking the symptoms in the new version of "beatings will continue until morale improves".

>His case shows that people do not believe that their society is a just one.

Exactly this. That was a watershed moment, I think.

If we actually lived in a "just" system, when people are executed for murdering a single individual, which many people have been, we would certainly execute people for things like, say, losing billions of dollars in pensions for the elderly with greedy mathematical trickery.

In a just world, hundreds would have been executed for the financial crimes of 2008.

"Justice" only exists when there's threat of punishment. It isn't enough to have the moral high ground; you have to have the might and the will to enforce the moral ground on others.

Humanity will always live under systems of "oppression", but it's what that oppression looks like that matters, because there'll always be someone who takes advantage of a system's goodwill, and that must be punished swiftly and brutally, to deter anyone from abusing the system's goodwill.

> vigilante justice (especially against nonviolent offenders) is wrong.

is it non-violent when they wield the system in a way to cause immense harm to the point where they are prolific killers indirectly and maybe even straight up directly? 90+ percent error rates in the AI that united used to deny claims is a violence. they denied 30+ percent of all claims.

No, violence is violence only when it's physical and direct. For example, mental violence doesn't exist. Verbal abuse does not exist. And in this case, United Healthcare had committed no sin at all, because due to being a non-physical entity incapable of physically interacting with the world, it didn't physically hurt anyone. Therefore it committed no violence. QED.

Since this is HN, I can't tell if that's satire or not.

Bravo!

Strange rationale. By that logic you are also a prolific mass murderer as you have not paid physicians to provide medical care to patients. Indirectly you have killed, well, everyone because you didn’t pay infinite money to provide unbounded medical care for every person who has died.

This is strange logic because anyone who is insured pay for other indirectly - that’s how insurance works: pull the money together so that anyone that will have bad luck of getting sick will use money from that pull. The assumption is majority of people won’t get seriously ill but once ill normally it would be financially devastating.

Related, this in fact what Peter Singer said: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/get-involved/videos-books-an...

Basically, it is your moral obligation to donate everything you have, except for what little you need to survive. If we put that essay into this context, then not donating would indeed be violence, such as not saving a drowning child just because you don't want to.

> But what he did was objectively what we consider to be bad… in our society, vigilante justice (especially against nonviolent offenders) is wrong

In our society we don’t objectively consider it wrong, otherwise Batman (Superman, Spider-Man) wouldn’t be so popular.

>otherwise Batman (Superman, Spider-Man) wouldn’t be so popular.

Batman is the absolute opposite because he goes out of his way to avoid killing villains, even incredibly evil ones like the Joker.

The goalposts were ‘ vigilante justice’ not killing people.

It's not like the Punisher isn't popular.

Let's be real: the original super heroes avoided killing because children were their target market, and unlike with cowboys and outlaws or indians, it would have been unseemly by the standards of the time. Not because of some kind of big point about "just vigilantism."

True. Dexter tv series was also popular - reason they made so many seasons.

A Dexter reboot where the protagonist targets extremely powerful people who commit mass violence within the confines of the law might actually be entertaining

Batman is quite famous for non lethal vigilante justice. If anything Batman's position is antithetical to Luigi's.

Non lethal vigilante justice is still vigilante justice

Well I suspect the lethality of said justice in this case is quite critical to the judgment of being _objectively_ wrong.

I think if Luigi had merely assaulted the CEO to teach him a lesson, and not killed him, then we probably wouldn't be having this discussion nationally. Or at least not to the same level of debate. That (admittedly arbitrary) line is a reason most DC characters like Batman and Superman generally refuse to kill even the most deserving of villains.

Everyone you listed don't kill people. Very few people consider Batman, Superman, or Spider-Man to be objectively wrong. They consider them to be objectively right, and it's because they're enforcing the law when the police aren't around to do so.

"Law" is just another way of saying, "The bare minimum standard that we as a society will accept."

So when we have a society that sends a drunk driver to prison for 70 years for killing a family of four in a head-on collision, but we don't send people to prison for their lives for gambling with the pensions of teachers, firefighters, etc., for polluting the waterways and the earth itself, of course this is the ultimate, eventual outcome.

The only shocking thing to me about Luigi's case is that it didn't happen sooner.

