Comment by zer8k | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zer8k | Hacker News Reader

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Denying life saving treatment to bolster your bottom line for shareholders is also murder by any other name. If you consider murder as requiring malice aforethought then it certainly fits the bill. Just because someone hides behind legalease does not release them from the moral and ethical corruption. No different than the death penalty this is simply a form of murder society has decided is acceptable.

So then it should be easy to see why a large portion of Americans vocally approved of this. So much so, that the media couldn’t even run enough cover to deaden even half the sound of the cheering.

I don’t know a single person who has gone through, or watched a love one going through horrific health insurance “process” in order to gain life saving care, that wouldn’t want someone to be “paid in kind” for their suffering.

Is “murder someone” just? No. Do I agree that this was how we should’ve approached fixing healthcare? Absolutely not. But there is an interesting moral and ethical dilemma that, much like everything else in life, paints a picture that is not exactly black or white. Many people view healthcare as an inalienable right. You can see how this creates a potentially dangerous high stakes conflict. The proper solution is, of course, to use our legal system to provide safeguards for the most vulnerable health insurance customers. If we focused hard on this, as we should, this entire situation could’ve been completely avoided.

I'm not especially interested in the moral and ethical dilemma of whether it's okay to murder—in my own frame of ethics it's not up for debate, and I don't share axioms with people who think it is. I'm far more interested in the fact that not everyone has the same set of values and the next victim of a politically motivated murder by someone looking to make a statement will probably be a victim that those here won't consider to have deserved it (but of course the murderer will!).

And if we focus hard on it in the future, we can hopefully avoid it in the future. Requiring people to glorify murder as the price of healthcare reform is a great way to negatively polarize people away from it; speaking for myself, I'm absolutely unwilling to make common cause with murderers, and if this initiative makes it to the ballot I will vote no even though I support its text.

Denying is not for shareholders, it’s for policyholders. A health insurance provider that doesn’t put guardrails on treatments will fail because the required policy rates will go up so much that the healthy people will go to a lower cost provider.

People are happy saying the insurance provider should just pay for everything until the bill comes due in higher monthly premiums.

Insurance companies are doing the only thing they can to exist in this fucked up system where people can bail when prices increase.

This is a function of limited risk pooling. Health insurance companies are state-locked. In the limit they function as options sellers in a stock market. If they can’t hedge off volatility with a larger risk pooling strategy they do something you can’t do at the market - simply deny care.

This problem is due to manufactured monopolies and regulatory capture. Open up cross state healthcare, allow larger risk pools, and use this to hedge off the risk of the 1/10% of customers who represent the highest risk pool. Costs go down for everyone and quality of care goes up. It’s not quite single payer but it’s simple probabilities. I find it hard to believe they wouldn’t lobby for this unless it’s vastly more profitable to stay state locked and deny care.

Of course though you are correct, in that a treatment still should have utility. But the average person being denied something as simple as a PET scan does not represent a maximization of utility. That is greed.

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