My last post was a little cryptic. So let me clarify with some illustrations.
I hope that helps!
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
My last post was a little cryptic. So let me clarify with some illustrations.
I hope that helps!
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Almost hard to believe there are people upset that everyone else is okay with removing this leech from the ass of humanity.
One would think that in an open market, the insurance company that denies the highest proportion of claims would not be a successful insurance company. Shouldn’t cluey consumers avoid such a rip-off?
Of course, that presumes an informed pool of people selecting their insurance, much as democracy presumes an informed and intelligent electorate.
(So, one does not think that)
Joé, almost hard to believe people might not want to be seen as condoning murder.
The net effect of the UHC assassination will be more bodyguards for executives, more “us-vs-them” mentality in the upper floors, and higher premiums/lower payouts.
Maybe that will push the US closer to a Medicare-for-all system, but as a tactic such acts seem generally counterproductive.
My insurance company is Medica. It’s not as if we have a choice — my employer negotiates a mass enrollment, and I don’t the criteria include what’s best for the employees.
I’m gonna have to stop you right there. First, we don’t have anything close to an open market in the US. Most full time employees get insurance through their employer, which often doesn’t offer more than one (or maybe two) options. Many employers care about only one thing: cost. Second, even when customers are buying in an “open market”, like healthcare.gov, or something, it’s not really obvious which are the best companies. Third, health insurance is way too expensive in this country, so a lot of people just buy the cheapest one because they can barely even afford it. The whole situation is fucked.
Why anyone is shocked that the general public isn’t upset about a healthcare CEO getting gunned down in broad daylight is a mystery to me.
https://futurism.com/neoscope/reactions-health-insurance-ceo
https://futurism.com/neoscope/reddit-delete-doctors-insurance
And the followup from health insurance companies?
https://futurism.com/neoscope/health-insurance-scrub-information-executives
https://futurism.com/neoscope/united-healthcare-claims-algorithm-murder
I wouldn’t count on a lot of public help in catching the shooter.
John Morales
There’s no need to virtue signal by feigning outrage to not be seen as condoning murder. One only needs not to condone murder to not be seen as condoning murder.
Yeah. Distributed responsibility. Lack of agency by employees.
Presumably, the cost of cheaper premiums is more than offset by the savings of the denied claims.
—
[anecdote]
Back in the day, I worked for JIS. South Australian govt mainframe operator/help desk.
In 1995, due a Liberal (eq. to Republicans in US terms) govt coming, the then-decentralised mainframe operations became recentralised and subcontracted to EDS. Yeah, Ross Perot’s business.
Point being, we govt employees were, um, “consulted”; we didn’t have to switch employers, but then we wouldn’t be doing the jobs we were doing.
EDS reps were bemused that none of us cared for their medical insurance, about which they made a big deal. They were thinking in USAnian terms, we Aussies already had Medicare.
At the time I wondered why such a big, big deal about medical insurance in their sales pitch.
(They never got back to us after we suggested more pay and nevermind the redundant insurance)
BTW, I lasted two years with them before I quit. We were not a good fit.
@5 You might want to check out that third link in my post above
Healthcare is not competitive in the US. As has been noted in other posts, most Americans get whatever health insurance their employer offers and a lot of it is unbelievably crappy. Even if you are in the C-suite, making health insurance company choices for your company, the options are severely limited, because the health insurance industry has carved out spheres of influence/individual fiefdoms for health insurance policy coverage. So even if you wanted to do right by your employees, the odds are that you can’t. Even if you were willing to sink all the company’s profits into health insurance, you literally have limited options, because there is usually only one megacorporation offering health insurance policies through a variety of shell companies.
The only time that Americans truly had options is when Obamacare (which was really Romneycare) was being hammered out in Congress and the health insurance companies started blanketing the airwaves with “concerned citizens” worrying about “government death panels”. No, the actual death panels are in the C-suites of health insurance mega corporations.
Predictably, the voters who would later become MAGAts took the bait like a bigmouth bass.
https://www.npr.org/2017/01/10/509164679/from-the-start-obama-struggled-with-fallout-from-a-kind-of-fake-news
Walter @8, its not virtue signalling to say you do not condone murder. Its reinforcing a principle of civilisation among people that may be becoming a murderous mob.
