Americans React to UnitedHealthcare CEO's Murder: 'My Empathy Is Out of Network' | Hacker News Reader

Americans React to UnitedHealthcare CEO's Murder: 'My Empathy Is Out of Network'

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182 pointspseudolus475 comments

Our collective reaction to this event makes it clear that there is substantial support for massive changes to the for-profit insurance industry. But every time we've tried to make it a public benefit, those attempts have fallen flat. Sure seems like the industry is able to lobby and market it's way to staying alive, despite the ire of the people paying them.

Decades ago I recall a previous attempt at moving towards a one-payer system, and it having some traction. My mother had some fairly serious health issues, and had many battles with getting insurance claims paid, living month to month in a single mother salary. Yet she also was firmly of the opinion that a one-payer system would be terrible, parroting the marketing of the industry advertising campaigns. Despite having a daughter in law that was Canadian, who's mother went through cancer and had superb care under a single-payer system.

It's complicated. Health insurance is expensive because healthcare is expensive. Different countries have approached this differently. In the UK the doctor will see you in 5 years, in China the government sponsors snake oil ( traditional Chinese medicine), and in Canada they introduced MAID (the 'just kill yourself now' health plan).

But it seems obvious that inserting a group of middlemen into an already expensive system is going to make it more expensive. The complexity of dealing with all the insurance companies is literally overwhelming.

It is so confusing to me that "socialized healthcare" is such a dirty word, when the whole purpose of insurance is, a it's core, introducing socialism into healthcare. If you are anti-socialism, cancel your healthcare and just private pay for your healthcare. :-)

Sadly, we in the US seem to be sliding in that direction with the noises being made about "healthcare pools".

Yes, insurance is effectively a form of voluntary socialism implemented on top of the free market. That's why it sucks so much in the first place. (Which isn't to say a purely market based system would be better; people buy insurance for a reason.)

As I see it, health insurance is uniquely bad for a few additional reasons:

1. People don't treat it as insurance against catastrophic events so much as a subscription for ongoing care, which greatly expands the scope of what costs are socialized.

2. It's often paid for through employers, which reduces consumer choice in deciding what plans to purchase.

3. Demand for healthcare services is relatively inelastic and with modern medicine there's often almost no limit to how much it can cost. If you wreck your car, at most your car insurance company is on the hook for the cost of the vehicle (and perhaps some additional costs up to a fixed limit). But if you're suffering from some disease with no known cure, you could easily spend tens of millions trying hundreds of different procedures trying to find something that will work to mitigate the effects of the disease, and that's an ongoing cost that goes on forever until you're either cured or dead. Somebody has to decide which procedures are worth it or not, and if you're not paying for it yourself that "somebody" isn't going to be you, which creates lots of inefficiencies and is heartbreaking for everyone involved. This is also why we end up with systems such as "in network" and "out of network" providers, and government regulations intended to make things more fair at the cost of even more layers of inefficient bureaucracy.

A few other thoughts:

> If you are anti-socialism, cancel your healthcare and just private pay for your healthcare.

Even for those who might be inclined to do so, this often isn't viable because of #2; they'd be leaving a bunch of free money on the table. I've also heard stories of some healthcare providers charging private individuals many times what they'd charge an insurance company for the same thing, though I'm not sure how common that still is today.

> inserting a group of middlemen into an already expensive system is going to make it more expensive

This is true, though note that government healthcare just replaces one set of middlemen with another.

> Yes, insurance is effectively a form of voluntary socialism implemented on top of the free market.

No, its not. Socialism is when the working class exercises control of the (non-financial) means of production. Insurance is neither about workers qua workers or control of the non-financial means of production.

Using disproportionate control of financial resources to sell risk-leveling as a service and therebu increase your disproportionate control of financial resources isn’t socialism.

... which is why I put quotes around my use of the term above. Single-payer plans are often referred to as "socialized healthcare", whether it fits the dictionary definition of socialism or not.

So, can we focus on problems and solutions and not argue about definitions? I don't think it brings anything to the table.

> Single-payer plans are often referred to as "socialized healthcare"

This is mainly an Americanism which is grounded in a similar mistake about socialism, though in a society which is actually democratic and predominantly working class, a State directed use of resources for a particular public service is at least not-entirely-unrelated to socialism (though if it is a single payer atrangement where the payees are private owners of the means of production actually employing providers of service, it is still not socialism; actually socialized medicine is, for example, where the worker-controlled state controls the hospitals, equipment, and other capital used in providing healthcare, and employs the doctors, nurses, etc. directly), whereas a commercial offering by a private capitalist profit-making entity is... nothing like socialism.

> So, can we focus on problems and solutions and not argue about definitions?

You are literally attributing a problem specific to capitalism to “socialism” and badly twisting the definition of socialism to do it. That’s not really a sign of being interested in “problems and solutions”, but of being interested in promoting ideological fantasies about capitalism.

If you were interested in what works, you'd look at why the problem is unique to the US and what distinguishes the US healthcare system from those of other developed economies.

I don't know if I'd call it a mistake... I'm pretty sure the phrase "socialized healthcare" was deliberately selected to help try to demonize the idea, supporting the insurance industry lobbying.

> People don't treat it as insurance against catastrophic events so much as a subscription for ongoing care

_People_ don't treat it this way, it IS this way.

Health insurance resembles insurance in almost none of the important ways.

Picture health insurance models laid on top of your car:

Imagine your car gets totaled. Your insurer says, "Hey, we're going to pay out $25K for your vehicle. So you have a $1,000 deductible, so that's $24,000, and then your copay for a total loss is $2,000, so that brings us down to $22,000. For total losses, your coinsurance as your contribution for your vehicle coverage is 20%, which is $5,000, so here's a check for $17,000. But that's only if you're buying a Hyundai, otherwise the vehicle is out of network and you'll get a check for $8,500 instead."

(And to be clear, I'm not saying auto insurance is without its own issues and sketchiness, just that it at least conforms to actual "insurance").

I think a better analogy to my point would be if making insurance claims for oil changes was considered a normal and accepted practice.

But you're right, that's part of the reason we end up with things like copays. My 3rd point above is also responsible for a lot of this.

And your insurance works with a mechanic:

How much is this oil change going to cost?

-- Can't tell ya. you have insurance though, right?

I have Geico. The oil change was $25 last year. Let's just do it, you're telling me it's necessary.

-- Great! It'll be done in about 25 minutes.

...

-- That'll be $1895.00, I'll send you the bill. But if you take care of it right here, I'll lower the price to $425.00.

WHAT!? 425 for an oil change? What a RIP! $125 is all you're getting from me.

-- Pleased doing business with you. See you again next year!

Simplifying the system should be the goal for lawmakers IMO. But that would never really get much traction. Getting care to people who need it has an obvious priority, so we layer more and more complexity over the current system.

Capitalism with transfer payments (the Nordic model) and socialism (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics model) are two very different things.

Regardless of how we might wish it to be, it's an observable fact that the latter sense is how the word socialized is understood in the USA. And yeah, people rightly object to totalitarian control over their health care, whether it's by a government or a for profit cartel that has managed to achieve a stranglehold on medical payments.

Most working people in the US are on private healthcare. What you are saying makes no sense. Most everyone agrees our current system isn’t working and needs fixing.

It's not that complicated. Healthcare is expensive, sure.

It's made more expensive by allowing the private healthcare industry to operate in such a parasitic way.

Americans and their employers pay an obscene amount of money to insurance companies every year for "health insurance". In turn, those companies use that money to employ people full time to find ways to deny people the coverage that they pay for based on technicalities. They do this so that they can pay people like Brian Thompson more money.

It's a disgusting and immoral system that should not be allowed to exist.

It is worse than that now, though, because they own doctors as well through Optum under the united health group umbrella corporation.

>In the UK the doctor will see you in 5 years

I get your point but for reality's sake the last time I saw a doctor, on the NHS in the UK it took one day. The service is a bit ropey but in strange ways.

Yeah but many people wait months to see specialists in the US that will only give them 10 minutes of their time...

The NHS is crumbling under a decade and a half of underfunding and intentional mismanagement to designed to prove it doesn't work by the Tories, and even then, it isn't as bad as you make out. There are 100% unacceptable wait times for some things and some procedures, but I'd take having an annoyingly long wait to see my GP over people I care about not having healthcare at all, and realistically it isn't as bad as you are making out.

In 2022, the British government spent £3.5k ($4.4k) per person per year on healthcare. The US spent $13k per person per year in 2022, of which $6.2k was government (national+state+local)[2]. The UK government spends less per person than the US government on healthcare, even before the amount paid privately.

Even if you think the UK's healthcare is worse than the US (which I fundamentally disagree with), you have an extra $2k to play with and do better than the UK before it costs more than the current system to the government, and then another $6k of extra tax before people would be more out of pocket than with private healthcare.

Healthcare is complicated, all systems have flaws and all are vulnerable to being manipulated. None of that changes that the US has the worst system, run in the worst way, with the least efficiency. And that's without even getting to the obvious point that a country where people are healthier is worth paying for: my friends and family, colleagues, people I interact with being well, living longer, and not having diseases is very worth paying for and I want to be taxed to achieve that.

[1]: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan... [2]: https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-repo...

>"In 2022, the British government spent £3.5k ($4.4k) per person per year on healthcare. The US spent $13k per person per year in 2022, of which $6.2k was government (national+state+local)[2]. The UK government spends less per person than the US government on healthcare, even before the amount paid privately."

The difference in medical spending is largely due to wage costs being much higher in the USA than the UK; healthcare insurance companies are not as profitable as it may seem (they're about as profitable as other insurance businesses). Pharmaceutical prices don't explain much of the difference either, because they’re only a single-digit percentage of healthcare spending (in the USA).

It isn't about the profit margin of the insurance companies it's about their purpose. What value do they add to the healthcare industry?

Aren't healthcare insurance companies intrinsically an inefficiency that could be outright eliminated?

If there is to be some control on healthcare spending, and/or policing of fraud, someone must approve and decline payment for services. This is the function currently fulfilled by the insurance companies. You can eliminate the companies, but anyone performing the service will consume some amount of overhead.

Well whatever is going on in America[0] it just isn't working.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Life_expectancy_vs_heal...

It isn't intrinsic. In any modern healthcare system, someone has to manage resource allocation and risk pooling. Some countries have government perform those functions, which can be more efficient but isn't necessarily so. In the USA, even the government run Medicare health plan outsources much of the administrative work to for-profit companies.

@nickff shouldn't that be a not-for-profit watchdog capability then? Not a massive money making middleman?

(Can't reply that deep)

Even if that is true, how does that change anything about what I said? The government can evidently do this more effectively, fairly, and efficiently.

That may be true; what are you basing this view on? How do you evaluate those three criteria?

> what are you basing this view on?

Every other developed nation?

It seems that it's not as clear to me, so could you please explain how one should evaluate those criteria?

The most obvious criteria is cost per citizen. The US has, by far, the highest cost per citizen. And also the lowest quality care.

I explained in my original post. The fact the UK government spends less than the US government on healthcare per-capita, despite the fact it gives everyone healthcare rather than just a subset of the population is pretty damning. How can anyone possibly argue the US system is working more efficiently given that?

The UK has private health insurance available for purchase too, right? I'd be curious to see what that per capita amount is. Does UK private insurance mean you opt out of the public system, or does it provide coverage for more things on top of the public system?

Yes, it's not opt-out, just additional coverage or the use of private facilities. Apparently about £1k per capita[1], I'd suspect a lot of that is probably dental due to a huge shortage of NHS dentists.

Historically private healthcare here was just about fancier rooms, better food, etc... Now it's often "the NHS said I need to wait 6 months to get this procedure, if I pay I can get it next week". A lot of the time with the same doctors and same facilities as if you went NHS.

In general, if you weren't waiting a long time for NHS healthcare, people were happy with it: five or so years back I worked for an American company that offered private healthcare as standard, even in the UK, and the healthcare company offered you £50 a day while you got NHS treatment rather than actually using their services while you had coverage, as it was obviously much cheaper for them, and everyone I knew took that deal every time.

Increasingly this is less true though, a decade and a half of being slowly throttled, then Covid, and you can feel that everyone is rushed and stretched to breaking point.

[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/283221/per-capita-health...

Thanks! So even including the folks who get private insurance on top of NHS, the healthcare spending difference between the UK and US is massive.

I'd add that the point of insurance is to pool risk for rare but costly incidents. Somehow we have a system where it also pays for foreseeable and very likely events. Of course supply and demand market competition breaks down in a non linear S/D case where there is no elasticity of demand. Ideally routine care would never be covered by insurance with full proce transparency like plastic surgery. Further separating health insurance from employment would drastically reduce the number of unique plans offered making it more efficient.

It would also require public non profit manufacturing of drugs to reduce the cost.

If routine and preventive care isn't covered by some form of insurance than low-income people won't be able to afford it at all. Some of those costs are inevitably going to be pooled.

Generic drug manufacturers have very low profit margins. Switching manufacturing of generics to non-profit organizations would have very little impact on total healthcare system costs.

If you're suggesting handing over ownership of patent protected drugs to non-profit organizations, well that would lower costs in the short term. It would also ensure the pipeline of new drug development is slowed to a trickle.

New drug development is largely funded by the government already. There are basically 0 new compounds on the market in the last 20 years. Most of the cost for drug development that is pricately funded is just dealing with regulation, not doing R&D. It is always economically more efficient to develop drugs instead of cures.

The vast majority of drug development costs are are in phase-3 human clinical trials. That's not just regulation, it's essential to prove safety and efficiency. The government provides very little funding for those trials. Stop making things up.