Yeah I listed all of those because it’s funnier when people mistake the vigilante justice’ thing for a ‘not killing people’ thing and then I can trot out Clint Eastwood and Dirty Harry, which was so popular it gets quoted regularly and had four sequels.

Batman, Superman and Spider-Man are not real. And that does matter. It is super normal to watch a movie and sympathize with what would be clearly bad guys in real life.

So yes, batman in particular would be considered bad by most people. He is just another gangster cause quite a lot of damage to the city on the regular. We do not care, because it is made up movie city.

Superman and Spider man afaik do not go around randomly assassinating people, but it is a long time since I watched that.

That isn't true. Just because we find something entertaining in fiction does not mean we tolerate it in real life.

Mangione support is largely isolated to young age groups of certain demographics, according to polling numbers.

It’s actually really interesting to see when people think his support isn’t even a debated topic, when the numbers show most people, especially adults, don’t support his actions.

A lot of folks who are sympathetic to his actions publicly go “oh no murder is bad” while privately being sympathetic.

I’m unsure how that shows with polling, tbh, but it certainly shows up in the discourse.

It's not most people, it's a plurality. There's a large 'don't know' contingent who either haven't made up their minds or don't want to share their opinion. Also, I would expect this data to skew toward younger people because anyone at or above retirement age is eligible for medicare, and thus not impacted by the decisions of private insurers to anything like the same degree.

I know more older adults who just avoid the topic than say it was truly wrong.

Condemning people to death and bankruptcy is violence.

That said, we consider vigilante justice wrong because we believe there is supposed to be actual justice from a functional system. When the system does not function, extrajudicial attempts at justice will become more common. Just like people will poach more in a famine.

Just a reflection, when you say: "especially against nonviolent offenders", I‘m pretty sure that a lot of people see it like this. People will directly die when a treatment is denied and for impacted people this is seen as a violent crime (even if indirect). This case is triggering more support as it has a potential impact on a the life of a lot of people.

> This case is such an interesting crossroads. He has such insane support ... But what he did was objectively what we consider to be bad… in our society, vigilante justice (especially against nonviolent offenders) is considered to be wrong.

It's worth noting that in our society lots of other things are also considered to be wrong, things which are done openly every day by some of the richest and most powerful people and organizations in the country.

That's why he has "insane support": the system is broken and has proven itself incapable of policing that other bad behavior.

> I don’t know what SO should have done

Well, nothing.

Unless they have a general policy of scrubbing records of everybody indicted for (but not yet proven guilty of) violent crimes, why do anything at all?

Non-violence...lines get blurred while being cut throat and cold hearted when you do it to thousands or millions of people. I'm surprised the GFC didn't have anything like this given the damage it did.

There are like 4 pro-Luigi subreddits with 10k+ users.

Reddit is not real life.

> Reddit is not real life.

...then it follows HN isn't. I happen to know they are both real for the purposes of existing and as a meta commentary on topics, since I participate in both. I also don't know anyone who wouldn't give Luigi a pass on a Jury, and these people don't vote the same.

Disregarding the existence of the sentiment, is the kneejerk noise of people thinking they are uber-rational thinkers or arbiters of reality.

I'll assume, in good faith, what your wrote was simply not what you meant.

Why would they (the companies) have to do anything should be the question.

The ”nonviolent” part is interesting. We as a society has many examples of holding such people responsible for ”legal” and ”non-violent” actions that clearly resulted in deaths of lots of people.

Sorry about the rather extreme example and inviting Godwin. But consider for example Krupp (CEO) and Ribbentrop (Diplomat) who were both entirely ”non-violent” people, they personally did not draw a single drop of blod as far as I know. And the holocaust were perfectly legal according to the law at the time.

Violence with the stroke of a pen, killing via a rubber stamp, violence through withholding safety.

> vigilante justice (especially against nonviolent offenders) is considered to be wrong.

I guess hiding behind the veil of legality and murdering thousands if not hundreds of thousands if considered worse. Rightfully IMO.

It’s so weird to me that people say vigilante violence is so universally abhorred, when we literally have Batman and the Punisher as major draws at the theatre.

Bringing justice to the person responsible to hundreds/thousands of deaths and immense suffering is right - was the murder of Mussolini unjust? Hitler's?