That said, the situation in the US seems to be one where the rule of law is broken and rebelion is becoming thinkable.
The non violent path seems to reqire getting around 1/3 of your population to learn how civilisation works and attain a modicum of rationality. Seems like a hard ask at this juncture.
idn’dat the ‘murican way?
paying off those expensive claims reduces those end-of-year bonuses for the execs. who, then, is gonna buy those ferraris, montana hobby ranches, and vail ski chalets?
DanDare @11: When peaceful social change becomes impossible, violent social change becomes inevitable.
It’s worse than that, Larry.
(Sorry, couldn’t resist!)
Presumably, the savings of cheaper premiums is not quite offset by the lost employee productivity due to denied claims.
(Thus the diffused accountability aspect)
PZ, what’s with these alarming messages from jetski (or something) saying that my IP address has been flagged when I try to logon to the site and that I needed to give them my email address? scares the crap out of me because I can’t tell if the message is legit or if your site has been hacked and they’re fishing for usernames and passwords. if it is legit, why is it flagging my IP, or rather, my ISPs IP?
[OT]
Larry, you NEVER EVER give your email address to anyone on such a basis.
If you feel you must, use a throwaway email address.
—
FWIW: I just checked, and FTB is functioning as well as it ever has.
Do you run any adblockers or domain management addons such as NoScript?
If you don’t, that’s not optimal.
[not legit, obs]
I’ve been with UHC through work for the last 10 years. About 5 years ago I was diagnosed with severe aortic stenosis, and needed a new valve. There were two options. One involved open heart surgery and would have put me out of action for months and months. I would probably never work again, if I lived at all. The other was called a Trans-Aortic Valve Replacement which is similar to getting a stint, and relatively easy on the old body. So I opted for that. The form was submitted to UHC to approve the procedure, but they denied coverage for the TAVR valve. Fortunately one of my doctors contacted UHC to find out why. UHC’s records indicated that the procedure was not FDA approved. But my doctor insisted that it was approved and got the fellow at UHC to double-check. He did and verified that the procedure was in fact FDA approved. A few week later I got my valve replaced and soon after I was back at work.
It’s a very stupid system.
Freethoughtblogs will only ask for your address if you are registering, otherwise that shouldn’t happen.
@8, 13 And yet, an awful lot of people are strangely comfortable with it. At least under certain circumstances.
Americans are worried about dying from lack of coverage by their crappy health insurance companies (I am not calling them healthcare companies; they provide neither help nor care); now health insurance executives can worry about dying at the hands of a justifiably outraged public.
If I was a United Healthcare executive I’d be pretty worried right now. Public sentiment is decidedly not on the victim’s side and there are no guarantees that he’s done yet either.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/hearts-broken-unitedhealth-group-speaks-after-ceo-brian/story?id=116515711
That dude is clearly smart, focused and had a plan, which he seems to have executed amazingly well.
He was in NYC for at least 2 weeks and the only photo image of him so far is a partial face shot from a youth hostel when he was ostensibly flirting with the check in clerk, which appears to have been his only mistake so far. The police have recovered exactly one unusable fingerprint.
He used a fake ID, scoped out his target’s environment, planned and executed the shooting and then took off on an e-bike, which might possibly be the most anonymous vehicle he could have chosen, and the most versatile. A bike can go places a car can’t, can change direction on a dime and unless the bike in question is some outrageous color, nobody can really tell one bike from the next in a few seconds. He also appears to have successfully fled NYC and does not appear to have left any digital or internet trail.
That’s a scary level of smart.
Is UHC’s strategy to provide the cheapest and worst health insurance that regulators will allow, so that employers can do the bare minimum to fulfill their legal requirements? Is that what’s going on?
Honestly I’m kind of surprised that they seem to be such an outlier. I’d have thought that the cheapest and worst health insurance was a more competitive market niche.
@15 Larry
It’s the Jetpack plugin for WordPress, probably. Never give it any personal info.
@19 PZ
You should have a word with the webmaster (or, abandon all hope, your hosting provider) about that. It’s asking for e-mail addresses and the plugin has been compromised by scammers in the past.
beholder, nah.