A lot of the reason efficacy is so regulated is that people shouldn't go into debt for snake oil. If on the other hand there is no cost to the patient and minimal cost to the taxpayer the downside for inefficacy is much less and doctors would be freer let patients take a chance. It would also help more drugs get tested faster on more people.

No offense, but I find this comment ignorant at best and purposefully misleading at worst.

I've visited emergency multiple times over the 20+ years I've been living in Australia. The first time I left with crutches, a casted ankle, and a whole slew of scans indicating it was just a serious sprain, not a bone break or tissue tear. I was almost out of emergency before I turned around and uncomfortably announced that I was leaving and yet hadn't paid for anything. A doctor came directly over, pressed the button for the automatic doors, and said "It's ok, this isn't America. You're free to leave, and you don't owe us any payment. Your taxes cover this."

I have severe spinal stenosis. On Tuesday I had an EOS scan. $0. Last year I had both an MRI and CT scan. Both cost me nothing and were covered by the public health system. If I had these 3 scans done in the US without private health care I'd be out of pocket $10k or more.

I've lived in a few countries and the Aussie system is by far the best I've used.

I've also had that "so I've just come out of the doc's, how much do I owe?" at reception, only to be told "nope, you're good, see you in 3 months for your next checkup" shock.

The U.S. spends much more money on health care per capita than any country on the planet, with far less to show for it. This is a uniquely American problem.

https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/health-...

> Decades ago I recall a previous attempt at moving towards a one-payer system, and it having some traction.

Obamacare had a public option up until the last moment before passage. It was dropped because they were one vote Senate vote shy of the required 60 votes.

Lieberman was heavily lobbied by the insurance industry and promised to join the Republicans and filibuster Obamacare entirely if they kept the public option in.

I blame Rahm Emanuel, Obama's chief of staff, who threw public health on the pyre as a sacrifice to Mammon, and his minions in the Donor Class.

He comes from a country that does have single payer but doesn't think it's worth doing for people in this country.

You are confusing two separate issues. A single-payer system would also deny many claims (or refuse to authorize many expensive treatments). Every socialized healthcare system rations care. It might be a net improvement overall, but we see a lot of affluent Canadians coming to the USA as medical tourists to skip the queues back home.

For cancer care, the USA generally has better 5-year survival rates than Canada.

Example of rationing in Canada (posting because I saw the article yesterday): https://ca.news.yahoo.com/halifax-woman-waited-3-years-10000...

What collective reaction? Sounds like you're in a bubble.

I have observed both responses. There are lots of people basically celebrating murder (sometimes veiled behind thin excuses and wordplay). There are lots of people condemning it too. Most people (not terminal social media dwellers) seem to be in the latter group, thankfully.

The vast majority of people I've talked to IRL, conservative and liberal, are thrilled about this. "American hero" is the phrase I've heard tossed around quite often.

Can't say it wasn't the best news of the week, maybe even the past month.

> basically celebrating murder

of a guy who basically runs death panel...

It's a problem of definitions. When you kill hundreds or thousands of people indirectly, as in you do not literally pull the trigger, that is not murder. But if you shoot one person, that is murder.

I've seen people advocate the death penalty for much, much less. If anyone stopped and did the math on how many people this CEO has killed, undoubtedly he would never see the sun again.

However, our system is specifically designed to maximize personal liability while minimizing collective liability. So, one is murder, and the other is good business. Whether or not this particular propaganda has seeped into an American mind depends on the person.

It's a frying pan or the fire situation. The frying pan is government healthcare. The collective US thinks the government run program is a garbage fire. Obvious reasons are that (1) it's really hard to fire bad employees government wise since employment is seen as a right and (2) it's really hard to get anything done since people think of 9999 ways to "be nice" as rights. Then, clearly for-profit institutions are also a garbage fire since they make that extra 10% revenue off of unnecessary suffering.

There is a great counterexample that is Kaiser. They are a private health insurance org that provides massive savings by simultaneously also running a network of hospitals and outpatient facilities. Notably they are not-for-profit. So that's perhaps what we're shooting for "all the goodwill of government, without the mucuousy bureaucratic slop in any government institution"

If only all the private sector orgs were Kaiser, not for profit and for the well being of humanity. Kaisers of the world are a flash in the pan, "don't be evil" googles only to become "be evil" googles.

I would simply recommend to look at how Singapore does things and copy that, after all, that's what China did and look how well they have done economically.

>"The sometimes celebratory attitude of such a broad swath of Americans on Wednesday felt like an embrace of that same sort of nihilism."

I couldn't disagree more with this facile comparison. The thing is, we all are someone's loved one, beloved father/mother, etc. And yet the people decrying these reactions shrug and walk away when the victim is anonymous and the violence comes in the form of denying people life-saving care--for profit--something that happens routinely in this country. It isn't a 9mm bullet, but it is just as deliberate and every bit as devastating to those involved, as all too many of us are. And it sure doesn't help matters when peaceful political attempts at solving this problem are constantly derailed by this powerful industry's lobby.

Every healthcare system in the world including the socialized ones denies some patients life-saving care. Care will always be rationed regardless of whether some entities are making a profit.

The reason for the denial is important. Also worth noting that our attempts to improve availability are actively resisted to maintain that profit.

Yeah, denying because it means more profits isn't okay. The fact that these insurance companies are publicly traded and have to maximize value for shareholders creates even more of the wrong incentives.

These should be not-for-profit entities, with appropriate controls.

Many private health insurance companies are not-for-profit, including such large organizations as many of the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association licensees, HighMark, EmblemHealth, etc. Their coverage and claim processing policies are pretty similar to the for-profit companies.

And private health insurers generally don't make more profit by denying claims. Due to the ACA minimum medical loss ratio rule it's rather the opposite. When claims are denied it's usually due to decisions made by self-funded employers that sponsor health plans for their employees. The insurers are mostly just acting as administrators for those plans rather than providing any real insurance.

How does this justify UHC's denial rate being double the industry average?

The US's embrace of a extremely greedy and uncaring for-profit health insurance industry is what is actually nihilistic. Every dollar of profit a health insurance company makes should have paid for healthcare for someone.

If one goes to subreddits or forums where nurses and doctors hang out it quickly becomes obvious why a large majority of people reacted the way they reacted.

Can you explain why it's obvious? I don't hang out in such subreddits, and with my outside (non-american) perspective it's a bit shocking to read.

I'm non american too. They make this news look sad, while him and their companies let thousands of people dying at the hospital because they don't have the means to pay for their surgeries.

They have blood on their hands and americans can't have empathy for these people having the power to let someone live or not.

Do they denied their surgery or did they get it but bankrupt after?

often, surgeries are denied if you can't pay. plenty pay insurance premiums diligently but then are routinely denied coverage. there was a story the other day about an insurance provider not continuing anesthesia in surgeries if they (the surgery) takes too long and the patient didn't pay up. healthcare is the #1 problem in the US right now and our legislators are only making it worse due to accepting bribes (i.e. lobbying monies) to keep the status quo or worse, enrich the corporations in our for-profit healthcare system.

You can see the down-to-the-minute processes work in United in a specific case of ulcerative colitis (which has no cure):

https://www.propublica.org/article/unitedhealth-healthcare-i...

It particularly interesting that high cost treatments seem to have motivated United to hire a college campus administrator as a secret budget specialist since the cost of a lifetime of treatment seemed high for younger people.

My god. I have Crohn's disease and am on remicade. I've had it refused by aetna and must try two "biosimilars" before being allowed to take the medicine I've been on for over a decade. They asked me if I'd tried them before because "some people do not tolerate them". So now I'm faced with potentially up to a year of decline and ruining health just to take the drug I've been on for a decade, _that the manufacturer pays for anyways_.

I had a 95% deviation to my septum. I spent years basically mouth breathing, because it was so occluded.

Finally went to an amazing ENT (where I got that number, and saw how bad it was on imaging). "Great, so when can we schedule surgery?"

He sighs. "First, I need to prescribe you these two nasal sprays so you can take them three times a day for four weeks and come back to me and tell me that surprise, surprise, they haven't realigned the cartilage in your nose. That way insurance won't deny the authorization of surgery."

is that why the allergist prescribed that nasal spray... i had to wait 6 more months for the nasal surgery that turned my life around. son of a bitch....

"Almost certainly", I'd say from my experience as a patient, as someone who worked in healthcare, and someone who worked for a company that wrote claims benefit management software for the industry.

> there was a story the other day about an insurance provider not continuing anesthesia in surgeries if they (the surgery) takes too long and the patient didn't pay up.

Thankfully, they've walked back that policy (for some unknown reason).

The system works! /s

Surgeons aren't going to do surgery if they aren't paid for it.

Yeah they will. Surgeons aren’t in it for the money, they’re in it for the glory.

Most doctors, nurses, EMTs, etc. would work for free if they could magically have them and their families taken care of, as evidenced by how much they go well above and beyond the requirements of their job, working heroic hours, buying stuff out of pocket when the system fails them, etc.

Not all health care professionals, but 90% of the ones I’ve met.

EMTs are usually in it because they're adrenaline junkie masochists. I am married to one, there are few exceptions.

Nurses are often there "for the money" but absolutely love their jobs.

Surgeons are absolutely in it for the glory, they have the same basic makeup as EMTs.

Different specialties have different personalities, for sure. Just look at Orthopedic bro...

What about the surgical nurses and med techs? What about paying for the surgical room? The after surgery care? And a lot of surgeons are in it for the money.

Even for folks who can pay for medical care... UnitedHealthcare is notorious for denying claims from their policyholders.

An example that was posted on Reddit recently from a physician:

"UHC denied my patient's prescription for a Lovenox bridge so her Coumadin could be held prior to surgery. The reason? I prescribed it twice daily instead of once daily, which is the standard of care for a Lovenox bridge. I was so pissed off I just paid for the medication out of pocket myself and gave it to my patient.

It was $12. Twelve. Fucking. Dollars. They were totally okay with the possibility of her suffering a stroke or major thromboembolic event to save TWELVE DOLLARS."

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1h6h0wp/comment/m0ew8...

Man, assassin may have been a bona-fide American hero.

I'd say it's worse than this. The Americans UHC (and CEO) harmed were all paying customers who were denied coverage for claims. Apparently (quick Google search), UHC denies ~30% of claims, while the industry average is 16% [0]. Their net income has also doubled from $11b in 2018 to $22b in 2024 [1].

[0] https://www.valuepenguin.com/health-insurance-claim-denials-...

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/UNH/unitedhealth-g...

Even 16% seems too high.

And just to be clear for those not living in the USA, the people being denied coverage by UHC are the same people paying health insurance premiums to UHC in order to have health insurance coverage.

When this news came in a retired nurse on my discord said that UnitedHealthcare was one of the worst for denying coverage for even the most obvious cases.

They are literally the worst. The deny more cases than any other insurance company.

Then deny just about a third of claims. These are things a Doctor believed necessary. Imagine if 1/3rd of your Healthcare was simply refused by a company that you pay a raising monthly premium to

Company routinely denied coverage in very obvious cases. Like claiming gunshot to stomach not being an emergency etc. The company overall had claim denial rate of 32% which is double the industry avg.

UHC had several cases where they denied air ambulance transport for seriously injured car accident victims to a trauma center due to lack of pre-authorization.

I'm a paramedic...

"This is John, I'm a paramedic working on one of your patients who was hit by a truck. We would like to fly him to the hospital due to his multisystem trauma but we need your approval. His name? Hang on, let me find his wallet. No, that's Smythe, S-M-Y-T-H-E, sorry, it's a bit loud with the jaws of life in the background... Uhh, yes, sure, I can hold for a nurse consult..."

Would you not take them in the heli and later bill?

“sorry, we couldn’t get the nurse on the line. I typed the case notes into our pre authorization AI, and it said ‘no’, have a great day! click”

It was already posted on HN, but this is a good summary.

https://www.propublica.org/article/unitedhealth-mental-healt...

Its also far bigger than most of these comments. Yes they denied over 30% of claims, which is awful, but they also did a large amount of retroactive denial and clawback schemes to already approved claims.

It's an unusually cruel industry.

a little bit of media coverage here (the top 20 things when I browse /r/all are about this murder)

https://www.thedailybeast.com/leading-medical-subreddit-dele...

a summary containing other social media reactions: https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/health-ins...

If I were running a medical insurance company in India I'll not harass doctors and administrators with tons of paperwork, since they hate one provider with a passion and are not afraid of telling patients.

When I read about unitedhealthcare and their practices, I always wonder if their offices are guarded by snipers and swat teams 24/7. If someone paid insurance for decades and gets denied treatment they need, then what is to stop anyone? Obviously most (by far) people aren't criminally insane, but you would think 1 or 2 per 1000 denials would think 'screw this; I go, you go'. Kind of a win for humanity in the face of pure evil I guess; people are far less willing to react with violence.

I wouldn't really calls someone like that criminally insane, though. Just perhaps a person with nothing to lose.

Why doesn't it happen every day?

Perhaps it is because previously, the world wasn't screwed up enough for it to happen. Why don't revolutions happen every day? But they do happen...

The boiling frogs aren't uncomfortable enough yet to take their jumps.

A century of conditioning. We used to just straight-up kill evil business owners and establish a union. And when that didn't work, we just blew up the factory and said "you're going to respect us".

That's all been diminished by law, and socialization does the rest.

Probably there's thousands of Americans essentially killed by insurance with nothing to lose. But they are too placated, much like a lap dog.

Hollywood would love this idea.