If the justice system won't take care of it, there has to come a tipping point, IMO.

But what he did was objectively what we consider to be bad… in our society, vigilante justice (especially against nonviolent offenders) is wrong.

What are you talking about? What "vigilante justice"? The innocent victim, Brian Thompson, was murdered by a lunatic. He was not an offender. It was no justice.

Justice isn’t confined to the law. Nor to any one person’s opinion.

By some accounts Thompson was a killer of thousands.

Using such a weasel phrase like "by some accounts" means that there's absolutely nothing standing behind this. If there was any concrete thing Brian Thompson did that was any kind of legal crime or moral error, you'd be able to name it.

I’m standing behind this.

I think that Brian Thompson was a mass murderer. His actions as CEO put profit before people and caused many people’s lives to be lost.

What actions? What did he do? You're just repeating empty phrases to smear the murder victim.

> UnitedHealthcare in particular denied coverage for post-acute care, or services and support needed after a hospitalization. In 2019, the insurance provider’s initial denial rate for post-acute care prior authorization requests was 8.7%; by 2022, it had increased to 22.7%.

Buck stop with him; between 2021 and 2022 he did that. Being the CEO and all.

And what's the crime here? What's the moral error? Can you elucidate? I hope you're not trying to argue that insurance should not be allowed to ever deny claims?

Why not, I pay them. Do you pay your phone company to not provide service?

Of course, there are plenty of places and circumstances where my phone company does not provide me service.

I think you understand very clearly what point is being made, and are just pretending not to get it.

My understanding is that people are twisting themselves into pretzels to blame the murder victim for something, but they have extremely hard time finding anything explicit to point to, so they just throw allusions, hoping that the reader will complete the bogus argument in their head.

Here, for example, the parent poster brings up some statistic that some very specific category of insurance claim denial went up in some period. The allusion is that this is nefarious, and is a result of some specific action by the murder victim. The reader is supposed to interpret it this way. Of course, there's absolutely zero evidence for any of these claims, and when you lay it down like that, it sounds pretty stupid without anything backing this up.

Just goes to show you how incompatible your morals are from others, I suppose.

It's a general category (all claim denials) and it did not go up, it more than doubled; as you are probably aware, it's far, far above the industry average. Also you're misusing the word 'allusion' which means 'to refer to something. You probably meant 'implication'.

No, denial of “post-acute care, or services and support needed after a hospitalization” claims is a narrow category, it’s not all claim denials.

You don't see a moral error with a health insurance company going out of their way to more than double the claims they deny, not because it's ethical or necessary but because they find ways to do so legally and the motive is profit?

Perhaps you're not well equipped to evaluate moral errors in the first place.

Ok: https://fortune.com/2024/12/05/unitedhealthcare-ceo-brian-th...

The only potential crime that article lists is allegation that the murder victim failed to disclose some material fact to the company investors. Are you saying that Luigi Mangione killed Thomson on behalf of the stock holders, who lost money by holding UnitedHealthcare stock?

Your comment is pretty clear example of the attitude around the case. People hate CEOs of companies that must make difficult decision, and so when they are murdered, they will twist themselves into pretzels to somehow justify that they had it coming.

Yes, but if there were a crime, then there'd be a legal remedy, so any vigilante action would be unjustified.

That something harmful is legal or effectively legal is a necessary requirement for a vigilante action to morally acceptable.

Wouldn't the moral acceptable way be to try making the harmful thing illegal?

And if people in their majority, in their stupidity or cleverness, reject your argument, isn't then vigilante action deeply anti-democratic?

I suppose it depends on how you view things and what tradition you're from.

I have a very old-style view, where courts provide systems that substitute for private vengeance and thus become legitimate by being willing to hear complaints of harm, so from my point of view, if a court hear the matter, the affected person can take whatever measures they wish, which of course has important consequences in cases of legal immunity-- when my view is taken, legal immunity is something one desperately wants to avoid having, because whoever has it must contend with private vengeance.

> People hate CEOs of companies that must make difficult decision,

No, People hate CEO's making greedy, selfish, unnecessary decisions that cost lives and cause suffering.

Be honest.