Plugins are not the responsibility of WordPress or of the webmaster.
Here.
@ 7 silvrhalide – I wouldn’t count on a lot of public help in catching the shooter.
I’m secretly hoping he doesn’t get caught.
[“the shooter” meaning “the murderer”]
As long as murder is righteous, it’s fine.
Perfect ethics, that.
Surely justifies the death penalty!
both victim and assassin were behaving like real americans, god bless ’em. i’m sure they’ll look past these little differences when they meet in heaven.
If the rich leave the poor with nothing to eat, the poor will eat the rich.
If the rich leave the poor with nothing to eat, the poor will eat whatever they can.
And there are a shitload more poor people readily accessible, Augustus, than rich people.
Consider the accessibility heuristic.
(What, down to gnomic platitudes already?)
@27 It’s an american solution to everything: use more gun / firepower.
New life goal: Try to live such a life that if you are ever shot on the street, most people don’t cheer for the shooter. Should be easy enough, most people are able to manage that level of ethical behavior.
Johnny-boy, Marie Antoinette eats cakes in hell.
Augustus, Marie Antoinette was strongly vilified by the “victors”, much as Catherine of Russia was, and the context is USA in 2024, not France in 1792.
Entirely different milieus, utterly different technology.
—
Again: topic is tacit approval of murder. And Marie was murdered. You clearly approve of that.
(Wikipedia: “Marie Antoinette was executed by beheading by guillotine at 12:15pm on 16 October 1793 during the French Revolution.[210][211] Her last words are recorded as, “Pardonnez-moi, monsieur. Je ne l’ai pas fait exprès” or “Pardon me, sir, I did not do it on purpose”, after accidentally stepping on her executioner’s shoe.”)
[OT]
“Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia from 1762 to 1796, played a pivotal role in the history of vaccination by championing the practice of variolation, an early form of inoculation against smallpox. Her advocacy for this medical innovation had a profound impact on public health in Russia and set a precedent for future vaccination campaigns.”
(https://historyofvaccines.org/blog/empress-immunization-how-catherine-great-revolutionized-public-health/)
John Morales–
As others have already said, the US has a very different system to Australia (which has it’s own major problems right now with an outright commercial war being waged between private insurers and private hospitals). A huge chunk of the American population is only covered for health as part of an employment package. And although diffusion of responsibility is part of the problem, the biggest problem here is moral hazard given that the risks to the person are in the hands of insurers and the employers.
I don’t necesarily approve of murder but I can’t say I’m going to mourn for or be upset about the death of an evil greedy man who did nothing but make the world a worse place through his own chosen actions. Nor am I going to condemn those understandably celebrating his death.
I also hope the reaction of the world to this greedy sociopaths death acts as a deterrent and a metaphorical wake up call to other such biullionaires much as (apocryphally?) Alfred’s Nobel’s premature obituary inspired him to think about what he could do to change his legacy.* Le marchand de la mort est mort (“The merchant of death is dead”)
See : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Nobel#Nobel_Prize
The shooter is not a murderer until such time as he is captured, tried in court and convicted of murder by a jury of his peers.
Until he is actually convicted, he remains a shooter.
It’s why school shooters are called shooters and not murderers.
People can be murdered or killed but the cause of death could conceivably receive a verdict of NGI, not guilty by reason of insanity. So the victims are murdered or killed but there is, legally speaking, not a murderer as a cause of death.
@ 30 At this point, I think the best the UHC CEO’s family can hope for is to bury the deceased in secret so his grave doesn’t get violated.
@34 The biggest problem with “choice” in American healthcare is that there isn’t any on the individual level. The only choice most American workers have is “take it or leave it”. There’s your choice.
@ John Morales, #2
You’re missing a piece of the equation, there: the US has been carved up by insurance companies so that, in most places, you essentially only have one option to buy from. They make more money by not competing. In my case, I’m “self-insured” meaning I had to buy my own insurance from the one and only company that sells policies to self-insured people in my state (Anthem Blue Cross/Blue Shield).