It's already a movie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-0_tN6O-5k

I forgot the \s :D thanks for the movie rec tho

I'm not really all that clued up on all of this, but overall seems like a Shinzo Abe-type situation: no, we shouldn't be assassinating people. But also: you can't just wreck people's lives for a living and expect no consequences. This seems just as much of a failure of society in dealing with these kind of nihilistic parasites sucking our society dry as anything else.

What do you should be done with him then?

Relieve him of his worldy posessions.

Wealth tax. Increasing tax on wealth, capping at a 100% tax for wealth above $10M. Exact numbers negotiable, but that's where I'm starting the bid. When you've hit your wealth cap, it removes the motivation to drive up your bank account's high score (or at least makes it much more difficult) which is what drives most of this evil.

> What do you should be done with him then?

Unemployment. Render the entire concept of being an executive for a for-profit healthcare organization moot.

This can be accomplished with legislation. There's already plenty of established laws that prohibit non-profit organizations from doing (or not-doing) certain things[1], so it's not a stretch to have laws that prohibit for-profit organizations from doing other certain things.

...I'm only saying "legislation" because, by all reasons the free-market cannot support a for-profit health-insurance company: how can they exist at all when they're competing with non-profits for the same customers but who (like BCBS) don't have shareholder dividends to pay; so for UnitedHealthcare to somehow be both more-attractive to customers than BCBS (presumably by being cheaper) and still being able to pay dividends with whatever's left leads me to some very dark conclusions about how they operate internally. There's gotta be something the SEC can find and charge them with?

[1] https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/charitable-organiz...

Have a society where people like this can't get a foot-hold in the first place.

And organisations like Uber, Microsoft, etc. flagrantly broke the rules, got hugely rich off that, and all they got was ... a corporate fine. No personal consequences at all. Corporations aren't a force of nature, it's run by people and those people looked at the rules and said "fuck those rules, I'm going to break them for my personal enrichment". Bill Gates and that Uber asshole are still hugely rich.

We're letting the exploitive nihilists run the world, and all the lawmakers do is shrug.

"Have a society where people like this can't get a foot-hold in the first place" - How does one build this society? This is not meant as snark.

Building a system that prevents sharks from getting a hold while also not preventing well-meaning people from building seems incredibly hard.

Things I'd start with include:

- Don't shoe-horn "free market" into absolutely everything, recognizing that in some areas you need more regulation than in others.

- Reasonable anti-trust with reasonable enforcement.

- Personal responsibility instead of corporate responsibility (which is very rare today except in cases of outright fraught such as Enron, VW Diesel, etc.)

You can argue a bit about the details, but I don't think any of this is hugely controversial and has broad support across the political spectrum.

Remove limited liability to 'all asset paid by undue selling of share and dividend received, pierce the corporate veil _systematically_ in every fraud cases.

Bilzerian have a famous son who squandered the hundred of millions he stole and put in a trust before getting arrested, but I'm pretty sure defrauding people and putting the money in a trust, getting out of low-sec filled with other people like you after 5-10 year then living like a king shouldn't be possible.

"Be careful. If you scare away my demons, my angels might leave as well."

What Abe did?

But nothing, lol. Should everyone working at meta be killed due to their contribution to social media?

If there’s a problem people should be tried in court, not killed

Nobody's saying they should be killed. But I can't deny, at least to myself, what emotions might inadvertently well up within my soul (does Meta believe in souls?) if an unthinkable event like that you are hypothesising about were to happen. It's outside of my control.

> Should everyone working at meta be killed due to their contribution to social media?

Not one of them - but you might be shocked by the amount of people that would say yes.

> If there’s a problem people should be tried in court, not killed.

Agreed - but what happens when the courts are corrupt? At least the thinking among these types is that the rich are above the law, so the only way to achieve justice, is to take it into your own hands.

Maybe our problems are only perceptive, or maybe there's something to them.

I don't know.

But what I do know is there's a pretty big divide.

There are plenty of people who do wrong in society and are not tried in court. They are just killed by the authorities because there is no recourse to try them in court. For example: if some person takes a hostage, the police will kill them if there is no other way. And for some very rich people with a lot of power and causing damage, what is the other way?

Should they? No. Morally (the world of "should"), vigilante justice should not be used in a society with laws and courts.

Is is a different world than should, though. In the world of is, there are a large number of people who feel that the system is rigged against them, that they're never going to get justice, that the courts are bought by the rich and powerful. In the world of is, that creates the grounds where vigilante "justice" will be used.

Whether you agree with it or not, whether you think it's right or not (I don't), we live in a society with a large number of people, with guns, who feel that the legal system has failed them, the political system has failed them, and this is the only course left. That feeling, in enough people, leads to some of them taking action.

So let the rich and powerful beware. I don't agree with it, I don't advocate it, but it is. If you're powerful, and you live in a world with potential vigilantes, you'd better make sure that not very many of them feel like it's time to become a vigilante. The rich have ignored that bit of practical wisdom; yesterday may have been the chickens coming home to roost.

To spell out something I think you're saying: if you want people to use the legislative and judicial systems to deal with abuses by the rich and powerful, you need to make sure that those systems are visibly willing and able to do so.

It's not just that you need a system that adequately prosecutes and punishes crime in order to keep vigilantes in check. Most such systems evolved as an explicit alternative to systems based on vendettas or lynching. These latter modes of prosecution and punishment are always lurking under the surface because they were there first and could only be inhibited by more civilized modes; they were never abolished by them.

Lol lots of SV freaks in the comments here very close to having their "are we the baddies" moment

It's interesting to see how both HN threads are noticeably more "moderate" and "rational" than the vast majority on online responses such as Reddit.

After joining hackernews I realized people here are generally open minded and thinkers. If you provide a valid point they will often reflect on their stance.

Hackernews is my fav forum.

If those people singlehandedly ran a division which unnecessarily harmed or killed tens of thousands of people all in the name of selfish profit while continuously two facing the entire public claiming to care about the lives of their customers, who are most likely trapped into using the companies services by monopolistic behavior created and continued by the person, then yeah.

Also, why are we so afraid that millionaires and billionaires might be a little afraid of the populace? Shouldn't they be? Shouldn't we live in a world where we care for each other and help to improve the world? Shouldn't the people that abuse that system to kill for profit be scared? I think they should be terrified, it might convince them to treat their fellow man better.

There must be real consequences. There is a group of people in America right now which can simply never face any real consequences for anything they do. They have enough money to survive being fired, they have enough lawyers to never go to jail, and if they do they'll get a cushy cell in a fed block for a year or so, followed by still having millions of dollars when they get out. What can we, as a populace, do to keep these people from destroying our society for their personal gain (deteriorating the conditions of normal life continuously will lead to revolt and unrest and destabilization). All we have is fear. That's the only option they've given us. So we should use it. Don't like it? Maybe start listening when the entire populace of the country is screaming at you every hour of every day that you're actively and intentionally killing them. It doesn't matter if it's just a system that you oversee, it's your responsibility. Your can change it, and you aren't, and we're begging you to. That state can only last so long before something breaks. The millions of furious people will not break first

Everyone? No. Those above a certain level? Who knowingly contributed to the Rohingya genocide? I wouldn't do it, but I would laugh at their obituaries.

Correct me If I am wrong but Abe was assassinated because the killer thought he was associated with a church that left his family destitute[1].

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinzo_Abe#Assassination

Not "thought", known to have:

> Abe and his family were known to have long-standing ties to the Unification Church, dating back to his grandfather Nobusuke Kishi; Abe himself had held speeches in support of the religious movement.

from the same article

Yes, I worded that incorrectly. What I meant was Abe didn't directly wrong the killer (AFAIK), he just happened to be the most public supporter of the church and paid for it with his life.

No you didn't word it incorrectly!

> the killer thought he was associated with a church that left his family destitute

The killer certainly thought that. Also it was true!

Yes, that is correct. It's kind of a similar situation in the sense of "person does bad things with zero consequences and no one seems to care, until someone is fed up and takes action".

The difference is that UH CEO's decisions did have consequences. His policies resulted in people not getting the care they were supposed to get (allegedly as per online media, I do not have any direct information or source for this).

Going after Abe is like going after Tom Cruise if you want to take revenge on the Church of Scientology.

"With zero consequences for the person doing the bad thing", obviously.

“Bad things” is subjective, and you’d only want to start this war if you’re certain you’d win.

[flagged]

The CEO is only causing trouble and death for poors (while actually making money for people that matter), so it doesn't count.

That is right. Our society is plenty violent, but the violence is only acceptable when it flows from those with greater power to those with lesser power.

I feel a lot of the pacifist 'we are civilised, violence should not be the answer' is a very wishy-washy opinion that comes from a position of privilege. Violence works—or at least, the threat of violence works. This is what keeps many people in line; it's how laws work. Imprisonment is inherently violent; physical force is used to restrain people and curtail their rights. Mutually-assured destruction (it's literally in the name) kept the superpowers from actually lobbing nukes at each other (and they still ended up fighting dozens of proxy wars anyway).

Vietnam recently sentenced someone to death for embezzling ~$12 billion[1].

[1]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd753r47815o

I agree, lots of, "my health insurance is fine! And besides wouldn't they try to kill me since i made insert relatively shitty technology for a decade". Reads like privilege of not having had these difficulties (because money), lack of empathy to read the room and maybe learn that far more people have far more problems than you might experience. And finally a suddenly realized guilty conscious(?) about their own roles in little pains and problems they created for people. Of course the person who built the claim denial system is going to be opposed to this discussion, because they're afraid. But, shouldn't they be? Shouldn't people be afraid to participate in evil systems? Otherwise what stops evil systems from continuously being spread into every aspect of everyone's (poors) lives.

Pacifism is a lofty ideal but also an ideal co-opted by violent power structures as a tool to reduce cognitive dissonance in those that would and should otherwise fight for their rights.

For example, I believe in peace and wish peace upon the world but I am not a pacifist and believe that a variety of techniques are necessary to prevent the world from becoming a techno-tyranny.

>blood-sucking CEOs have a 1/10 chance of being assassinated. Don't you think that the regular expectation of this might make them a little less blood-sucking?

I get the point you're making. But I suspect it might just as easily go the other way: the 10% chance of assassination would justify having your security detail, probably paid for on the company dime, but affordable even if you're "only" making $10M/year. And once you have that candy shell and the "me against them" mentality, you might just go further with the bloodsucking.

IOW: Maybe the current situation IS tempered already. :-(

Well personal security isn't a stopgap for healthcare execs, because the personal security staff, and/or their extended families, will be using the healthcare that they provide. the risk of an insider job is high

Holding such opinion is fine in my eyes, as long as you’ll be the one enforcing those measures. If you wish to be the one pointing the finger to have people assassinated or worse, I have no sympathy for you and would fight your ideology until the end.

Some live who deserve to die. And many that deserve to live lose their life. Can you give it back to them? If not, don't be so hasty to take it away from others.

--Gandalf

Tell that to the person who acts in self defense when someone breaks into their home.

Using lethal force to defend yourself from lethal force is not, in my opinion, "acting hastily". If you're talking about using lethal force as a reaction to just property crime, though, I think that is morally indefensible.

Well, I think there is also a gradient in terms of acts such as the main subject matter, and it's worth thinking about.

Where do you draw the line of it being 'just property crime' though?

It only matters where your state draws that line.

Just because your state draws a line doesn't make that line just.

Are you replying to the correct thread? It’s “just” as in “only” not “just” as in “justice”.

Regardless of your personal feelings if you kill someone in defense of yourself or your property it’s going to matter a lot what state you did that in.

> Or terrorists who kill people

Your post is ironically just a pro-terrorism argument. You want terrorism targeted at CEOs to change their behavior.

There are a million different viewpoints on what acts are harmful and how to minimize or prevent those harms. It's better that we use things like voting and laws and courts to collectively reach consensus on when to use violence, rather than individuals killing people who disagree with them.

You can argue that this CEO should have been arrested for some crime and you can argue that said crime should carry the death penalty upon conviction. But that doesn't mean it's valid for a random person to be judge, jury and executioner based on their own personal concept of justice.

Terrorism is a catch-all word. And it's quite an effective one at making blanket statements with no nuance.

You are literally making the case that if CEOs are scared they will change their behavior. You shouldn’t even have to squint to see how that’s terrorosm.

Okay then. Provide any definition of terrorism and I will tell you how the system takes part in terrorism against ordinary citizens every day.

How about 14 random people, randomly selected? That's a full Jury, a Judge, and an Executioner, worth of people.

Not endorsing the practice, merely pointing out that to put someone to death in the U.S. defined notion of due process, no more than about 2 dozen key people's assent/cooperation need be attained.

> Not endorsing the practice, merely pointing out that to put someone to death in the U.S. defined notion of due process, no more than about 2 dozen key people's assent/cooperation need be attained.

Surely you mean no less than two dozen?

Sorry to be pedantic here, but terrorism has multiple definitions, all of which include the keywords 'for political goals'. This doesn't seem political to kill the person responsible for the death of one of your loved one. Sure the event itself is politic, sure it breaks the social contract, but this isn't political by itself,so it isn't terrorism.

I suppose the way to ascertain whether this incident was terrorism is the ask the person whether it was revenge or to effect structural change in healthcare.

"deny" "defend" "depose"

sure looks personal

Yeah, if we extend this into a gotham esque deterioration of society and slippery slope ourselves into gibberimg carnal terror that they might come for us next. But for this case, who exactly disagrees that this man was leading a harmful and terrible system? It seems to me like every single person who's ever had insurance difficulties (98%) is very much in complete agreement about the crimes of this man. And the rest are simply inempathetic, privileged people who've been lucky enough to not encounter the real insurance industry. This isn't about Healthcare, this is about insurance.

