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> This is not a soldier or a serial killer. It's worse than both. How can you be so morally clueless? When an insurance company denies coverage, it isn't kill

by slibhb 2y ago

> This is not a soldier or a serial killer. It's worse than both. How can you be so morally clueless? When an insurance company denies coverage, it isn't killing someone. It didn't make anyone sick. Rather, it didn't pick up the bill for their treatment. That may have been wrong, it may have been an evasion of responsibility, but it is not comparable to someone who goes around killing people. I have to understand comments like this (there are a lot of them) as some kind of morbid performance art. Either that or severe mental illness.

cdelsolar 2y ago
Compare this to someone who controls the only available lifeboat while others are drowning. The person in control may not have pushed anyone overboard, but if they refuse to help—especially after taking on the explicit role of “we’re here to help if something goes wrong”—they carry moral responsibility for the resulting harm. Insurance companies are not random bystanders; they are paid entities agreeing to intervene financially on behalf of the patient. Their explicit role makes their refusal to pay not merely passive, but an active withholding of assistance they were entrusted (and compensated) to provide. An insurance company knows full well that refusing to cover a critical treatment will likely result in the patient’s deterioration or death. Remember Asimov's rules? A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. They are one and the same.
- nickff 2y ago
  What if the lifeboat skipper picks up many people, but decides that picking up more would endanger the lifeboat itself? Asimov’s rules don’t work; that’s the whole point.
  - cogman10 2y ago
    If you are to apply it the way health insurance works, the skipper is asking the drowning victims to give them all their money and then is deciding on who they rescue, mostly leaving the people far away to drown because that will have added fuel costs and they'd rather save that to go fishing on tuesday.
    - nickff 2y ago
      This analogy is already a stretch (I didn’t come up with it, was just responding to someone else), and you’re torturing it beyond reason.
      - jiggawatts 2y ago
        Brian Thompson's net worth was $43M. He definitely has a yacht or two.
cogman10 2y ago
> it isn't killing someone. It is absolutely killing multiple people yearly. If I withhold water from someone dying of thirst, who I promised to give water to, who paid me for that water, I've killed them when they die. I may not have plunged a knife into their heart but they'll be dead all the same directly from my actions. If an insurance company does not pay for the medicine and treatments they say they cover, that they payed to cover, and people die from that, they are responsible for those deaths. A serial killer kills less than the medical health industry does. That doesn't make them moral, it highlights how immoral the current healthcare system is in the US.
- nickff 2y ago
  Every healthcare system (even single-payer) denies some care to some people; they do this because of limited resources, fraud risk, etc. Do government healthcare ministers and other administrators responsible for single-payer systems deserve to die too? What about legislators who limit healthcare budgets to below 100% of GDP (which is to say all of them); should they be summarily executed?
  - cogman10 2y ago
    > Do government healthcare ministers and other administrators responsible for single-payer systems deserve to die too? No, because as you point out there are legitimate reasons to deny coverage. However, when your competitors are denying at a rate of something like 10->15% and you are denying at 36%, that goes beyond just managing resources or fraud prevention. Your question is a false dichotomy. > What about legislators who limit healthcare budgets to below 100% of GDP (which is to say all of them); should they be summarily executed? Again, false dichotomy. Primarily because it's not even provable that 100% of GDP going to healthcare would actually save more lives than 99% or 50%. Further, unless you have a very expansive definition of what healthcare means (food? housing? etc?) then putting 100% of the budget towards it would ultimately starve out necessary industries for life thus causing death. The real question to ask is "Can an insurance company be moral if it denies legitimate claims" my answer to that is no. Pragmatically, I can excuse some of it to human error as that'll happen. People will die from accidents and that's just a part of life. However, let's not pretend that there isn't a massive incentive for these large companies to deny as many claims as possible with no market forces and few regulations to impede them. A government denying a liver transplant to a 90 year old is quiet different from a health insurance agency blanket denying cancer treatment because it costs them too much money.
diob 2y ago
I think you don't understand the games they play. They will cause a surgery to be delayed the day of the surgery by last minute denial tactics, losing patients precious time in things like cancer treatments. In that case, you didn't have the time to even collect the money and get a loan, if that's really your angle. It's not performance art, just empathy. I have a friend who they tried to kill this year. His doctor recommended going in and removing an area they thought some skin cancer had spread to. They performed the surgery, biopsy confirmed their suspicions. After all that, the insurance company (too late thankfully) came in and said they didn't think the cancer had spread, so no need for surgery. I hope you never have to deal with this, but if you live long enough you or a friend / family member probably will. There's countless amounts of blood on their hands. It's not about bills coming in and getting uncovered, it's about life saving surgeries being delayed till the patient dies in hopes that they can avoid covering something they're supposed, or avoiding paying for a medication in the hopes that the patient dies before they can litigate. I don't really care how you want to spin things, that's murder, and thankfully most folks agree with me.
lazystar 2y ago
the cognitive dissonance of the folks in the insurance industry is what resulted in that execution a few days ago. stop deluding yourself.

