Ahh yes, I guess he was just following orders, right?
High-profile killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO in New York
- Thread starter VorZakone
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Well, he'd still be alive so maybe he should have done that?
Do enlighten me
If he didn't do the incredibly evil, incredibly well paid job someone else would have and he'd have missed out on all those millions just for the sake of something trivial like "morality". Can't be having that.
Wow
You’ve got heart conditions, sorry you have to take your chances. You died? Oh well I’ll get my bonus this year.
"So we can't pay out all claims even though you pay for coverage...sucks to be you, but you don't want to be paying a bit more per month do you?"
All insurance is a scam in one way or another. The whole industry needs (but never will receive) a huge overhaul.
All insurance is a scam in one way or another. The whole industry needs (but never will receive) a huge overhaul.
There’s two issues at play here. Capitalism. Which is why huge corporations try to make as much profit as possible for their shareholders. And the American healthcare system. That enables corporations like this one to maximising profit by screwing money out of the sick and the dying.
If you really want to murder your way to an improvement in that healthcare system then shooting CEOs is not the way to do it.
Murdering an end to capitalism is a whole other, separate issue. Although, again, killing CEOs is unlikely to help.
He was a multi millionaire, he didn't have to do that job or any job ever again.
You can use your exact argument to defend a slave plantation overseer, who is killed during a slave revolt.
People have agency in what jobs they choose to do.
Do you believe the man deserved to be murdered?
No one deserves to be murdered. Though that isn't relevant to the post I made.
I know, I was just wondering. Fair response.
Was he actually murdered or was his existence just no longer covered?
cool.
Of course, everyone who isn't earning 30 grand or less must be killed. It's the mob way. Rich? Well you should die then.
How to overhaul it is really complicated.
My main beef with insurance in Ireland right now is that they charge insane premiums for anyone who wants to set up a small business which involves risk. Climbing gyms is a consequence I experience personally but also a huge issue for kids play centres, swimming pools, adventure playgrounds etc etc. The insurers have all pulled out of Ireland, leaving only one or two companies left. They charge so much money that all these small businesses are going bust, one by one. There hasn’t been a new swimming pool built in Dublin in decades. That’s fecked up.
The reason it’s so expensive is because we’ve always paid out incredibly high compensation for people who hurt themselves at one of these businesses. High pay-outs and a court system that makes it very hard for the business to win its case. Combine this with the insurers need to grow/make profit and we are where we are.
How you go about changing all of this is not easy. Where do you start?
Banging the same drum, but public healthcare has to improve massively. You'd know this more than most I guess. It's not just Covid backlogs, it was inadequate before that.
As for private health insurance. That's just market driven metrics. They want to take as much from you without ever paying you anything back as possible. That's the basic model for every insurance company on the planet. Make it necessary (say car insurance, which is sensible, for obvious reasons) and then price the feck out of it. The US has made it necessary in basic health. That's disastrous. In other nations it's an option, in the US it's basically mandatory unless you have some form of public provision. I'm not sure what the state of the US medicaid/medicare system is but I doubt it's great. It was written, iirc, with the insurance industry having a sizeable input (under Obama).
Why not a public insurance company? Not run for profit but which you can pay into if you like and so on and so forth. Then price gouging qua profit would go out the window. Surely the state can buy one of these companies out and then manage the risk portfolios and so on ad nauseam.
Have we actually seen any proof a pre-existing condition didn't contribute to his death? Makes you think
The “public insurance company” is basically the Australian model; Medicare. And that’s the best healthcare system I’ve ever worked in. Worth having a read about.
Glad to know it exists. Will read up.
Nice way to reduce a point once again.
All I said was I endorsed the guy being gunned down. I didn't claim it would improve anything. In fact, my original post was suggesting a similar point.
The richest 1% on the planet possess >50% of the world's wealth in what amounts to a system of human farming when you really think about it (scarcely novel, this is the point Orwell made in Animal Farm except the socialist revolution of the animals merely ended up replicating the capitalist structure it deposed).
But consider wage-labour. You work for an amount which is necessarily, in almost all cases, worth less than your labour time. The profit of that goes to whichever company you're wage-slaving for. We are the only species which farms ourselves and calls it an economic system. fecked up beyond insurance industries alone.
Socialism, ala Lenin, does not work but it is clear that social systems do work when profit motive, in the capitalist, human farming, extreme, is erased and you run the company based on "fair margins".