Terrorism is political policy designed to make everyone terrified "they could be next". If a random person on the street gets shot that's terrorism, but if Adolf Hitler gets shot that isn't terrorism since most people aren't Adolf Hitler and don't have to worry about being treated the same way. Somewhere between these two points is a dividing line.

If you can fairly and correctly evaluate which CEOs are especially blood sucking, simply taking their money and sending them to prison for a while will have the same effect and be far less ethically dubious.

If the evaluation is flawed... do you see why it's not a good idea?

What US executives have been so prosecuted in recent memory? And specifically for abuses of the public, not of financial frauds affecting shareholders or lenders.

Examples from the healthcare, banking, pharmaceutical (notably Purdue) or petrochemical industries might be particularly appropriate.

My read of the street is that the institution of law and courts has been assessed as insufficient and/or terminally dysfunctional.

I thought of Martin Shkreli, but I think he might fall under your criteria of defrauding investors

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Shkreli

Good suggestion, but I think it's the investor, not public side, which pushed the needle there.

I thought the original argument was that they should be prosecuted and condemned to death. And against this, I say if you are able to prosecute and condemn the right people, sending them to jail is enough to get a useful result.

What's the view you're defending? That CEOs should be murdered when some arbitrary citizen ready to do murder thinks the CEO is guilty enough?

I totally think law and order is dysfunctional. I don't know if people will actually resort to murder, but I could understand why they would do it. (It's far easier to talk about it than to do it.)

But it is not a good solution to the problem. The system of "murder people when we are upset" will certainly be at least as dysfunctional as the current one, if not more. Law being taken into the hands of whoever has weapons and the will to do it is what happens in narco states. Who prefers that?

I was directly addressing your statement "simply taking their money and sending them to prison for a while will have the same effect", and asking for examples of where that's happened, again, specifically for abuses against the public at large rather than for investor or creditor classes for whom justice seems far more often and readily served.

One would think that this is a target-rich environment, and yet there don't seem to be many cases of that occurring. You've not answered my own question (choosing to rather spectacularly misinterpret and misstate my comment instead). I've put the question (phrased several ways) to an LLM which first responded with a set of decades-old fraud (e.g., creditor/shareholder victims) cases, and then point blank refused to suggest who might be prosecuted, or even who has been discussed as being plausibly prosecuted (interesting set of guardrails).

The law for whatever reasons --- I can think of several and there are many which have been expressed both recently and going back through time, Anatole France's observation of the law and its majestic equality would be among the classic and better known --- seems not to take an interest into affronts against the public at large.

I think my point was clearly expressed as originally put, if you've any difficulties in interpreting this, please say how and where: My read of the street is that the institution of law and courts has been assessed as insufficient and/or terminally dysfunctional.

The alternatives are not good, a point on which I suspect we're agreed. But they'll be reached for where institutions consistently fail, if I read history correctly.

And to draw on another recent HN thread, if the purpose of a system is what it does, then the system isn't broken but is performing as intended. Which would itself be a problem.

(See: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42313947> among numerous others: <https://hn.algolia.com/?q=stafford%20beer>.)

>> And what about this? Imagine a world where the especially blood-sucking CEOs have a 1/10 chance of being assassinated. Don't you think that the regular expectation of this might make them a little less blood-sucking?

> If you can fairly and correctly evaluate which CEOs are especially blood sucking, simply taking their money and sending them to prison for a while will have the same effect and be far less ethically dubious.

But that would require the buy in and cooperation of the state, which probably wouldn't work any better than the current political/judicial system, because elites like CEOs have disproportionate influence in controlling state behavior. The system is setup to primarily protect and serve people like them.

I think the GP's idea was to add an extra-judicial check on CEO behavior that could be implemented by a motivated individual, and thus would be much harder for CEOs to subvert. Even the threat of assassination could have a restraining effect, because who wants to live in a bunker surrounded by guards? The blood-sucking CEO wouldn't be able to enjoy his ill-gotten gains.

One (somewhat small) problem with the GP's idea is its focus on CEOs. One feature of capitalism is how it can obscure culpability and create scapegoats to misdirect anger and protect the principles. A CEO definitely has fault and responsibility for the company's actions, but he's ultimately a minion of the company's owners. Above the CEO things often get shadowy.

Motivated individuals will make for an even less fair system. Current CEOs and politicians and rich businessmen are by far the most motivated individuals, with lots of resources at their disposal.

Courts and laws have become corrupted, but you tink letting people at random make their own justice will not be corrupted?

One of the reasons this even sounds remotely possible to you is we have not abandoned the idea of the rule of law. If it were abandoned outright, the CEOs (or whatever) would never be outside of protected areas and without guards and such. Ordinary citizens however, would not afford protection.

Oh of course! I'm sure everyone here would love if that was an option. My gosh if rich people were effectively punished for their crimes we'd be living in a completely different society right now! But they aren't, and so we have this

We still live in a society where the Democrat's second largest donor was thrown into jail for 25 years during a Democratic administration.

Perhaps the exception that proves the rule.

If it were possible to easily do so in today's society, I would agree with you. The entire point is that it is not easy, especially since "taking their money and sending them to prison" often involves a sentence not commensurate with the crime, and ditto for the fine.

What is the crime? What law was broken?

My point exactly is not that a law was broken, but a crime was committed!

A crime is an unlawful act. It’s not just whatever behavior you personally don’t like.

How do you imagine murdering the guilty would be possible when sending them to jail is not? Do you think courts are corrupted, but if random people just took justice into their own hands that would work out to be fair and just?

I know nothing, but reading the news "CEO assasinated" my first thought is he was murdered by a rival organisation.

CEOs are not martians. They're some of "the people" we are talking about. They rose to the top through ruthlessness and disregard for laws and such. You think giving up on laws will make them less powerful?

This seems to be part of the civilization / institution — chaos / individual retribution axis.

I.e. yes, we absolutely should prosecute more white collar crime.

The problem with analyses like these is that every CEO is protected by state limitation of liability. These people are shielded from legalism. They can lose their business potentially but their personal status (other than that tied into equity in the business) is pretty much 100% shielded.

That's definitely a problem.

And the "let whoever is upset try to murder the respective CEO" analysis has no problems? I think it has more.

Everyone reasonable agrees that this would certainly be a preferable alternative to vigilante justice. But it isn't happening and it won't happen.

If we assume a fantastical world without political lobbying that’s only limited by the depths of one’s pockets then it makes sense to talk about prosecuting wealthy corporate executives.

If we’re in a world with such lobbying... do you see why prosecution might fail despite its merits?

I thought the point was to prosecute them and condemn them to death. Do you think random murder by whoever is upset enough will work out to be fair in the real world, not a fantastical one?

Isn't that the whole point of the social contract? People agree not to take the law into their own hands in exchange for the guarantee that society will protect and benefit them. If society is failing to protect and benefit people then the social contract has already been broken.

Stated another way, society's end of the social contract is to make sure that people generally aren't upset enough to commit murder.

> I thought the point was to prosecute them

> Imagine a world where the especially blood-sucking CEOs have a 1/10 chance of being assassinated.

Assassination isn’t prosecution.

My point is, it’s the fantastical world that actually prosecutes corporate managers for their criminal decisions. Shit, it’s the fantastical world that has American laws which make it illegal for UHC to have the business practice of denying claims by default unless/until they’re positively proven necessary beyond any sliver of doubt.

I am not trying to say murder will work to correct corporate behavior, I’m saying that it’s the thing we can see actually happens as an attempt to correct the behavior. It’s not hard to find many examples in this thread of people who think corps get away with too much. That is how one can tell there is a lack of prosecution and/or protection laws.

The real world has unfortunate circumstances that encourage this kind of crime because America does not have effective laws/enforcement which curtail the power of the corporations who write said laws. That’s the fantasy. We don’t live in a world where execs can be prosecuted for most of their anti-social decisions, let alone are.

I never made a value call about what’s fair, I only pointed out that the idea of prosecution in this context is a fantasy.

NB: Saddam Hussein was, at least nominally, tried and executed, not assassinated:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Execution_of_Saddam_Hussein>

I'm not claiming that the trial / execution adhered to any particular standards, just that as an example of an extrajudicial killing the story's a bit shaky.

There are other examples to choose from, including the utterly nonjudicial killings of Osama bin Laden (by US forces) or Muammar Gaddafi (by Libyan rebels with at least notional US support). There's a long list of US targeted assassinations as well, from Anwar al-Awlaki (2010), with another 35 intended targets and 200 killed, see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targeted_killing#Use_by_United...>.

(I'm also not litigating the appropriateness of those actions, rather they're offered as instances where the US government has acted within recent memory to kill designated enemies without judicial process.)

Thank you for the information -- those are indeed better examples.

> there are plenty of cases where people break the law in a socially regulated way and society doesn't enter into some sort of chaos.

You're talking about civil disobedience here, which typically doesn't involve murder.

> (how is lethal injection different than assassination? I think it's basically the same)

I'm opposed to capital punishment, but I see a huge difference between the two even though they both involve killing someone. The death penalty only comes after a legal process and court deliberation. Assassination is unregulated. That's a pretty large distinction.

> Don't you think that the regular expectation of this might make them a little less blood-sucking?

No, I don't. It would make them do their bloodsucking differently in order to minimize their risk, but I don't think it would make them cut back.

> I'm opposed to capital punishment, but I see a huge difference between the two even though they both involve killing someone. The death penalty only comes after a legal process and court deliberation. Assassination is unregulated. That's a pretty large distinction.'

True, there is a distinction but in some cases since there is no alternative, it might be the next best thing.

> Theoretically and philosophically speaking, why shouldn't we?

Because what you are describing is literally anarchy. It’s antithetical to our foundational principles as a society.

> I bet not many Americans would object to taking out terrorists, especially some who have caused a lot of damage like 9/11.

Opposition to the war on terror is not a fringe position in the United States.

> What about Timothy McVeigh? The U.S. assassinated him basically (how is lethal injection different than assassination? I think it's basically the same).

Well you’re wrong. Timothy McVeigh was tried and convicted. That’s literally the difference between assasination and the death penalty. Opposition to the death penalty is also not a fringe position and many states no longer practice capital punishment.

> And what about this? Imagine a world where the especially blood-sucking CEOs have a 1/10 chance of being assassinated.

How do you identify the 1/10?

> Don't you think that the regular expectation of this might make them a little less blood-sucking?

I don’t know what the effect would be, why are you so confident you do?

> I wonder why it's morally acceptable for a country to send an army to assassinate some guy causing trouble or for the police to kill a terrorist holding hostages, but when another rich guy takes charge of a machine killing many more people than the average terrorist, assassinating them is taboo?

Do you really wonder? Do you really, honestly not know the difference? I find that very hard to believe.

> Because what you are describing is literally anarchy. It’s antithetical to our foundational principles as a society.

A little anarchy now and then may not be a bad thing if it upsets the exisitng power structure. And the founding principles do not imply that the current society is what the founding principles were meant to imply.

> I don’t know what the effect would be, why are you so confident you do?

I am not completely confident but it's a reasonable assumption.

> Do you really wonder? Do you really, honestly not know the difference? I find that very hard to believe.

Of course there is a difference, because they are different situations. But I don't think there is a moral difference.

>Because what you are describing is literally anarchy. It’s antithetical to our foundational principles as a society.

If the society has failed, people will use violence to build a replacement. This is the system. Its always been the system. What you are saying here, is that stability is more important than fixing a system that is killing people.

>Opposition to the war on terror is not a fringe position in the United States. And non violent opposition didnt really end it in any reasonable time frame.

>How do you identify the 1/10? The bullets and blood will be a pretty good indicator.

>Do you really wonder? Do you really, honestly not know the difference? I find that very hard to believe.

The difference is that foreign murder doesn't challenge the stability and comfort that the state provides you, where as local murder might spread to you, and you might need to change your behavior to avoid it. Its just plain old discomfort and hypocrisy. To paraphrase a common internet saying, the f*king around is fine, you simply dont want to find out.

> If the society has failed, people will use violence to build a replacement. This is the system. Its always been the system. What you are saying here, is that stability is more important than fixing a system that is killing people.

Is it fixing the system or replacing it? You can’t have it both ways.

A repair can include replacement. How finely would you like this hair sliced?

> It’s antithetical to our foundational principles as a society.

I'm not sure it actually is. The foundational principle of society is basically the social contract "Individuals give up the right to exert violence in exchange for society providing safety and benefit."

If society fails to uphold its end of the bargain, then it seems logical that the individual is no longer obligated to hold up their end.

You don’t get to kill people when you don’t get your way. I can’t believe I even have to explain that. If assassination is acceptable behavior society is doomed. And the people carrying out those murders aren’t going to build anything better than we have now.

Yes, the healthcare system has flaws. But those flaws are fixable. In living memory we have seen dramatic improvements in the healthcare industry. Murder isn’t the solution here.

Come now, lets not resort to strawman arguments. The injustice and inequality in our current system is clearly dramatically more than "you don't get your way".

Shinzō Abe was an (indirectly) elected politician, though. The consequences for his actions should be people not voting for his party again. Murdering him because you disagree with people who voted for his party is not just an attack on one person, it's an attack on democracy.

What the recourse should be for those at the top of corporations whose decisions negatively impact millions of people is far less clear. "Voting with your wallet" isn't really a thing if you only have bad choices.

sorry for the downvote, but you misunderstand the motive of his asssasin. Abe and his family were directly involved in a church movement that had harmed the assassin's family. Strangely, it had very little do with politics, and so elections could not have righted the perceived wrongs.