If I worked for a company that had an insurance plan as part of its compensation package, I’d have another option, which is to take whatever plan the company bought from whatever insurance company they’d contracted with. But I don’t, so I have to deal with Anthem BCBS, who offered me exactly two options: the shitty and extremely expensive plan, and the shittier, marginally less expensive plan. I opted for the former, because the latter essentially covered nothing beyond catastrophic illness and injury, and only that if they couldn’t find some way to weasel out of paying.
For my $700+ a month, I get catastrophic coverage, once my $8,000 deductible is met. I get prescription coverage, with a copay of $0-$75, once my separate $3,000 deductible for prescriptions is met. I also coverage for doctor’s visits with a $25 copay (for general practitioners; the copay is higher for specialists), once my separate deductible for office visits and lab testing is met. All this only applies to physicians, hospitals, pharmacies, and labs that are in my insurance network.
Believe me, I’d love to take my business elsewhere, but the only way I could do that is to move. I can’t afford that and, even if I could, the options elsewhere in the US aren’t much better.
And, if you’re thinking that it would be cheaper for me not to have insurance at all, you’re mostly right… unless I need emergency care, or surgery, or a lot expensive tests.
@John Morales, you are neither young nor unintelligent. What on earth makes you still believe that the healthcare market in the USA is open and that people, even informed ones, have meaningful choices that include the ability to actually choose good and accessible options? I do agree that a significant portion of the American populace seems awfully ignorant and proud of their own stupidity but your #2 reads like you are blaming the victims here.
I was in the USA over a quarter of a century ago and spoke to a high-ranking hotel manager who had what he considered “good” health insurance because he had a moderately high income and could afford it. He still had to pay through his nose for his chronic illness medication on top of what the insurance covered. He admitted that if his income were lower, he actually would have only two realistic options – either die of his illness or die of starvation.
A family acquaintance of mine was a government employee at the Pentagon and as such, he has one of the cheapest and best healthcare plans there, and it covers his wife too. He still had to actually argue with his doctors to test her for Alzheimer’s because they did not know if the insurance covered the test and had to find out. And the insurance does not cover the assisted care she needs.
I have seen no indication on the internet that the situation improved over the years, quite the opposite.
[Charly, I was being sardonic. “(So, one does not think that)”]
Kyle Kulinski and, I guess, collegue* (?) discuss this nicely here – Internet ERUPTS IN GLEE Over United Health CEO Kílling on their Secular Talk YT channel 22 mins length. WARNING : Some possibly offensive / NSFW gendered language.
.* Didn’t catch her name, not sure who she is, sorry.
In the current system, the rule of law is for the peasants and does not really apply to the rich, so I don’t really have a problem with extrajuridical solutions.
I am sure in the past also there were many feudal lord’s who got stabbed “unlawfully” by their peasants and they fucking deserved it.
@ ^ lotharloo : Yup. Exhibit A : Trump.
^Also slave owners killed by slaves in USoA too..
^& elsewhere everywhere there are (were ..no,sadly are.. Still) slaves & “masters.”
One side can approve of murdering insurance executives who scam the masses, while the other side can approve of killing children. What a wonderful society.
Public attitudes towards science are subject to the “outsider affect.” Science looks very different when looking in from the outside. Scientists know that they aren’t like that heartless greedhead CEO of United Health, and the public sort of appreciates the distinction. But we also know that science supplies the medical technology which give greedheads their power.
Civic textbooks tell us that democracy will give us sound public policy, which will protect the common good. But the GOP has sold its soul to the dark side, and the Democrats are conflicted between “protect your voters,” and “take the money and run.” If the voters no longer seem to care about their interests, if you can screw them with impunity, then the “power of the ballot,” falls flat. Democracy is the only system which inherently gives ordinary people a say in what will be done to them. Lose democracy, and you bring back the horrors of the Middle Ages. (People back then were not fundamentally more evil that we are, it’s just that we have democracy and they didn’t.)
Science can be, and should be, used to benefit everyone. But if access to the benefits is controlled by the rich and powerful, it is all too easy for those on the receiving end to lump scientists in with “them.” If you want science, work for justice!