Again, you exemplify the exact attitude I describe. Can you point to any single decision that Thompson made that cost live and causes suffering? You can’t, but you assume there must have been some, because you start with assumption that the victim here is guilty, and only then try to find reasons why.

> Again, you exemplify the exact attitude I describe.

That's fine. I think you exemplify the attitude that lead to Thompson's murder and will lead to many more similar incidents.

> Can you point to any single decision that Thompson made that cost live and causes suffering? You can’t, but you assume there must have been some,

If denials tripled under his watch, as CEO you don't think he necessarily was involved in that? He clearly approved of profiting off of literal unnecessary deaths.

> because you start with assumption that the victim here is guilty

The most basic of reasoning shows he has some moral guilt, just not legal guilt.

P1 - He was the head decision maker

P2 - Decision was made to actively increase unnecessary deaths for monetary gain

C - He ultimately approved of that decision

If denials tripled under his watch, as CEO you don't think he necessarily was involved in that? He clearly approved of profiting off of literal unnecessary deaths.

You have yet to show that tripling denials of a particular category of claims is even wrong in the first place. Let me repeat: any system will deny some claims, so denied claims are not prima facie evidence of anything wrong.

Decision was made to actively increase unnecessary deaths for monetary gain

Nobody had shown any evidence whatsoever that anything like that happened. Not only are denied claims not automatically wrong, but also changes in denial rate do not even need to correspond to any decision or change in policy, but may instead result from changes of external factors.

He ultimately approved of that decision

What decision? You just assume that there had been some decision, that Bryan Thompson approved, and that it was nefarious. There is as of now zero evidence for this, this is just your speculation. Murdering people based on speculations like that is profoundly evil, and so is excusing it.

> You have yet to show that tripling denials of a particular category of claims is even wrong in the first place.

Honestly this is a pretty bad faith argument. They are denying at a significantly higher rate than their competitors, their internal policy focused around denying, and enough people are getting screwed over that a murder was committed.

But yeah, sure, assume this is all business as normal and not at all morally wrong to make your argument if you must.

> Nobody had shown any evidence whatsoever that anything like that happened.

Basic. Reasoning.

If claim denials triple during a time when a particular CEO is in place, that CEO would have had to have something to do with that.

> Not only are denied claims not automatically wrong,

They are on this scale and when the denials are bad faith. I can't prove that to you unless their documents get leaked, but that's for legal matters. For moral matters, the evidence supports that the difference from the drastic increase were indeed bad faith denials.

> What decision? You just assume that there had been some decision, that Bryan Thompson approved, and that it was nefarious.

Exactly, because he was CEO.

> There is as of now zero evidence for this, this is just your speculation.

He was CEO.

> Murdering people based on speculations like that is profoundly evil, and so is excusing it.

He was CEO. He oversaw a company going out of their way to deny claims even if you want to play devils advocate and pretend to be ignorant and deny that.

What he did was far more evil than a single murder, and what you are doing in defending the system that caused someone to feel that they had to murder it also more evil, the system that allows for shitty health insurance companies to cause so much pain and suffering. THAT, is evil.

No one will have concrete answers until discovery during Mangione’s trial. That is, if United doesn’t find themselves their own Jack Ruby.

What discovery? Are you suggesting that the defense in the murder case will be able to do any kind of discovery on UnitedHealthcare? How would that even be possible?

My intent was merely to point out that it is a commonly held belief, because it seemed like you were not aware. I didn't want to champion that belief.

But since you've invited me to name the moral error, sure. Accepting a fiduciary responsibility to chase after profits in a context where that very clearly means finding ways to deny people access to healthcare is a moral error. If you can't ethically do a job you shouldn't take that job. At best you're lying to shareholders, at worst you're killing people. The only ethical path is to go find a different job.

There is absolutely no way to run an insurance scheme without denying some people coverage. No system anywhere in the world, public or private, accepts every single claim. You must deny some claims, there's no way around it. This means that according to you, there's no ethical way to run health insurance system. I disagree, I think we need insurance to exist, and given that someone needs to run insurance, I don't think that taking such a job is inherently a moral error.

It's really just for-profit health insurance systems that I think can't be made ethical. If you have to deny some claims based on resource availability, that's an uncomfortable necessity, but we can do insurance-like things without asking people to balance human life against shareholder greed.