Fair enough.

> This seems just as much of a failure of society in dealing with these kind of nihilistic parasites sucking our society dry as anything else.

While nobody's shedding a tear here, we should be cautious about even softly embracing or downplaying vigilantism.

Worth remembering, and we've already seen it happen frequently: Vigilante justice can be wielded against controversial personas you support, and there will be just as much applause from the sidelines (from the other side).

That feeling can even extend to people you might consider innocent: See one of the other comments where someone is noting they wouldn't shed a tear over a particular company's *employees* being murdered.

Fully agree with you, vigilante justice should not happen because we have a system protecting the citizens and doing them justice. Wait, do we actually have such a workable system? Because if not, vigilante justice is just around the corner.

Just be careful what you wish for :). Vigilante justice doesn't have a great history of being actual justice.

I wish those working laws and law system, can I get them pretty please? No? Which party in power does something for it? Instead of trying to scare people with the threat of vigilante, I'd rather appease them with the lure of a healthy system.

The answer to "X doesn't work" usually isn't "let's do the exact opposite of X because X isn't working".

There's just scads of historical evidence to support what a bad idea that usually is.

What is the answer?

Tell that to Dare Devil, or Spider-Man, or the Punisher. Seems America kinda idolizes vigilantes

The justice system doesn't have a great track record of being actual justice either.

How's France looking these days? still under bourbon rule?

its the usual 'problem' in this country - all of these reprehensible actions by these corporations are, by and large, legal.

being legal doesn't make it right or ethical though.

the legislators clearly think the system is fine and workable as evidenced by the legislature passed to allow profits over, quite literally, anything else in this country.

whilst i don't condone murder or vigilantism, i fully expect more of this because this is exactly what the 'system' has wrought. when you have nothing to lose, all options are on the table.

> the legislators clearly think the system is fine and workable as evidenced by the legislature passed to allow profits over, quite literally, anything else in this country.

But don't you think that a more civilized way to solve it is by voting and changing the legislators who think this is right?

I mean, the issue is when it goes from a sacrificed lamb CEO from a very disgraceful industry and replicates to the rest of society.

I've voted every single year of my adult life. It doesn't seem to be working.

    But don't you think that a more civilized way to 
    solve it is by voting and changing the legislators 
    who think this is right?

Absolutely, but corporations effectively control the government and who gets campaign funding.

The 2024 presidential election was won by the candidate who spent about 1/3rd less than their opponent, and we’ve seen many successful campaigns in the past decade funded by small donations beat corporate backed candidates. Funding isn’t everything, and it’s a cop out to co-sign vigilantism on such a glib basis: https://www.opensecrets.org/2024-presidential-race

Rule of law is a precious thing, even if it’s imperfect, as all human systems will inevitably be. We shouldn’t be cavalier about discarding it. The alternatives are much worse.

Nobody is claiming that outspending your rivals is some kind of automatic electoral win but nice job, uh, over there. (gestures at the remains of the strawman you tore apart)

Back on topic...

The relevant campaign spending figures here would be "minimum amounts of funding to run a viable campaign" and not "how much did the winner spend."

What I, unlike our recently deceased strawman, was pointing out is that without backing from corporations and the people who own them, your chances of winning elections to higher offices (congress, presidency) are close to zero. And the odds of enough similarly-untainted, like-minded people getting elected concurrently (or at least running campaigns popular enough to pressure those in office) is even more astronomically low.

But....

Campaign funding issues only scratch the surface of what it would take to achieve any kind of real reform re: freeing the government from corporate influence.

Because even if you, say, pull off some kind of underdog miracle and get elected to Congress without completely selling out... you're not going to accomplish shit without political capital, somehow bucking the other 534 members of Congress who have sold out.

> was won by the candidate who spent about 1/3rd less than their opponent

I guess the truth of that statement depends on whether or not you consider the $36 billion dollars that Musk has lost on Twitter to have been "spent" or not.

Is that the case if you include the fact that Fox News is effectively a wing of the Republican party? It seems to me that Republicans don't need to spend more since they have an entire outside propaganda apparatus.

It's also not just funding. It's funding, gerrymandering, the electoral college, lobbying, the Supreme Court, voter suppression, etc.

The wealthy have captured the levers of government and wield them against the working class, and it's only getting worse.

Captured them? Made them, they did.

When democracy doesn't work, the citizens have a duty to turn to violence against their government. They not only SHOULD do it, they MUST. That is the fundamental principle this country was founded upon.

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread. -- Anatole France

>we should be cautious about even softly embracing or downplaying vigilantism.

Agreed. However, there's been kind of a lot of noise being made the last year or two about "it's time to sharpen the guillotines" WRT the concentration of wealth, and as a society in the US our collective reaction seems to be "let them eat cake".

Yes, it's unfortunate and we very well might be headed towards a French Revolution era.

I hope people on both sides of those phrases remember how many benign people were killed during the French Revolution, to say nothing of how many "true believers" were as well (Robespierre was also executed by guillotine).

Revolutions are fascinating. The Reign of Terror served as a warning to plenty of non-peasants. But, to get there, the army of the monarchy had to kill thousands of peasants without any warning or recognition of their humanity. So I think people who know the Revolution wonder whether people are reacting like we’re at the beginning, or the middle.

The French Revolution is generally agreed to have started with the third estate forming their own assembly and storming the Bastille a month later to depose the king.

Whatever you think of Jan 6, we clearly haven't deposed the President nor has any vocal section of Congress formed their own legislature so any argument that the revolution has actually begun seems specious or is stretching the definition of the word "revolution" so much as to be meaningless.

Revolutions usually involve going through a door of no-return, and there's little evidence to suggest we've hit that point. Congress could, tomorrow, announce a wealth tax and sweeping reforms and etc and most aggrievances would be resolved.

We don't say a ball is on the ground just because it's in freefall and likely to be on the ground shortly barring any last-second intervention.

Yet the right-wing narrative building since 2016 is that Trump and close legislative allies are counter-revolutionary. “You’re not going to have a country anymore” is not suggesting a return to a 1950s tax regimen.

Oh here’s my other favorite part of this discussion: Which revolution are we talking about? Left vs right? Wealthy vs poor? Capitalism vs Socialism (yes, that is very different from the previous one)? All extremely different revolutions even if they’re all bubbling to the surface now!

Hopefully when the glorious revolution comes, it’s the one people are hoping for and not one of the other ones.

There are plenty of people who will find this murder and the reasoning behind it abhorrent but still support violent overthrow of existing power structures.

Hearhear. I suppose the first tenet of conservatism in light of the education of founders of America is that rapid change in social order tends to be a net negative. Other preoccupations have been bolted on, but now we see a Republican Party that itself is changing faster than the Democratic Party.

“THERE were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”

― Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Timely as ever

"Vigiliante justice" is an oxymoron.

`Insurance premium` is an oxymoron even more so for non-native English speakers.

The only problem I can actually name with vigilante justice is that it can be error-prone. Otherwise it's only an encroachment upon the state's monopoly on the dispensation of justice, and I'm not seeing a moral objection to that. And the state's approach to justice is also quite error-prone.

It's a narrow view of justice that equates it to well aimed violence.

> no, we shouldn't be assassinating people.

"I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure"

Nearly fell out of my chair with that one. Who said that? Seems familiar

Often misattributed to Mark Twain but actually from Clarence Darrow, a lawyer I've never heard of: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mark-twain-obituary-pleasu....

Clarence Darrow is one of the most famous lawyers in US history, and is widely considered to perhaps be the best attorney in US history as well.

The main way normal people have heard of him was that he was the defense attorney in the Scopes monkey trial.

Wait so there was near universal outcry on the left about “Jan 6 insurrection” but assassination of public figures is actually fine if they have a low approval rating and allegedly negatively affect people’s lives? Guess what? Congress is lucky if 10% of people across the board think they AREN’T screwing up the country.

Yup. One was a revolution in which the government was justified to defend itself. Maybe responding with overwhelming force would have been better.

The other is more like a school shooting. Unless we really want to talk about the causes and access to guns, thoughts and prayers are enough.

I think this is a subject that tends to bring the absolute lunatics out of their holes.

Not to get into political aspects and you putting "quotes" around Jan 6 insurrection (attempt) but this is a big country and there will always be someone who thinks that public figures are screwing them (or not). In Congress however, the people have ability to replace such figures, every two or six years. Those are there are elected by the majority of their constituents and the minority which "lost" will have opportunity to change the direction for their district/state in two or six years.

You cannot compare that to this tragedy in any way/shape/form...

Oh yeah. I agree that all powerful people which most people hate should be scared. What other incentive is there for them to not screw everyone over forever? They're certainly not gonna just decide to care about other people. However, Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, and fired up his base on the lie that it was stolen from him and they'd need to storm the government to take back power if they didn't want to be completely disenfranchised forever and hunted down like dogs in the street. All of which was obviously a lie. Even funnier how they screamed about being disenfranchised after 2020 and just won the next election, guess that was a lie too?

If Donald Trump really had the 2020 election stolen from him i'd support the jan 6 people because they'd be right. But they're not, they voted and they lost, it was not stolen from them. On the other hand, who exactly is disagreeing that this health insurance company is hurting all of us? What evidence do we have that they're not actually denying necessary care and, in fact, are actually the only person that can save us from the evil other insurance companies that actually provide insurance to their members? I don't see that rhetoric here. The situations are very different.

It sounds like you're saying people should have the same attitude towards a mob storming the capital on the claim of a stolen election vs a man who systematically oppressed those who are ill, and arguably stole from them as well?

I don't wish harm on anyone but these are two very morally different situations, which require very different responses.

Also it is not clear to me that those who are outraged at the CEO is on the left. I'd imagine that the right is equally denied of health coverage while ill, and it seems plausible that they would be just as angry as those on the left.

> you can't just wreck people's lives for a living and expect no consequences

The problematic aspect of this argument is that if expanded to the whole society, it can lead to a very dark place.

I come from a place that has 40K+ murders per year [1]. People literally dies all the time there, and as much everyone is so fed up with corruption and inequality, I strongly believe that institutions, law, and order are the best solution once I experimented it in another place.

People all over the internet are using the narrative related to the insurance industry that let people die, and this CEO was the sacrificial lamb of this narrative. Its an easy thing to do since it's a direct cause and consequence thing.

But expanding the same logic, should politicians have the same treatment since their decisions have way more consequences [2]? Of course not.

As someone who saw civilization and savagery, I would choose the first in a heartbeat, and the main issue here is the incentive structure that rounds the health system in USA and why the political class does not take action to change it.

[1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/312455/number-homicides-...

[2] - https://www.metropoles.com/brasil/eleicoes-40-candidatos-mor...

Is anyone arguing that this form of justice should be expanded to all of society?

While I'm not defending the CEO in any capacity, there are many places on the internet simply gleeful to watch this man die. These people feel that way because his company killed their loved ones and harmed them directly.

I think a lot of the terror and push back were seeing in these comments and discussions is just how completely detached rich and privileged people are from the lived experience of the majority of the country, and a corresponding lack of empathy that comes with simply not being aware of the class war that's being fought. I think these privileges people did not understand how much of the populace actively despises them for being so privileged and umempathetic. Most people working at wendys or target simply can't understand how this ceo could've lived knowing he was destroying people's lives. And now rich tech workers are looking at their own track records, seeing a few unsavory things, and terrifying themselves over a slippery slope that makes them the victim, when the real ground truth of what's actually happening is that poor people are victims every single day, they're being walked on by huge corporations and abused to feed corporate compensation packages for executives that were fired for embezzlement.

It's easy to try to make the story about ourselves and make up something that makes us feel scared and vulnerable, like we're next. But that's theoretical, and imaginary. There's real harm being done to thousands of people every day, done by massive corporations. If you're willing to attempt to turn the conversion to suit your imaginary persecution scenario, why aren't you willing to shift the conversation to the real death and depravity that real people face every day? If you're so scared, why haven't you done anything yet? Don't wanna be one of the targets? The fix your shit and start working to better the world instead of extracting from it. That's the power of this assassination. The legal system is only scary to the poors, Healthcare is only fucked for the poors, job security and stable income and housing and for prices are only fucked for the poors. Everyone is scared to die. Don't wanna be, better start giving the poors other ways to communicate, cause they're gonna get their message across one way or another.

Thank you for articulating this.

I'd change "thousands" to "millions" and keep all the rest. Very well said, thanks for taking the time to state it!

Why are you calling street crime a form of justice?

just to provide some context, the murder rates across Brazil vary widely by region. São Paulo's is pretty close to the global average.

maybe stop wrecking people's lives?

>But expanding the same logic, should politicians have the same treatment since their decisions have way more consequences [2]?

Yes? Like not even a little bit?

The liberal ideal of Democracy is as an alternative to violence. When Democracy fails, you are expected to correct it with violence. The system doesnt work without this failsafe.

I really dont understand where this civility at all costs idea came from.

Shit yankistan was literally founded on this ideal. They venerate people like John Brown who got to the wetwork of abolition years before there was a civil war.

> The problematic aspect of this argument is that if expanded to the whole society, it can lead to a very dark place.

then don't be the CEO leading society to a dark place?

70%+ of Americans are happy with their healthcare. I have UHC and I'm happy with my coverage. The comments in the article and your post bring to mind nihilism more than some CEO none of us knew.

Edit, source: https://news.gallup.com/poll/327686/americans-satisfaction-h...

https://i.ibb.co/CzZhS40/image.png

These kinds of tone-deaf comments try have no place in 2024 when discussing Health Care.