All the liberal tuttuting about how we should feel bad this guy rightly git plugged is really disgusting. You are all moral cowards who sleep admissions die and suffer specifically at the hands of this man. Millions of people are denied life saving treatment because this man made the decision to deny their care solely to pad shareholder pockets. People have been trying to improve american Healthcare for 100 fucking years and at every turn it has been systematically stymied and sabotaged by the rich and powerful. This is literally a case of a mass murder finally getting a little comeuppance and yall are morally outraged because the shooter didn’t fill out the proper fucking paperwork. Especially for you non americans who have socialized Healthcare you need to shut the fuck up because quite frankly you are moral pygmies, tiny monsters waddling in the wake of these bloated demons.
Not “sleep admissions ” but “sleep as millions” and yes it’s literally millions in America.
A whole lot of people decrying murder seem to be perfectly fine when it’s done slowly and agonizing through systemic force instead. A lot of people have a reductive understanding that flattens “being glad when someone who was powerful and above the law and helped bring misery and death to thousands of people is killed” to “condoning murder” in general. What happened to this guy was downright merciful compared to what his company did to scores of people daily.
Me and my family are currently the targets of genocide. “We will eradicate transgenderism” is a rallying cry for the right, and we are facing an onslaught of laws designed to eliminate us from society. The people pushing these laws are protected by them; we are not, and the Democrats are next to useless when it comes to preventing our genocide. If arrested, we face loss of the medication that makes our lives worth living and systemic rape in prison (look up the common practice of “v-coding”.
In a country with so many guns, it’s inevitable some will fight back against the people responsible. A lot of people seem to think trans people are responsible for their own oppression and that if they don’t behave as their communities are being destroyed and their loved ones are perishing, they are just providing their oppressors with reasons to be more aggressive. (This common line follows the exact same logic as those who victim-blame with regards to rape, both flavors of which I have unfortunately been on the receiving end of and of which is perhaps the single most infuriating thing for many of us to hear from someone.) A lot of you make posts that echo pre-WWII opinion columns from people “sympathetic to their cause” lecturing Jews on how they should behave under the rise of Nazi Germany.
A lot of you don’t seem to understand that laws are backed with violence. When you decry victims of oppression using violence against their oppressors, you ignore the fact that it is already perpetually used against them. You claim violence isn’t necessary but every state in the world who claims a monopoly on it certainly disagrees and uses it to often devastating results. A lot of you have this downright childish, context-insensitive morality that is indifferent to blocking thousands of people access to readily available, lifesaving medicine, with the threat of force, resulting in mass suffering and death, but outraged when someone shoots one of the relatively few who is responsible for it.
A lot of you value abstract, arbitrary rules and the concept of “stability”, a concept that those who have been denied lifesaving medicine, who are systemically oppressed due to the color of their skin, who are specifically targeted by the law and threatened with rape in prison due to their gender, are never afforded, over actual felt experiences. A lot of you, when push comes to shove, are more content with doing fascists’ work for them than supporting those who fight back. Seeing the overwhelming enthusiastic response to the news lately has been the one thing over the last month that has given me and so many others in my community any kind of hope. I’m hoping that the “a lot of”s I’ve been typing here become more and more outnumbered.
When there is no legal accountability for people who cause the (completely forseeable) death of innocent people, then other techniques to achieve accountability become plausible, on the “that man needed shootin'” principle.
Officials in forced-birth states where pregnant women bleed out because of their actions should reconsider their life-choices.
One used a gun, the other used laws, regulations and technology to kill. They are both murderers. My opinion is the one who used administrative wrangling to accomplish his goals would use the gun to kill if his position in life were at the bottom of society. The insurance executive could also be labeled serial killer.
https://futurism.com/nypd-ai-find-ceo-killer
NYPD at its finest.
You know that the trail has gone cold when the cops start relying on AI to find a suspect.
Personally, I was shocked that the cops even found the backpack. Lonely possessions tend to find new owners quickly in NYC, especially Central Park.
I can’t condone a murder but at the same time, I also can’t mourn the death of a vampire. The motives of the killer are not clearly known, only inferred. But if he for example lost a loved one to the brutal practices of his health insurance company, the murder is understandable and IMO morally justifiable. This man had on his hands the blood of millions. Killing him is not on the same moral plane as killing an innocent would be. Not even close.
The legal system should not allow the deaths of those millions in the first place. If there were no vampires, nobody would need garlic and wooden stakes.