It seems pretty obvious that opting into a position where you'll have to do that might make you unpopular with the humans.

What is "resource availability"? In a non-profit healthcare systems, how exactly the amount of available resources is determined? Is there no person involved making a decision that causes the amount of available resources to change? Think about it. Consider, for example, politicians who set the healthcare tax rate. If they set it 1% higher, there will be more resources available. Does it mean that by not doing so, they deny care to some?

I strongly encourage you to think very carefully about this. Once you do, you'll find that there are no simple answers: you'll always have limited resources, and you'll always have to deny care to some people, and in fact it will always include some people personally making the call to deny care to some people. Any system that actually exists, public or private, does this.

> In a non-profit healthcare systems, how exactly the amount of available resources is determined?

You would generally count them. Like, if you have three people in need of a ventilator and you only have two ventilators, then one person is getting denied a ventilator today.

> Any system that actually exists, public or private, does this.

That's true, and I don't have a problem with it. Tradeoffs have to happen. What I have a problem with is incentive structures that attribute greater success for the people at the top when they create outcomes that involve more death for the people at the bottom.

Plenty of systems which actually exist don't congratulate leadership for reducing quality of care.

OK, but why is there only two ventilators? Who made this decision, and based on what? Try to think a couple of steps ahead.

Presumably somebody involved in deciding budgets, a politician perhaps, or somebody with a rather political role in the hospital. Whoever they are, in most cases they're balancing ventilators against test kits or against hiring more doctors or against letting people keep more of their paychecks, or all kinds of other things which might indeed be more important for the patients/citizens/etc...

There's no fundamental reason why they have to be in a position where screwing the people who receive the care would ever be considered the ideal option. But that's how it is when you have a group of shareholders who have no stake in the quality of care. Thompson opted into a conflict of interest which need not exist in order to provide insurance.

More likely they balance the need to increase healthcare taxes against their chance of being reelected.

Sure, and that's not exactly comfortable (maybe "reelected" shouldn't be a thing, idk). But if the people reelecting you are also the patients then the particular conflict of interest I'm worried about is not present.

Yes, that's why NHS is so well funded. Oh, wait, it isn't.

Government-organized resource allocation is, more likely than not, bad to very bad.

True, and we need to get our shit together about that, but it's not an apples to apples comparison. A government allocates 100% of the available healthcare funding towards healthcare outcomes. A corporation (in the US) allocates 80%. You can tolerate a sloppier slicing if you're starting with a bigger pie.

You are right, BUT: Those denials have to follow contractual terms. I know a local (Europe) real world example where a friend of a friend (insurance company area manager) literally was told "this is your sum of money on claims that you can accept in this quarter, it cannot go above that". Which either you get lucky and make the quota, or you screw people over and hope they don't sue. And since we live in a world where the company wants "a little more" each year, well.. I don't see how this ends well.

The same problem does not apply to our social services (including health insurance) as they dont have to make profits at all costs.

The line is on why you are doing the denying. Are you doing so because providing the healthcare is literally impossible, or are you doing so in order to make more money?

I think you need to specify this more.

In most insurance fields, it would be possible to only deny false claims. Take insurance of your house. The rates could be calculated that they can pay out all real damages to the full amount. Because the maximum damage amount is limited.

That's not true for health insurance, because the total possible damage (cost of treatments) is almost arbitrarily high, so that you cannot pay everything for everyone.

I don't want to defend the US system here. But it's not a problem that any country really solved, and one could argue about advantages and disadvantages of the different systems all day long.

> moral error,

The moral error is by refining and endorsing a company policy that went out of it's way to cheat people out of their due insurance, killing significant amounts of people as a result and ensuring suffering for even more.

Our legal system can't really address this, not until the electoral college gets disbarred or red state voters realize rejecting socialized health care hurts more than it helps.

Until that happens. things are going to get worse and people are going to get frustrated and start acting out. It's what happens when you have such a broken system.

Talking about "we don't do that in society" is ignoring the problem at it's core. You can't expect people to just obey the rules and respect law and order when it clearly isn't working for them or people they care about.

Everything Brian Thompson did was legal, which is not the same thing as being "innocent."

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