It's almost as tone deaf as telling someone who'd just been in a car accident that "I'm fine, and you'll be fine too".

Imagine if I wrote "70% of Americans don't really experience racism or discrimination, so it's all fine" ?

Racism is nothing like health care.

Health care is a good or service that depends on other people's labor. People do not have a right to other people's labor (no matter how much they insist otherwise). It's entirely reasonable to bring up the fact that most Americans are happy with their health care.

>People do not have a right to other people's labor

Oh god not this nonsense "you're enslaving the doctors" argument.

By the way, insurance companies don't provide health care. They're a financial layer set to extract profit from those who need it, and United Healthcare seems to be the best at it.

That is not, in fact, what insurance is.

It is not what insurance should be, but it is in practice what private health insurance is.

Insurance is an attempt at statistical multiplexing of a financial resource whose profit taking mechanism is investment of float, and management of spread, leading to perverse incentives when it comes time to actually pay out.

As statistical multiplexing usually does, it improves things somewhat when you can't grow things larger, but when done for-profit with dividends, often disincents actually solving the capacity problem.

> Racism is nothing like health care.

Racism is a lot like classism, though, and the distribution of health care is a consequence of structural classism of capitalist society.

I don't think racism is much like classism.

I'm not sure what your second clause means other than "currently, people with more money can buy more health care". Of course it would be nice if the supply matched the demand r.e. health care. But neither single-payer systems nor more radical "restructurings" have solved that problem.

> It's entirely reasonable to bring up the fact that most Americans are happy with their health care.

You can bring it up and it very well may be factually true, but it's irrelevant to the discussion.

I disagree that people don't have the right to other people's labor. Society is effectively a system where people pool their labor, resources, ability, etc. for mutual benefit. If people can't reasonably expect to gain some of the benefits that other people can provide, then why would they enter into the social contract in the first place?

What's the most serious claim you've had to make with UHC?

I fell prey to their AI that (definitely unintentionally) denied 90% of claims. I required surgery for a repetitive stress injury. I fought it and got the surgery done, but it pushed the surgery into the new plan year which I suppose was the original intention.

If this was a family member with cancer being treated the same way I'd be significantly more sanguine.

Sanguine means "optimistic or positive, especially in an apparently bad or difficult situation".

Did you mean to write a different word, or are you saying "if a family member dying of cancer had their treatment delayed, I'd feel more positive"?

"Sanguinary" might be the intended word here.

Emergency surgery that probably would have invariably killed me since the organ was already gangrenous.

It got called "medically unnecessary" because apparently the person processing the claim couldn't read the fact that the organ was already dead and stopped at the line "stomach pain".

I had SIRS/sepsis right after that, it was fun.

What % of Americans have had a serious illness or injury and are they in the 70% or the 30%?

How many Americans were unable to answer the survey at all because they died from a treatable condition that was denied by their insurance company?

Literal survivorship bias. Woof

Thirty percent is a big number when you’re thinking of consequences like bankruptcy and death.

"70% of Americans are happy with their fire insurance. The ones whose homes burn down aren't, and are saying something about their claims being denied, but they are a minority."

I’m pretty sure that people around the world had a lot more empathy towards Shinzo Abe.

>>you can't just wreck people's lives for a living and expect no consequences.

Just wondering how will people react to mass unemployment resulting from AI/Automation.

There better be lots of affluence going around. Food, Healthcare, and Fun. Or things will get ugly fast.

Yes there will, and i think it will be a terrible thing, helped by a terrible precedent we're setting now. If you don't want death to be the precedent, give people another option. He needed to be punished for what he did. None of us can put him in jail, he has too much money for that. Violence is the only recourse we're allowed, that's a terrible thing but it's true. I wish it wasn't like this

Well, the tax rate for people making (say) more than 2 million / year could just be 50%, and then increase by 10% for every 0 added.

$20 million -> 60%

$200 million -> 70%

$2 billion -> 80%

I think that would bring things under control without resorting to extrajudicial means. But apparently, that's completely impossible to achieve in the US, so here we are...

Are you aware that wealthy people sometimes employ the act of a “modest” salary and live off collateral loans from their 100s of millions to billions in stock, so as to not pay taxes?

I mean, it's pretty logical why we don't punish/deal with these nihilistic parasites - it's because they control the levers of power.

In places like China people in power who enable massive fraud have been executed or imprisoned for life.

I guess this is substantially because there are two power structures in China: the capitalist class, and the Communist Party, and the Party periodically finds it necessary to remind the capitalist class under whose sufferance they are being allowed to get rich, and why.

I saw discussions about the killer's gears. The shoes cost more than $1K. The backpack $200. The hoodie $200. The silencer $800. And etc. If this were true, it didn't look like a vengeance by someone with nothing to lose, but by some professional.

Did you see a "steal his look" meme and think it was real?

I had no idea there was a meme. And given my zero knowledge in attire and fashion brands, I wouldn't know if what was said was real either.

If you were going to do something like this, you have very very little hope of ever living under your original identity (you'd probably have to be without papers or flee the country), so getting some kind of very high interest loan to buy gear would be rational no matter what you had to lose.

While the weapon itself was certainly expensive, I don't know how anyone can tell the price of the fairly generic clothes from the blurry footage.

> "...you can't just wreck people's lives for a living and expect no consequences..."

Considering how many people have had their identities stolen and suffered considerable financial damage thanks to sloppy programming and IT practices, I really would not cheer on the pursuit of that line of thought if I were you. The software industry is not exactly loved by the public right now.

The problem is that it is systemic, the CEO is just part of it, killing the CEO will just cause a new CEO to be appointed, maybe one who is even worse. If it becomes common for unpopular CEOs to get killed, this will select for CEOs who don't mind risking their life if the pay is worth it, essentially the profile of a crime lord.

Killing the system is much harder. If you want to go the murderous route, the idea would be to murder random shareholders, not necessarily the CEO, based on how much share they have. It may include the CEO, directors, or maybe you if that company is part of of your portfolio, directly or not.

The most effective way may actually be the most boring and frustrating: financial sanctions or outcompetition by a government elected by people who actually care. A systemic solution for a systemic problem.

Society has no shortage of nihilistic parasites, in fact normal people can act like this in the right circumstances. And by normal people I literally mean you and me. The problem is addressed by avoiding such circumstances.

I hope this is a sign the people have realized democracy has failed, they have no real power, and that we need to fight the oligarchs

I think democracy has definitely failed. And if people start fighting oligarchs, that wouldn't be a bad thing either, provided it is done strategically.

Pure democracy failed when the elected leaders decided to experiment with not enforcing laws.

It's probably slightly more correct to state that they failed to get full democracy.

America has a long history of denying democracy to its people, so it's not exactly a secret.

On a long enough timescale it can be seen to becoming more democratic but there were setbacks along the way and the oligarchy made a few strong moves over the last few decades.

Hilariously, Donald Trump's re-election is such a great example of how powerful democracy is if you actually do it.

But Americans are so pacified that it takes conspiracy theories to get them interested in invoking their supreme power at the ballot box

That voter apathy is intentional. Making you believe "both sides" (as if there are only two sides) are the same is intentional.

If you hate politicians, make them fear you at the ballot box. Let someone else go to jail for murder.

UnitedHealthcare knows about HIPPA but somehow this past year or so leaked (through one of their business partners iirc?) the Social Security Numbers PII of 100+ million Americans, an act which while perhaps inevitable can never be undone, also leaking the numbers of my three young kids which as a dad I now have to mildly worry about for the next few decades.

Nobody deserves to be murdered, there are way worse things where life itself is at stake as described in this article, and as someone working with databases and security over decades I know people in glass houses shouldnt throw stones.

But I am not a fan of these guys and I thought perhaps a few on this forum would appreciate this nerdly? petty? but also slightly serious vent and point.

Correction to a common, minor mistake: it's HIPAA, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, not HIPPA.

Was it CHANGE? My kid has already had his data exposed by companies affiliated with UHC twice. He's not even in Kindergarten yet.

Ours was. 3 kids with their data exposed when they were 4 and 2 respectively (the 4 year olds are twins).

yes

related tidbits: * UHC only acquired CHANGE 2-3 years ago hoping for AI gold. data is sometimes nuclear waste, eh? * unconfirmed by me if CHANGE was UHC vendor prior to acquision but seems likely * Biden DOJ blocked the acquisition since it gave UHC access to competitor info managed by CHANGE, then later caved * some CHANGE server didnt have MFA but was "supposed to" ... but theres probably more not disclosed * it's widely (unusual for a hack) reported UHC did pay the hacker 22 million ransomware. maybe our kids numbers were saved but nobody actually saying that * The hacker claiming responsibility for the hack was arrested in russia just now (see krebs blog). Within 72hrs of the assasination. No way thats a coincidence. Havent seen that angle reported yet though. Surely some strings being pulled or heat applied somewhere...

If they manage to catch this guy, it would be fascinating to watch jury selection. Trying to find people who haven’t been fucked by health insurance will be near impossible.

I would bet he walks regardless of evidence.

But juries have been brainwashed into believing that they don't have the right of jury nullification of a case, whereas in truth they have always had this implicit right.

> Trying to find people who haven’t been fucked by health insurance will be near impossible

What world do you live in?

America

I'll add my voice and say you must be pretty damn privileged, either in health or money, to have never experienced a loved one or yourself being actively degraded and attacked by the insurance state. The people on the phone are nice, but the company would rather you died, sorry. Also, for you to state such a question tells me you're not only privileged, but completely unrecognizing of that privilege, attributing incredible luck to some kind of innate power, or just very unempathetic or un plugged in to the reality of the people at Starbucks, or target, or anywhere else that people serve you.

They denied one third of every claim sent. Even indirectly, just the culture change of doing that has and will undoubtedly kill thousands of people who are afraid or helpless to even try to use this evil system.

I was thinking about that earlier - I'm not sure they could find 12 jurors to convict the guy.

I was filtered for this by questionnaire when I served jury duty earlier this year when I was asked if it was ever okay to break the law and why. The prosecution prolly never selects anyone who answers yes to this. There was a murder trial I was not selected for then some weird civil action in Santa Clara county. I was also eliminated from the jury pool in San Mateo county when I said I would not automatically assume a police officer was telling the truth.

> I was also eliminated from the jury pool in San Mateo county when I said I would not automatically assume a police officer was telling the truth.

This seems like a good reason to start “creatively interpreting” these questionnaires. Like, maybe I automatically assume they’re telling the truth until I notice a whole bunch of inconsistencies and start applying my critical thinking skills. The question just asks about my initial assumption.

It might not actually be that hard.

First, they could just end up with a panel the is full of older people. Remember, once the average person in the US hits 65 they are eligible for Medicare. Medicare users tend to be pretty happy with it. 80-90% satisfaction rate, 90+% rate its performance positively, around 95% are satisfied with the quality of care, and few report problems with access to care.

Even if they remember being not happy with an insurance provider before they switched to medicare they are old enough to have probably had several insurance providers and will probably remember good ones too.

Second, there are a lot of people who even if they are at a provider that likes to fuck people have never been fucked themselves. A lot of people only use their health insurance for routine physicals, routine lab tests, routine vaccinations, and the kinds of things that even the most fuck-inclined companies don't usually fuck with like getting treatment for physical injuries.

I think it wouldn't be too difficult. The Jury would be 20-30 year olds who haven't yet had to deal much with health insurance. Or people who aren't insured / avoid doctor visits and are roughly neutral. Or people who complain about insurance, but also blame the people who take advantage of the system for their insurance costs going up. Or people who have good insurance paid for by their employer.

Atomized violence like this is pure adventurism and does nothing to improve the lives ruined by men like Brian Thompson. If anything, this event will serve as a catalyst to expand the police state. There is nothing to celebrate here.

That is probably true. Direct atmomized violence as you nicely put it is in some way welcomed by the system because it is a perfect excuse for the system to tighten the reigns.

When I was a super angsty teenager I had a little thought experiment. I imagined that I had a Death Note or some other magical device that could instantly murder someone from any range at any time. How long would it take me to eradicate McDonalds? (Nothing against McD in particular, just using it as an example of an enormous company.)

I eventually came to the conclusion that there’s no way to do it killing individuals one by one in isolation. You would have to kill enough people to start changing society, in one way or another. But you can already do that, plenty of other ways to change society without murder. It might be hard but not impossible.

To 13 year old me this was like some divine epiphany, and so even though it’s, well, pretty unimpressive, the event is very clear in my memory.

I would bet I could take mcdonalds out in under an hour. You don't need to kill everyone just a few at the top to make your divine will understood.

Btw I love mcdonalds and would never

> When I was a super angsty teenager I had a little thought experiment. I imagined that I had a Death Note or some other magical device that could instantly murder someone from any range at any time. How long would it take me to eradicate McDonalds? ... I eventually came to the conclusion that there’s no way to do it killing individuals one by one in isolation.

I'm not so sure. What if you repeatedly and predictably killed whoever occupied C-suite and the board (or whoever takes the leadership roles)? Eventually, people would see the pattern, and no one would agree to take those roles, and the company would die.

In your thought experience, if you proceeded to predictably kill whoever was*next in the line of succession after exactly a week, you could probably even trigger a mass resignation without even killing that many leaders, as everyone races to get out of the way.

Yeah, the other strategy is to release statements about why they're dying. "The next CEO that increases their salary or does a stock buyback within 12 months of laying off more than 30 employees will die." And then follow that up with action? Sure, they'd hunt you down, but they'd stop extracting like that reeeaaall fast.

Such a police state cannot function without meaningful gun control regulation, so it might still improve lives.