As far as Marie-Antoinette and the cake quote goes, even though she might not say exactly those words, the odds are that she did utter something similarly oblivious and infuriating. She was a sheltered, privileged person who lived a life of luxury completely divorced from the day-to-day reality of her subjects. To this day privileged asshats say those things. Remember that “avocado toast” guy? A millionaire who assumed that poor people could save for a house by not buying avocadoes on toast? Plus rich conservative commentators the world over utter similar things on the internet on almost a daily basis.
I found this to be a rather informative article: The deep roots of Americans’ hatred of their health care system
I miss David Graeber. To quote him from his book “Bullshit jobs”
My daily email from the New Yorker features an article with a title which begins “A Man Was Murdered in Cold Blood…”. The cold blood part is arguable. We need to find a way to hold people accountable for stochastic deaths, which are admittedly difficult to assign.
@56 They are absolutely bullshit jobs, but they are bullshit jobs that are seen as a gateway to middle class employment for people who would otherwise be unemployed or be working class.
The numbers vary, but there are about 17 nonhealthcare providers for every actual healthcare provider in the US system. Receptionists, office assistants, insurance coders, patient advocates to argue with the crappy insurance representative over denied claims, etc.
They are a major reason that the US healthcare is so expensive. (Pharmacy benefit managers, obscene drug companies, etc are other reasons.)
However…
If the US goes to a single payer system (I wish!), all of those employees are out of a job… and health insurance.
Americans are (justifiably) terrified of being without health insurance and are (justifiably) terrified over losing even the crappy healthcare that we have now for something even worse.
The Affordable Care Act was some bitterly fought legislation and was, frankly, some crappy compromise legislation that satisfied no one and didn’t really solve the problem of overwhelming healthcare costs. The one really good thing that came out of it was the prohibition on preexisting conditions.
Another appropriate one from This Modern World: The Doctor Will See You Now.
I’m a little conflicted about the crime . Feel sorry for the victim’s wife and kids . If he’s responsible for some of the crap that health insurance companies do to people , I don’t feel so sorry for him. The killer , I’m not sorry for him at all and frankly hope he gets caught. He traumatised a lot of people including bystanders, colleagues and relatives of this man he killed.
I am fortunate either in my health overall or my work based coverage so have no horror stories to tell yet about my own health insurance, but I am appalled more at the health insurance industry itself than at some rogue killer of a CEO. Kinda hard to feel bad for him per se. Yet I have no idea why the shooter killed him so I’m not about to canonize him.
One of Obama’s failings was lacking a spine for the public option. I mean it wasn’t even single payer. He was more successful than the Clintons in the 90s though. I know people who have benefited from ACA even in shithole Florida so it wasn’t an epic fail. It could have been much better.
Lucky for my dad that he served two years in the newly minted Air Force in Alaska during the Korean War so he was able to utilize VA benefits for his COPD that progressed to emphysema. My mom had work provided insurance for her three cancer bouts but still wound up with a shit ton of medical debt when she passed away. My dad did too.
Anyway I recall this bit of apt polemics by the ever abrasive Florida Democratic Representative Alan Grayson (who wound up being something of a jackass himself for other reasons):
I also recall the Denzel movie * John Q* for some perhaps relevant reason. And Michael Moore’s Sicko. Health careinsurance is fucked up in the US and it pisses people off. Too much money is being made for it to be reformed adequately.
My “Kinda hard to feel bad for him per se. Yet I have no idea why the shooter killed him so I’m not about to canonize him.” was unclear. Cocoa porter. It should read that it is kinda hard to feel bad for the CEO per se. Yet I have no idea why the shooter killed the CEO so I’m not about to canonize the shooter.
I do get why he’s becoming something of a folk hero though whether that sentiment is appropriate. Fuck appropriate.
Next up: is killing an oil company executive self defense?
Marcus, no.
The executive will be replaced with another executive.
No net gain.
@ Marcus Ranum, #63
No, killing an oil executive is not self-defense.
Obama and some of those others need to look up something called the “broken window fallacy”.