Better suited for a different thread but it is all about wealth inequality (as everyone knows). Born, by birth, entirely equal to every other child, but by social structure scattered across a stratified, artificial, system of capital wherein one child has no chance and another has many. Simplistic, but more or less exactly correct.
Significantly more expensive than ours.
Is it not a social imperative that senseless loss of life should be avoided as much as possible? Is the irony lost on you that you celebrate one man’s death because you presumably think he contributed to too much… death?
The last paragraph takes the cake.
the cost per capita isn't that much more considering the enormous gulf in quality
splashing another $20bn or so a year on the NHS to get the level of service Aussies get would be money well worth spending
It's about a 5th more, which is huge. I would be happy to pay more taxes for it.
I'd assume it has a lot to do with how the money is spent, too, rather than just how much money is spent. Each will be a factor. For the Aussie system you'd need to redesign the NHS to allow public health insurance models. That's about how you use the money as much as how much money you use.
More than happy to be a humanoid black hole for irony if it means more dead scumbags
Money well worth paying though. I’ve worked in both systems (and used them as a patient). The difference is night and day.
Australia spends quite a bit more on administration than we do.
This person did a job that made the world a worse place. He actively has contributed to the suffering of thousands.
What has that got to do with people earning 30k?
People like you have the weirdest morality. I genuinely can't wrap my head around this viewpoint, and I've seen it expressed a lot online whenever anything like this happens
You don't build a tolerant society by being tolerant of bigotry. It sounds counter intuitive but you need to show intolerance to certain viewpoints. Similarly, you don't build an empathetic society by being kind to soulless sociopaths who only care about their own selfish wellbeing over the lives of other humans. If we need to gun down a few more CEOs to get to a more empathetic society, that's a sacrifice we should be willing to make.
Sorry the system is setup in a way that no is responsible hence no one has any moral obligations and can do whatever they like without any consequences.
The reaction from the post I made makes me believe politicians have successfully manipulated the people into going after the people who don't have any power to change the situation. Fine, you successfully killed the CEO, what do you think will happen next? Another CEO will come and continue the same policies. Will you go kill him/her too? What about the claims investigator who actually decided to regret these insurance claims, or the underwriter who rejects policies because of pre-existing conditions? Why not kill him/her as well since they also make these decisions, do they not have the same agency that the CEO has?
This problem is much bigger than just how an insurance company handles claims, it's a systemic issue and therefore if you really want to go on a vengeful killing fest go after the people who actually have the power to change the system. They have the power to actually help poor people get the basic level of cover they need without worrying about costs but they actively do not want to. They have the most agency here.
Private insurance companies are not charities, they have to work within the limits of making a profit and therefore have to make decisions that mean some people don't get the cover they need. Again, if you want everything to be covered, be prepared to pay a sh*t ton of money for it as well.
This problem is much bigger than just how an insurance company handles claims, it's a systemic issue and therefore if you really want to go on a vengeful killing fest go after the people who actually have the power to change the system. They have the power to actually help poor people get the basic level of cover they need without worrying about costs but they actively do not want to. They have the most agency here.
Private insurance companies are not charities, they have to work within the limits of making a profit and therefore have to make decisions that mean some people don't get the cover they need. Again, if you want everything to be covered, be prepared to pay a sh*t ton of money for it as well.
Are you willing to do it? I doubt it. This "we" thing. You mean other people ought to gun down CEOs. Where does that end? It's lunacy. I can understand, entirely, why the man did it. But I cannot justify it at all. You don't derive justness from laws of contradiction: that is, you do not find truthful action by referring to falsity. This one man was the CEO of a company who destroyed millions of lives (and you see how quick that company replaced him? Didn't give a shit about him, really), and this other was one of those affected by that company. Is it just to murder a man who could be swapped out with thousands of other people the very day he's killed? Or, even better, when is it just to murder a person, period?
You won't get a more sympathetic society. You will get anarchy. First the CEO of this terrible company and then the guy next door who called your wife a terrible name. It slides that quickly.
On behalf of capital interests. It is capital which manipulates the people, the politicians, for the most part, just obey it.
Anarchy may be preferable.
That's small "a" anarchy. Just to draw a distinction between murdering whoever you want and the likes of Rosa Luxemberg who disagreed with that entirely and correctly called it fascist. Which is where it ends up if you want a spoiler alert.