No amount of security and surveillance can guarantee safety . Secret service and intelligence community has thousands of people at their disposal and exceptionally advanced tech yet the attempts on Regan or trump failed just on luck .

UK is a good example of what kind of police state you imagine, strong surveillance with strong gun laws , it won’t solve healthcare or class divides but mass shootings and violent crime rates will drop.

As far as I can see the incarcération rate in the US is about 4 times higher than that in the UK. The US even has the death penalty, where the UK does not. When it comes to surveillance, there's no greater set of invasive measures than the PATRIOT act.

When I talk about police states, that's the kind of stuff I mean. And it seems like it's functioning just fine in the US, despite the lack of meaningful gun control.

My point is that there is not much else the state can do expect gun control they already have extensive monitoring, police forces with free rein, the worst incarceration rate on par with likes of Saudi Arabia as you point out.

The only major difference between UK and here is gun control (and to an extent media control) I.e first and second amendment rights .

Observing the coverage of this event , more media control doesn’t seem to likely have meaningful returns , so gun control is all that is left.

I am not saying the government will be smart to figure it out and do it, however unless they do it there won’t be meaningful impact on the people’s ability to react this way.

—-

PS: UK unlike Netherlands or like nordic countries is rate limited by capacity of prison system

This is also a problem in US a bit less acute though, so it is hard to say what would be natural rate for UK would it closer to US or not. Capacity influences policy on sentence length, early releases etc

I'm not so sure about that

https://www.fastcompany.com/91241537/anthem-blue-cross-blue-...

There is not much a police state can do when 1 out of every 3 Americans own guns.

> There is nothing to celebrate here.

Disagree. This might be the best news in a long time.

Their incarceration rate is the fifth highest in the world, they have the death penalty, and their surveillance apparatus is infamous. Sure seems like a police state to me. But the population does get to keep the trinkets that make them feel like big boys, I'll give you that.

There's a bit in Dickens's Christmas Carol where Scrooge sees the generally pleased reaction to his death.

Wonder if any other CEOs are seeing this reaction today as a visit from the ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

I doubt it. Besides being generally physically isolated from the rest of the proletariat, they're all living in a social/professional bubble full of sycophants where everyone blows smoke up their asses and tells them they are good and correct. I guarantee you not a single Fortune 500 CEO thinks of himself as the bad guy of the movie.

The wife saying that the threats to his life were "something about coverage?" sort of hammers this point home.

The stock went slightly up after the murder. I guess he is replacable. Rest in peace. The company will do just fine.

He died doing what he loved: increasing shareholder value.

This is the best comment I have read on this site. Also hope he gets denied life insurance if he has it

this comment is pure gold - thanks for making it today!

Possibly because his replacement can now commit even more horrors and blame it on the incumbent. They have a year or three of unlimited enshittification.

Anyone wanna guess how many deaths this guy was responsible for?

Half a million

Source? Or is this a joke? I both can and can't believe this statement

"Any guesses for how many ...?"

"Half a million"

"You got a source for that guess?"

Understandable reaction. Leadership of totally unethical companies deserves no sympathy.

I feel similarly. I don’t want the guy to die, but I’m not shocked that he was murdered. I’m not sure that anyone feels UnitedHealthcare as a for profit health insurance company really helped them in their life besides their employees.

Most people I know feel their company adopted them as a cost savings option and severely degraded their plans from a BCBS plan.

The murder could have been avoided if the bad guy had a gun.

How does having a gun help when the person is shot from behind?

Has anyone claimed responsibility for what appears to be a well-planned assassination?

As America moves further towards a billionaire-controlled system that disregards conventional norms of democracy, I wonder if there will be a rise of militant leftist groups, like in Italy and Germany in the 1970s (Red Brigades, Baader-Meinhof). These groups also targeted industrialists and executives.

Also Greece - I can't remember their name, 17 November?

Ah yes, Baader-Meinhof. The namesake of one of my favorite phenomena: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion

It's extremely difficult to have sympathy for this person, just look at the data. They were the highest by percentage of claims denied of any company. They were being investigated for fraud, corruption, _and_ monopolistic behavior. Many people (including myself) have had family members killed by the state of Healthcare in America. Just last week i was wondering to my friends how things like this don't happen more often!

Healthcare companies are run by their executives and their shareholders. Those people have been actively pushing our passively watching extremely harmful policies get enacted month after month. Another company just announced it'll only pay for the estimated amount of anesthesia for a surgery, and not the actual amount needed (you know, when you live in reality and not on a spreadsheet).

I'll say, personally, i watched my own mother slowly die because:

1) she was afraid to go to the doctor for fear of having to use my father's insurance which i needed very badly and which she had to use after being laid off from a highly profitable corporation in 2009

2) when she did use his insurance (she was right) they fought very very hard to not cover the necessary treatments. The amount of anguish and terror they put my father through was equal to that of watching his wife wither and die, he'll say that himself

3) the _only_ reason she even got what she did was that he was high enough in _his_ work position and there long enough to have significant pull with the tpp guys, who are the only actual human beings in the entire story. They fought for him and the entire company switched health providers because of the cost of one man's wife.

Every human you talk to on the phone will try to help you and genuinely wish you well. All the people in the doctors office and so incredibly kind and helpful and knowledgeable. What we have, is a group of blood sucking number-brained vampires, running these systems. I watched my mother die because she was scared to use a healthcare system that she had worked for, paid into for the vast majority of her life. The system didn't care about her, the system wanted her to die because it would save a couple thousand dollars on a 20 billion dollar balance sheet.

How many of us have seen this happen. I think we Americans tend to kinda forget that we can choose a different system, we can fight for a better reality. And the assassination, practically ritual murder in the eyes of some, of this man, this executive that represents the worst of the worst of the system, his death brings us back to the reality which we actually can change. The high guard of Healthcare aren't invincible, maybe the system isn't either. We all just watched a man die in the street, but most of us have watched people far more important to us die before, sacrificed for people like him. A lot of us have had to fight endless pointless hours to receive something which _every single human around us_ believes and knows is completely necessary, just to eventually be allowed the privilege of being charged impossible amounts for treatment your need. Die or debt, the system says. It's just so nice to not be the one in the system that's scared, even if only for a moment.

Life is not neal breen, most likely this won't trigger a revolution or any lasting change, besides executives becoming harder to kill and more detached from regular life of normal people. But could this work? If our political system is have a hard time making bastard megacorporations treat us like people, we'll executive assassinations work? What kind of fear will happen and is it the kind that will make them want to fix problems? Seems like that might require some kind of movie-esque hacking the tv channels and presenting your demands along with actions to back it up. Will this change anything?

Don't leave a trail of bodies behind you if you want me to care when you die. Some of those bodies were friends, family, and members of my communities.

What difference would it make to anyone if you care when they die? They’re dead.

It's not unusual for people to care about their legacy. All but one health insurance executive got to find out how people will remember them.

The business model of insurance is no more exploitative than that of big tech. One needs look no further than profits to verify this. With the number of corporate tech people here, I would expect more reservation over corporate guys getting capped.

Besides, the big money settles to specialists, hospitals, & pharma (remember Shkreli?). Unless this was a competitor’s hit, the killer went for the wrong target.

When is Nadella going to get popped for draining a redacted amount of water from a desert town for model training? When are Cook and Zuckerberg going to get drive-by’d for eavesdropping on your conversations so they can target ads?

That is why I would not have any sympathy for a big tech CEO either.

The most shocking aspect of this murder is the fact that I S&P 100 CEO did not have any kind of security around, especially being from an industry that deals with so sensitive business like insurance.

It's bonkers to me that the board of this company did not know that he did not have any personal security, and definitely someone somehow will open a lawsuit to uncover that.

If a S&P 100 CEO is so approachable like this, what this company board thinks that it would hold someone to threaten or kidnap the CEO himself or it's family members to get some advantage?

Unless you know someone is trying to kill you it can be safer to give yourself a lower profile by not having security.

I am not a CEO, but I am pretty sure that after the company becomes a national entity there are some specific insurances specialized for this kind of individual and the board provides some security at company expenses [1].

For instance: The shareholders of Tesla know that it has a huge dependency on the services of Elon Musk, and the continuity and value of the business rely upon his ability to work (i.e. not being dead); I strongly believe that if the board of directors does not allocate security services to keep the continuity of his life (i.e. to keep him working) I would be surprised that it wouldn't be a gross breach in their fiduciary duties.

[1] - https://fortune.com/2024/09/14/tech-billionaire-ceos-securit...

[2] - https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000119312510...

Tesla is a unique case in that their overvaluation is very much tied to elon personally. Elon is also a public and recognizable figure. Security is usually to keep the crazies away, not the dedicated attacker. If you're a nonpublic figure you don't have to worry about being recognized and attacked by random crazy people.

> The most shocking aspect of this murder is the fact that I S&P 100 CEO did not have any kind of security around, especially being from an industry that deals with so sensitive business like insurance.

Brian Thompson was not a "S&P 100 CEO" (that's UnitedHealth Group, whose CEO is Andrew Witty), he was the CEO of a subsidiary (UnitedHealthcare).

Given how many claims UHC denied it'd be real hard to find trustworthy security guards. Any one of them could have family or friends that suffered due to denied claims, something that (probably) won't show up on background checks.

As TwoNineA posted in another thread:

"I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure." - Clarence Darrow, often misattributed to Mark Twain

Old Soviet joke:

A man goes to a newspaper stand every day, buys a copy of Pravda, glances at the front cover, curses, and throws it away.

After a few weeks of this the seller asks what's going on: "why do you always look at the cover but never inside? Can I help you?"

"I'm looking for an obituary."

"An obituary? But those are in the back and you're only looking at the front!"

"Oh no, the obituary I'm looking for will be on the front page."

From Bierce's "The Devil's Dictionary":

> HOMICIDE

> -n.

> The slaying of one human being by another. There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy, but it makes no great difference to the person slain whether he fell by one kind or another - the classification is for advantage of the lawyers.

An amusing side-story:

> Normally, trolling and sadistic glee over a person’s death are relegated to the margins on extremist sites like 4chan or X ever since Elon Musk purchased the platform.

Media outlets are now outright referring to Xitter as an extremist site.

I noticed that as well. I’m of two minds - on one hand Gizmodo is a total rag and they’re not above that kind of shit slinging. On the other hand, they kind of have a point…

The author must have never used teddit

i mean yeah? it’s pretty easy to find white supremacy, anti-semitism, overt racism, etc with a little of search from the home page. reddit and other sites have their fair share, but twitter is the only large only that encourages or at least doesn’t push against this sort of content

I'm not sure why anyone would celebrate this, a father was executed in daylight and left a mourning family. Regardless of what you think of a man's deeds, his life had value.

If he had done wrong to people, he should be brought to justice via the court of law (in a democratic nation at least..)

The failures of our legal system to hold the wealthy in general and CEO’s in particular accountable for their decisions is why he was gunned down instead of being brought to justice via the legal system.

If he killed as many people with a gun or a knife as he has with his decisions as a CEO, he would likely be the most prolific serial killer (though maybe not since there wasn’t a cooling off period).

I like many people am not cheering his death, but I’m also not ever going to mourn the death of an objectively terrible person.

The family’s rich off money made killing some people and making a ton more suffer.

Live by the sword…

> If he had done wrong to people, he should be brought to justice via the court of law (in a democratic nation at least..)

Even the Sacklers are free and still rich. This is like wishing for a unicorn for Christmas. You want something that flat out isn’t real.

This man indirectly killed thousands and left many more sick and destitute. His policies have made countless families mourn. His life had negative value. I celebrate its end.

To me death sentence should be denied, in any form and for absolutely any reason.

Also why _health insurance_ needs to have profits ?? It's just like basic school education.

Denying some procedures can be rational becouse unefective.

But pleas do make health NOT A BUSINESS !!

funny that he gets all the blame

as if any other insurance company can do any better, in a broken system

but the system, those that created it (politicians) and those that exploit it (non-medical hospital staff) get off

Well UHC does have the highest denial rate in the industry, even in a broken system his company is an outlier.

https://www.valuepenguin.com/health-insurance-claim-denials-...

In reading other discussions, I came across this recent gem from a different company:

November 14, 2024 - In an unprecedented move, Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield plans representing Connecticut, New York and Missouri have unilaterally declared it will no longer pay for anesthesia care if the surgery or procedure goes beyond an arbitrary time limit, regardless of how long the surgical procedure takes. The American Society of Anesthesiologists calls on Anthem to reverse this proposal immediately.

https://www.asahq.org/about-asa/newsroom/news-releases/2024/...

That by itself doesn't mean anything.

Their profit margins are higher than average but not exceptional.

https://www.financecharts.com/compare/UNH,CI,ELV,CVS,MOH/sum...

But even that doesn't mean anything.

I worked for a company that used ML to fight health insurance fraud ("mistakes") in the German market - where doctors/administrators would require payment for extra procedures that they never actually performed. So "denial rate" or even "profit margin" would go up with better AI that discovers more fraud!

Maybe a good metric would be something like "expected lifespan"? But even that can be misleading (e.g. maybe different insurers serve different populations...)

How can you say that doesn't mean anything? It means that if you have united, your twice as likely to be denied necessary, prescribed care! That's what it literally means. I don't care if occasional doctor over prescribe a thing and make extra money, does that happen in 1/3rd of all prescriptions given by all doctors in the network? This man's company was increasing profits by denying necessary care to people, including dying people who would have been saved. He made the decision to keep the company doing that and his purview built the system that automated denials so they could deny even more, all without letting an actual fucking doctor see any of it. That's monstrous! That's disgusting! He's literally killing people with his policies, while taking home the highest salary in the business! How much human suffering, how many hours of terror and pain, how many dead bodies did that man let happen, did he _make_ happen, all so he could take home millions and millions of dollars. I'd bet he never had to fight for a prescription, he never got taken off a necessary medication, he never spent months of his life fighting on the phone to save his mother's life, or to get the necessary medication so that she could at least die in peace.