@30, 38, 48, 54,60
https://futurism.com/neoscope/replies-insurance-ceo-social-media-chilling
Note that Montana does indeed have anesthesiologists but UHC just won’t pay for any of them. Also notable is that none of the anesthesiologists will accept UHC b/c it is out of network, so if you live in Montana, be prepared to pay the entire cost out of pocket. And there’s no point in being mad at the anesthesiologists either–they have a living to make and med school loans to pay off, to say nothing of operating costs like rent, medical equipment, malpractice insurance, etc. Whatever cut-rate reimbursement UHC is offering is probably not enough to keep the doors open and the lights on.
UHC is happy to take your premium money though.
Maybe the CEO’s family actually misses him and maybe they don’t.
No one has any way of knowing. It’s entirely possible they will miss the income and not much else.
A person who deliberately signs off on a bespoke algorithm to deny the elderly and sick health benefits 90% of the time is clearly betting on the court system to rule in their favor. As US wrongful death lawsuits go, generally you have to prove some sort of economic loss or else wildly egregious behavior in the denial of claim (for punitive damages, a thing that is very hard to prove in the US legal system). So if your 70 year old grandmother dies because UHC won’t pay for her medical care, generally the best you can do is collect for largely nonexistent financial damages by her loss. (Translation: the lawyers will cost more than you will ever wring out of UHC.) Could she have lived to 80 or 90 with treatment? Probably? But the US legal system isn’t set up to pay out on that kind of emotional loss. Or punish the people who cause it with their denial of claims.
There’s a reason the shooter left bullet casings with “deny”, “defend” and “depose” written on them at the scene of the crime.
The other thing to keep in mind is that a person who can kill people with a stroke of a pen or keyboard and sleep soundly at night is a person who clearly has parts missing. No one really misses a sociopath. For all the official outpouring of sorrow re: the UHC family is deeply saddened by the passing of our CEO etc., I wonder how many UHC immediately dusted off their resumés in the hopes of getting the deceased’s job & paycheck. Because, face it, it’s that kind of company.
For all we know, he might have been horrible to his wife and kids too. Because that dude clearly had parts missing. (Case in point: Harvey Weinstein. He wasn’t just a sexual predator of women, he was a shit to everyone he ever met. The misogyny was just a red flag that everyone in Miramax chose to ignore.)
@63 Maybe?
Let me pose a hypothetical: you and your family live close to a petroleum processing plant. As per most processing plants, the physical and chemical safeguards are few and/or faulty. Your family is constantly subjected to toxic chemical fumes from the petroleum plant and state and federal officials. The toxic chemicals give your kids/spouse/you cancer.
Are you justified in killing the CEO who is directly and indirectly killing you?
I’d also like to point out the silver lining in that after the UHC CEO was gunned down, a number of other health insurance companies reminded a number of other harsh restrictions on healthcare (note the links in upthread posts for denial of anesthesia & other care). Message sent and received! By the intended audience!
The shooter killed ONE person.
How many lives will be saved because that hit job made health insurance executives fear for their own lives enough to reverse unconscionable healthcare restrictions? Restrictions that will clearly kill patients or throw them into unrecoverable bankruptcy.
Do the needs of the many (patients/healthcare policyholders) outweigh the needs of one SOB CEO?
There’s a reason the shooter is on his way to becoming a folk hero to some.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/12/06/unitedhealthcare-ceo-brian-thompson-threats-court-battles/
Apparently he wasn’t living his “fullest life” with his actual family though.
I guess the wife (a physical therapist) is lucky that she had her husband’s CEO millions to live off of, instead of having to rely on her income as a physical therapist, one who might have otherwise had to eke out a living on whatever insurance companies, including UHC, threw her way as a medical practitioner.
@silvrhalide:
100% he had a number of affairs and whatnot around the globe. The average rich person is the most scummiest scumbag you’ll ever meet.
LoL, Johnny M, the petulant contrarian spouts royalist propaganda again.
No, Cake-stuffing Antoinette was instrumental in influencing her weak-willed spouse to keep opposing any change to the political system that might favor the lower classes, to never compromise and to invite war just so outside monarchs could put them back on their cushy absolutist thrones again. She absolutely deserved getting her bloated head lopped off for this and the constant waste she indulged in while the masses had trouble buying bread and were squeezed hard with taxes because the first and second estate refused to contribute to the state they were mooching off of.