by slibhb 2y ago

cdelsolar 2y ago

Compare this to someone who controls the only available lifeboat while others are drowning. The person in control may not have pushed anyone overboard, but if they refuse to help—especially after taking on the explicit role of “we’re here to help if something goes wrong”—they carry moral responsibility for the resulting harm. Insurance companies are not random bystanders; they are paid entities agreeing to intervene financially on behalf of the patient. Their explicit role makes their refusal to pay not merely passive, but an active withholding of assistance they were entrusted (and compensated) to provide. An insurance company knows full well that refusing to cover a critical treatment will likely result in the patient’s deterioration or death. Remember Asimov's rules? A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. They are one and the same.

nickff 2y ago
What if the lifeboat skipper picks up many people, but decides that picking up more would endanger the lifeboat itself? Asimov’s rules don’t work; that’s the whole point.
- cogman10 2y ago
  If you are to apply it the way health insurance works, the skipper is asking the drowning victims to give them all their money and then is deciding on who they rescue, mostly leaving the people far away to drown because that will have added fuel costs and they'd rather save that to go fishing on tuesday.
  - nickff 2y ago
    This analogy is already a stretch (I didn’t come up with it, was just responding to someone else), and you’re torturing it beyond reason.
    - jiggawatts 2y ago
      Brian Thompson's net worth was $43M. He definitely has a yacht or two.

cogman10 2y ago

> it isn't killing someone. It is absolutely killing multiple people yearly. If I withhold water from someone dying of thirst, who I promised to give water to, who paid me for that water, I've killed them when they die. I may not have plunged a knife into their heart but they'll be dead all the same directly from my actions. If an insurance company does not pay for the medicine and treatments they say they cover, that they payed to cover, and people die from that, they are responsible for those deaths. A serial killer kills less than the medical health industry does. That doesn't make them moral, it highlights how immoral the current healthcare system is in the US.

nickff 2y ago
Every healthcare system (even single-payer) denies some care to some people; they do this because of limited resources, fraud risk, etc. Do government healthcare ministers and other administrators responsible for single-payer systems deserve to die too? What about legislators who limit healthcare budgets to below 100% of GDP (which is to say all of them); should they be summarily executed?
- cogman10 2y ago
  > Do government healthcare ministers and other administrators responsible for single-payer systems deserve to die too? No, because as you point out there are legitimate reasons to deny coverage. However, when your competitors are denying at a rate of something like 10->15% and you are denying at 36%, that goes beyond just managing resources or fraud prevention. Your question is a false dichotomy. > What about legislators who limit healthcare budgets to below 100% of GDP (which is to say all of them); should they be summarily executed? Again, false dichotomy. Primarily because it's not even provable that 100% of GDP going to healthcare would actually save more lives than 99% or 50%. Further, unless you have a very expansive definition of what healthcare means (food? housing? etc?) then putting 100% of the budget towards it would ultimately starve out necessary industries for life thus causing death. The real question to ask is "Can an insurance company be moral if it denies legitimate claims" my answer to that is no. Pragmatically, I can excuse some of it to human error as that'll happen. People will die from accidents and that's just a part of life. However, let's not pretend that there isn't a massive incentive for these large companies to deny as many claims as possible with no market forces and few regulations to impede them. A government denying a liver transplant to a 90 year old is quiet different from a health insurance agency blanket denying cancer treatment because it costs them too much money.

diob 2y ago

I think you don't understand the games they play. They will cause a surgery to be delayed the day of the surgery by last minute denial tactics, losing patients precious time in things like cancer treatments. In that case, you didn't have the time to even collect the money and get a loan, if that's really your angle. It's not performance art, just empathy. I have a friend who they tried to kill this year. His doctor recommended going in and removing an area they thought some skin cancer had spread to. They performed the surgery, biopsy confirmed their suspicions. After all that, the insurance company (too late thankfully) came in and said they didn't think the cancer had spread, so no need for surgery. I hope you never have to deal with this, but if you live long enough you or a friend / family member probably will. There's countless amounts of blood on their hands. It's not about bills coming in and getting uncovered, it's about life saving surgeries being delayed till the patient dies in hopes that they can avoid covering something they're supposed, or avoiding paying for a medication in the hopes that the patient dies before they can litigate. I don't really care how you want to spin things, that's murder, and thankfully most folks agree with me.

lazystar 2y ago

the cognitive dissonance of the folks in the insurance industry is what resulted in that execution a few days ago. stop deluding yourself.