I have. We have. So many more people than apparently you think. He deserved a lot worse that a gunshot.

When the systems are so kafkaesque, so labyrinthine, the processes are intentionally gordian knots of unknown requirements, silently attacking your very need to survive as a human being. When the systems can't be fixed by the people most drastically effected, what recourse do we have? Nothing. So I'll cheer his death, at least someone did something for once.

An insurance adjuster defending insurance companies. Sounds good to me!

His innovation was to deploy AI models to automate claim denials. The system didn't make him to do that. He's responsible for the deaths of thousands and is rightly receiving 0 sympathy for his demise.

It's AI in name only. It's not AI in truth. It might as well have been a random number generator.

Yeah agreed. I mean these words have been diluted to hell. It’s all just statistical models, random number generator being one lol.

I don't mean to make light of real AI like well-trained large deep models, but clearly the use here of "AI" by these insurance firms isn't reflective of any intelligence.

He gets the blame as a "representative" of the industry, and certainly deserves all the blame for what his own company did. The fattest check in the company and all the executive power come with all the blame.

But let's not dilute the issue, politicians didn't create the circles of hell of getting a claim assessed and denied in milliseconds by some algorithm. That was CEOs' chase for the profit.

Politicians however are responsible for allowing insurance companies to reject claims at all for FDA approved indications. Insurance companies should not have the power to deny any medically prescribed claim for an FDA approved use.

Sounds like an Ayn Rand book. I say: the system may not forbid you to do something, but that doesn't make it ethical.

Someone will get blame so there is pressure and change happens, life isn’t fair for regular people so there is no reason it should be fair for these people

There is no system, it’s a Nash equilibrium of individual actors under insane regulations.

Politicians create systems like this because they're incentivized to do so, by lobbying or ownership.

To paraphrase Clarence Darrow, "I've never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure."

Instead of “Americans” this should say “selected social media posts”. It’s not indicative of any consensus among Americans.

Although this looks like it could be a professional hit, possibly part of a bigger and more hidden issue, I always wondered how long before people start taking the vigilantism road especially in countries with extensive gun ownership. And how will those CEOs react to this.

I was thinking the same but then I thought a professional hitman probably also has families and health insurance problems.

Or people with families and health insurance problems may be able to hire a hitman.

The CEOs will hire private security, expense it to the company, which causes pressure to raise insurance premiums.

Having private security around all the time makes it way harder to cheat on your spouse.

...why?

There's the risk of them talking. Also if you visibly have security it's way more likely people will take pictures of you and post them.

It's difficult to eliminate witnesses, if they're physical security professionals.

j/k

Didn't seem to bother JFK, though it did cause "morale problems" with the Secret Service. Thought it's true, they weren't private security.

Still not ideal for the life loving CEO. Anyone who had to go around with a security detail because of genuine threats to their lives knows it's a crap situation.

Plenty of your customers may have nothing to lose. It's just a matter of kicking off the trend and way more people start seeing options like this, previously considered crazy, as more and more realistic.

> which causes pressure to raise insurance premiums.

Why aren't premiums already as high as the market will bear?

Or, given the theme of both headline and several comments on this story, higher than it will bear?

Because it's not a market. I work, and thus have no choice which insurance i'd like. There's only one plan which is even remotely affordable and that's the one provided by my job. If that insurance plan decides to deny me life saving, essential medications, i can't just switch. Health insurance is a necessity, it shouldn't be a market. We can see that since everyone stopped pursuing anti trust every single industry has either or is in the process of being completely captured by some big fish, eating everyone else up and squeezing consumers to the maximal amount possible. I for one, don't think we should be basing the cost of survival on the _maximum possible the market will bear_. Inevitably that will lead to it being far above some people's means, an ever increasing number of them. I don't enjoy the look of a future which involves revolts and assassinations but what option are we giving people? When health insurance companies kill the people that matter most in your life, what do you really have to lose? When the systems stop caring about preservation of human life, why should the people care about preserving the system? Why, they might actively become hostile to it. Even if it's a system which is merely survivable for the majority of people (maximum cost the market will bear), enough disenfranchised people _will_ take their power back, even if it takes the whole thing down. And in their lives, with their experiences, they're right

In an ambush game, the ambusher need succeed only once, the ambushee always.

The best security is a society which doesn't promote ambush attacks, whether out of general respect, lawfulness, or a belief in institutional mechanisms (business practices, fair marketplaces, civil and criminal courts, penal systems).

Attempting to bolt on security where such a society doesn't exist is quite fraught. The attempts will likely be expensive and lossy.

There are two end of the spectrum:

* behaving better, potentially with the consequence that profits would be reduced

* getting more security guards, keep lobbying for laws to silence stories that could make them look bad, and keep lobbying against laws that would prevent them from doing the bad things

I have strong guesses about what the majority of them will take. But, who knows, maybe polymarket knows better ?

> * getting more security guards

It will be interesting to see how VIP security companies respond to the proliferation of kamikaze drones.

Oh my God, i has forgotten about that black mirror episode. Strange we don't see more civilian attack drones, they'll only get easier to make

> Oh my God, i has forgotten about that black mirror episode. Strange we don't see more civilian attack drones, they'll only get easier to make.

It's probably because killing someone with a gun is far more represented in the media. Guns are a product that can be purchased off the shelf.

Also civilian kamikaze drones would probably be easy to jam and on top of that require a lot more technical skill to pull off. You'd have to build a bomb and some kind of fuze, and it'd be a lot more expensive to practice and test it out to the point where it would be likely to work (v.s. a gun where you can buy a bunch of bullets for probably a fraction of the cost of a single unmodified drone).

Drone + gun + trigger widget?

> Drone + gun + trigger widget?

I feel that would work at all because the aim would be terrible.

Hope you're right, because this seems like hobbyist level to refine in this setting.

Remember that NRA used to lobby to add restrictions to open carry and gun ownership before placing your bet.

Also, in the US, AP rounds and suppressors were banned before DIAS for AR were, so...

People say 'professional hit' as if it was something that existed outside of Hollywood movies.

They do, but the targets are rival drug dealers etc, not megacorp CEOs. (Except maybe in Russia.)

Cartels have sicarios but not in this country. Drug gangs aren't really the 'professional' type of killings.

"Not in this country" is some reevaluation from "outside of Hollywood movies". Other countries are real.

Most Hollywood movies are set in the US. If you want a realistic portrayal of foreign counties there's always foreign cinema.

Did you actually bring some counterarguments to "other countries are real"?

You don't believe hitmen exist?

They exist, but they're FBI agents. Try rentahitman.com

According the recent hit comedy movie “Hit Man” staring Glen Powell, they don’t exist!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_the_Jackal

Granted, it may be extremely, extremely rare. But it does exist.

Plus I have to wonder if you really think all the people in Russia who "fell out of a window" actually fell out of windows.

Hitmen at the paygrade seen here absolutely do exist, you just usually don't notice that very often unless it's either secret services that are involved (e.g. Russia's various assassinations in the UK or Germany) or it's major figures assassinated by drug cartels who are not members of some sort of cartel (e.g. the murder of journalist Peter R. de Vries). Drug and other organized crime networks routinely kill each other, but it doesn't make the headlines if it's not done in the public.

AKA "Contract killings" or "murder-for-hire". They are estimated to account for about 5% of murders.

CEOs are already reacting to this with doomsday scenarios.

Where? I'd love to see what they actually think about this. If any of them have even begun to consider treating people as human beings instead of temporary roadblocks to growth at any cost

There is no need for gun ownership. Vigilante justice is quite popular (both the idea as well as actual instances) in many poor countries (if not most). When dysfunctional or outright malicious institutions have pissed off enough people, you can expect the fringe to start lashing out with violence.

Vigilantism is most of America’s gun violence.

Only most?

Not that professional. Looks like a suppressor on a pistol, but not configured and tested so that it doesn't malfunction. Shooter is skilled enough to deal with the malfunctions.

This suggests that shooter's at the minimum enthusiast, possibly trained for a different profession as a rank and file guy, but not enough to actually put somewhat specialty gear together reliably.

I don't think the guy's a hired assassin per se, but more likely a very disgruntled person who felt wronged by UnitedHealth.

The bullets had “Deny”, “Defend”, “Depose” written on them, which makes it seem ideological.

https://apnews.com/article/unitedhealthcare-ceo-manhattan-sh...

It probably is not a professional hit. I read an interview about it with a professor of criminal law who has spent decades studying professional killers, and he mentioned several things that would be very unusually for an actual professional hit.

I don't remember all of them, but a big one was the timing and location. Professional hitmen learn the target's routine and make the hit somewhere where there won't be many people around and there is less chance of something interfering with getting away.

This guy did it in a crowded area, that is full of cameras, and even stopped at a Starbucks beforehand to buy some things.

I've also seen a few comments from experts about the gun. It seems to be a gun that a professional hitman would be unlikely to use. Here's an article that quotes several of these experts on the oddities of the gun [1].

[1] https://www.foxnews.com/us/former-nypd-inspector-skeptical-u...

Yeah the guy's photo has been put out by the police and is fairly clear. I figure a professional would have done a better job at not being seen.

I'm going to call the bluff of everyone who condones this (save for the sociopaths) and aver that they are "LARPing".

As keen as their justifications may be in hinging on the non-ethics of Brian Thompson and UnitedHealthCare, I think that quietly, most people are relieved that this is an event among countless events that will wash away with time and the cycle of news and that they are afforded this brief flame of solace to voice their frustrations from the comfort of their own homes, minds and devices, without having to practically consider the dissolution of society that the crime represents and advances.

People on the internet seem to have a problem differentiating between companies and human beings.

If you find pleasure in the death of a human, you need to reflect on what inside you is broken.

It’s possible to have no love for insurance companies and still regret a tragic loss of life.

I think most people aren't finding pleasure in his death, but perhaps a sense of justice.

The man probably has a higher body count than Bin Laden. I think schadenfreude from most is to be expected.

CEOs are paid big bucks because the buck stops with them.

The actions of this CEO in particular caused suffering to an untold number of families, just reading through comments on Reddit about people who had UnitedHealthcare denying life saving procedures is heart breaking, one of the most striking anecdotes to me was a widower telling how his wife died from treatable cancer after UH postponed twice her surgery date, 3 months each time.

I can differentiate between people and companies but immoral actions of a company are perpetrated by its executives, and the CEO is the lead executive, so this person's job in particular was exactly to be the responsible for the company's actions.

Pretty easy to understand the lack of sympathy viewed from the broader picture. I don't condone the murder but completely understand why people do not care he died.

> you need to reflect on what inside you is broken

Well people's opinions might be different if this CEO had reflected on what inside him was broken. So a kind of symmetry.

You are making the argument that if you don’t like a company you can kill humans.

So if I don’t like Facebook am I justified in murdering a coder? Or is it only Zuckerberg that is fair game?

What company do you personally work for? What if I have beef with them? I’m I justified in killing you because your employer hurt me?

Textbook strawman.

Yes, 2nd amendment gives me the right to own a gun and the right to own a gun gives me the right to murder anyone I want for whatever reason I want :)

The company this guy controlled made money specifically by murdering people, by denying them needed medical care. It wasn't just any company, and it wasn't just any employee. And honestly, I'd be fine with it if some Rohingya guy smoked Zuckerberg.

>People on the internet seem to have a problem differentiating between companies and human beings.

Naive. Companies are made of humans, and often bring out the worst in them. Fiduciary duty doesn't excuse shitty behaviour.

I’m amused by people defending the celebration of a murder.

Also saddened, but I guess lots of people online are horrible people who think they are good.

Companies don't make decisions, people do. He was the top decision maker at his company.

The difference is: companies are fictive. They don't actually exist. Under the hood, it's just people making decisions. One of those people making decisions – one allowed to dictate to or overrule other decision-makers – has been killed.

Yes, death is bad. However, much as I would it be otherwise, I have a finite capacity to care about death: I would rather spend that on innocent victims, rather than perpetrators of large-scale systematic violence. That which is broken inside me reflects the world.

On a philosophical level, of course. The real world has otherwise this habit of kicking philosophy in the gonads. When a guy orders people to death - and make no mistake, this is what UH CEO did - his own tragism gets somewhat rightfully overshadowed. Like in the tramway dilemma, you simply cannot equate the sympathy or the pain of thousands families with the pain of one, unless moral high ground is all you have. And no I don't split the world in companies vs people - insurance companies are people who consciously decide to let me die because shareholder value, so they must suffer those consequences. Big power should come more often with big responsibility.

Most people have zero care for this person as he and similar people have zero care for most people. There is a price to be accepted by people, no one can expect to do malicious things, harm people and then still be accepted because they are human

Who runs those companies? Who makes the decisions in those companies?

I think it's humans, no?

"if you find pleasure in the death of a human, you need to reflect on-" - HN Already flagged comment.

Corporations of various kinds knowingly cause the death of many people each year, but they have PR departments that put out vague statements of regret whenever there is an overly obvious causal nexus.

Corporations are run by humans, and not all of them are nice people. Some are amoral or outright sociopathic. My understanding is that the victim in this case didn't die instantly, so presumably he had a couple of minutes to realize that he was critically wounded and absolutely helpless. I feel OK about that.

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