[OT]
“royalist propaganda”, heh.
You’ve bought into the legend.
Here, for you: “The phrase “let them eat cake” is often conventionally attributed to Marie Antoinette, but there is no evidence that she ever uttered it, and it is now generally regarded as a journalistic cliché.[228] This phrase originally appeared in Book VI of the first part of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s autobiographical work Les Confessions, finished in 1767 and published in 1782: “Enfin Je me rappelai le pis-aller d’une grande Princesse à qui l’on disait que les paysans n’avaient pas de pain, et qui répondit: Qu’ils mangent de la brioche” (“Finally I recalled the stopgap solution of a great princess who was told that the peasants had no bread, and who responded: ‘Let them eat brioche'”). Rousseau ascribes these words to a “great princess”, but the purported writing date precedes Marie Antoinette’s arrival in France. Some think that he invented it altogether.[229]”
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Antoinette#In_popular_culture)
BTW, equating a monarch in C18 with an executive in C21 is rather silly.
(Executives are middle-class, they work for a living)
I always thought the “punching nazis” argument was just a prelude to the main act.
Interesting to see, “it’s just punching, not killing someone; stop being so hyperbolic!”, evolve into, “y’know maybe killing isn’t so bad after all”.
So… NYPD found the shooter’s backpack… which was filled with Monopoly money. IOW, the one that the shooter wanted the cops to find. Kind of a statement there, with the Monopoly money.
https://abc7ny.com/post/unitedhealthcare-ceo-murder-latest-nypd-searching-central-park-pond-possible-evidence/15626851/
They also have video of his cab ride, which shows only his eyes and eyebrows. I’m sure that will be very helpful on the wanted posters.
Dude is just playing with the cops and the FBI.
@ Silentbob, #74
Yes, punching is punching, and it’s rarely (deliberate) murder. It would not be correct, however, to call the famous Nazi-punching incidents a “prelude” to murder. The punching was a warning, a way to say to Nazis that we will not idly tolerate them repeating the atrocities of the past. It’s a violent rejection of everything Nazis stand for- which, I remind you, is the enslavement and extermination of everyone who isn’t a Nazi.
Punching a Nazi says “we will fight back.” Killing Nazis was not only always on the table, but I’d argue that there’s a point at which it becomes a moral imperative. Others may disagree, but I happen to believe that, if it will stop Nazis from repeating past crimes against humanity, it’s better to murder Nazis than allow them to murder those whose only crimes are being Jewish, LGBTQ+, disabled, politically left-wing, or otherwise inconvenient to Nazis ideas of “purity.” Personally, I really hope it doesn’t get to the point.
However, none of this is actually relevant to the topic at hand, as the murdered individual in this case was not, so far as I’m aware, a Nazi. Yes, he was a party to mass murder (as are all health insurance executives), but the bloodshed of insurance execs is generally motivated by greed rather than the exterminationist white Christian nationalism that drives Nazis.
I’m a firm believer in hitting people greedy execs where it hurts them the most: their wallet. Murdering one, or even all health insurance execs, would be unlikely to save any lives. The health insurance machinery of death would keep on churning without interruption because, unlike Nazism, it doesn’t rely on forceful leaders and a core of fanatical followers to keep moving. It’s just people doing their jobs and pretending that the industry’s body count is not their responsibility. You can’t destroy a monstrosity like that with a few bullets. The only thing that will work is turning the law against them.
Ultimately, we must turn the law against Nazis, too. Alas, in the short term, the law belongs to Nazis. It will not protect the vulnerable. Murder is always bad, but sometimes not killing is the worse choice.
FYI.
Our local regional hospital dropped United Healthcare as a partner a while back.
They no long recognize United Healthcare insurance and Medicare Advantage plans as in network.
Which makes them pretty useless for the people who have those policies.
Most patients switched to other plans if they could.
It is no secret why they did that.
If United Healthcare denies claims, the hospital quite often ends up not getting paid either.
@Silentbob:
Did you support the killing of Bin Laden? I know it’s a hyperbolic example because Osama was responsible for far fewer American deaths than this guy but I would like to know if you actually like “civility” or just the veneer of it.