14 ms·

Usually I don't tend to get caught up in stories like this. But one thing has me completely fascinated, is how far off the deep end the internet went over the l

• benterix 2y ago
  > who actually lead pretty decent lives. It's because the whole image is fake. In theory everything is fine but you know there is something very bad about the healthcare system, and the power of an institution to decide about someone else's life or death is just one aspect of it; prices inflated beyond imagination is another one (these two are related). So we pretend to live normal lives but in the back of our head we pray we don't ever need to become a victim of this system. But on the outside yes, it looks like everything is fine and we have decent lives.
  • jml78 2y ago
    I can explain my perspective which echos kinda what you say. I am in my 40s, I make pretty good money. My life is good. My mom died last year. The medical system and her medicare "advantage" plan killed her. She had a stroke. However, within a day, she was up and walking around with assistance. However, the hospital was understaffed so two things happened. She fell going to the bathroom AND after that happened, they did not get her moving enough and she got a huge bed sore. The huge bed sore would not have happened if her medicare advantage plan hadn't denied denied denied having her moved to get physical, occupation, and speech theray. If she had just good ole medicare, they would have approved it the day of request (it was requested the day after the stroke, I was warned that her plan was going to deny because they always do where medicare always approves). Instead, she rotted in an understaffed wing of the hospital for a week while I fought to get shit approved. After getting approval to be moved, she was making slow slow progress due to the bed sore. It is hard when your body needs to recover and you have a huge wound on your back. Once again her medicare "advantage" plan denied giving her more time in therapy. Guess what? Medicare would have just approved. Her advantage plan said the "community" could care for her and she could just get better over time. Do you know what that means? They wanted me to quit working and care for my mom 24/7. That is what they meant by community care. I am an only child with no other family except my wife and kids. The hospital social worker was great and refused to discharge my mom because she knew I couldn't physically move my mom around or give her the care she required. That started a month battle where her insurance was refusing to pay anymore hospital bills, refused to get her more therapy, and essentially killed my mom. If the social worker had allowed my mom to be discharged, I would have been fucked. She slowly got worse and died. The american medical system with its private "advantage" plans took what would have been a recoverable bad health incident and allowed it to kill my mom for greed. BTW, after a month of fighting, emails to the insurance board of directors and CEO, I got more therapy approved for my mom but it was too late by then. She died a few days later. You can probably guess how I feel about the CEO's murder........
    • greenie_beans 2y ago
      that sounds like a true nightmare. i'm sorry that happened.
      • jml78 2y ago
        Yep, and it is preventable. The one thing I can say is NEVER let your parents sign up for a "medicare" advantage plan. There is no advantage. The company my mom was with is one of the largest and profited something like 18 BILLION off medicare last year. How do you think that is possible? Because they overcharge medicare and deny coverage.
        • lotsofpulp 2y ago
          Source? UNH’s entire net income in 2023 was $22.3B, and their market cap is more than 5x the next biggest managed care organization (MCO). The other MCOs all had net income less than $8B (CVS/Elevance/Cigna/Humana/etc). There is no way a business earned a profit of $18B just from Medicare and it not being visible on their net income figures. That is not to say Medicare Advantage is good for most customers (the common advice is to stay away from it), but fantastical numbers don’t help arguments.
          • wyre 2y ago
            Profit is not income. That $18B could be spend on salaries, bonuses, company assests, etc, and I'm not an accountant but if it's getting spent on the business it doesn't have to be included in their income reports.
            • lotsofpulp 2y ago
              Profit without a qualifier is assumed to mean net income, which is all revenue minus all expenses. But even supposing that the business earns $18B from Medicare Advantage after all is said and done, it doesn’t pass the smell test because at that level of profit, these businesses should shut everything else down and just do Medicare Advantage.
  • BLKNSLVR 2y ago
    Your description reminds me of the opening scene of Blue Velvet.
  • noisy_boy 2y ago
    Its because the generally applicable standard way globally to know if things are bad for someone, doesn't work in US. Most people have homes, there is a car standing outside, they have clothes to wear, people are generally private (due to high focus on individualism) and unless you try, you can't really overhear your neighbour - so these issues hide behind closed doors.
  • blantonl 2y ago
    The problem is I don't see any "easy" solution to this issue, simply because there will always be an institution in place to decide about someone else's life our death. Be it a privately run for profit insurance system that runs on perverse incentives, or a government agency that runs on power and influence and corruption.
    • bendauphinee 2y ago
      The “easy” solution is to try and remove profit as much as possible from the equation. Pretty much every other high GDP country in the world has single payer healthcare. Guess how many people get told their anaesthesia won’t be covered for their full surgery. That shouldn’t even be a question, and yet the US system makes it one.
      • deleted 2y ago
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      • Thorrez 2y ago
        Two people I know who moved to the US from countries with single payer healthcare said that in their previous countries they would have to wait a long time for certain operations, but in the US can get them almost immediately.
        • harimau777 2y ago
          From what I understand, wait time can certainly be an issue with single payer healthcare. However, there's people in the US who have effectively infinite wait time because they can't afford treatment at all.
          • ceejayoz 2y ago
            I have an excellent insurance plan and ready access to a large US hospital system. The wait to see a dermatologist as a new patient is ~6 months. Definitely not unique to single-payer systems.
          • 2y ago
  • jajko 2y ago
    You just described one of quite a few reasons (higher education falls into same category, overall security could be mentioned in such topic too) that I consider some parts of western Europe a better place to live and raise kids than anything US can provide. Despite having much lower numbers on paychecks alone. I get that system needs to push folks into working hard and motivate exceptional efforts (and luck), but sometimes this goes into properly bad directions where few gain and majority loses. In any functional society, all this is never isolated and it has ripple effects.
  • dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
    >In theory everything is fine but you know there is something very bad about the healthcare system, No merely healthcare, but employment, housing etc. It's easy to single out healthcare for obvious reasons.
  • benced 2y ago
    You can leave! Nothing is stopping you from staying in the US. Particularly if you're on this website, you probably have talents other countries would like to acquire. The fact that you haven't says you don't believe what you say.
    • dudeinhawaii 2y ago
      The "America, love it or leave it" tactic? It's intellectually dishonest and shortcuts any kind of debate or thoughtful discussion. Or is this more of the "you haven't left your wife beating husband so you must like it" tactic? That's also philosophically bereft and avoids anything substantive. Suffice it to say, constructive criticism is vital for democratic improvement.
      • benced 2y ago
        If your belief is the United States is so bad that it justifies murder, you should leave. If you're more reasonable, I would not recommend leaving.
        • jplusequalt 2y ago
          My belief is that there are people who get what they deserve. The CEO was one of them.
        • dvfjsdhgfv 2y ago
          > If your belief is the United States is so bad that it justifies murder, you should leave. That's a weird conclusion. For me, it's rather "The USA has its flaws (for me - healthcare and higher education financing above all) so we as a society should focus on fixing these problems". Killing people or leaving the country are not solutions, they are are an equivalent of short Twitter replies on a nuanced subject.
          • benced 2y ago
            I agree! I'm only suggesting leaving if you think murder is justified.
• kypro 2y ago
  I thought it was a joke when I saw the posts on the Reddit homepage celebrating the murder and even the murderer. Partly because I thought Redditors were above that type of thing, but also because I thought it was against their TOS. It's a real reminder of how little sympathy people can have about people who they consider the enemy or the "other". I'm almost certain nearly all of the people celebrating the murder believe that they're good people and believe in justice too. Humans are so flawed. And I'm not suggesting for a moment I'm above it. I've often noticed how I don't care as much as I should when someone I dislike is harmed or suffers injustice.
  • oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
    I was even more surprised by the response on Bluesky because I naively expected it to be 'better' than that. But I saw vitriol and hatred directed at people for daring to suggest that other, unrelated CEOs shouldn't be shot. It was like a reflection of the worst elements of X, even though these people claim to be the 'good' side.
    • purplethinking 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • oneeyedpigeon 2y ago
        That's part of my point: the censorship of death celebrations that I would expect is not happening.
        • bilvar 2y ago
          Twitter did not censor calls to violence from the left before Musk either.
        • purplethinking 2y ago
          [flagged]
        • 2y ago
• guerrilla 2y ago
  > melting pot Did you mean tipping point?
  • munksbeer 2y ago
    Yes, probably. But I don't think we're at an actual tipping point. I don't think we're about to see a breakdown or anything like that, soon, but we're certainly heading in that general direction. What is the euphemism I'm actually looking for? Knife edge? No.
    • adregan 2y ago
      Powder keg?
      • munksbeer 2y ago
        Yup, that's it, thank you.
        • fastball 2y ago
          I assumed it was "boiling point".
          • guerrilla 2y ago
            This makes the most sense, since it explains how we got the pot involved.
  • hansifer 2y ago
    Maybe powder keg
  • deleted 2y ago
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• deleted 2y ago
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• thomond 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • nemomarx 2y ago
    in my left leaning circles there's still general support. maybe he was a bit of a median voter, listened to Rogan a few times, but he seems to have radicalized on a few issues in the end and I'm not seeing a lot of anger about what's basically centrist right stuff. it's not like the guy seems racist or anything.
  • sumeno 2y ago
    There were tons of articles before he was identified talking about how this was a truly bipartisan issue. The left and right were celebrating pretty equally and I don't think that has significantly changed
• Havoc 2y ago
  Yeah was wild to see that. I take it as a reaction to the wider public feeling that the US medical system is broken and the appropriate channel to fix it (voting & politics) being broken too thanks to lobbying. Under circumstances like this people’s perception shifts to a more relativistic perspective. A bit like perception of a rioter throwing a stone at riot police depends on whether the viewer agrees with the movements goals even if in isolation they wouldn’t normally approve of throwing rocks at people faces.
• intended 2y ago
  > Things really feel like a melting pot at the moment, with so much pent up anger amongst people who actually lead pretty decent lives. One of the reasons that many people voted for Trump, is nihilism. The real belief that Trump is the one most likely to burn the ‘system’ to the ground. That is the brightest hope some voters have.
  • deleted 2y ago
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  • uoaei 2y ago
    Please put more effort into understanding people's issues with the system as it stands today. And please understand that virtually no one wants to leave a burned-out wreckage on a desolate hellscape. Everyone fancies themselves Shiva, or a phoenix, or whatever cultural imagery makes sense to you.
    • intended 2y ago
      I know this is a sensitive topic. I am sorry it bothers you. The sadder truth is, that I say what I say - AFTER having already applied your advice. I have spoken to strangers, reached out to see what they think. I spend the time to understand the many subcultures people are not parts of. Go look at what is showing up in streamer feeds. Talk to people, and when a 20 year old tells you “yeah bitcoin is great, because I have no hopes. So even if it goes to the shitter, how much worse can I be.”, you will see that people are truly happy to see things go to hell. I do wish I had seen other things and had different interactions. But there is a substantial level of nihilism. If you wish not to believe me - we’re in a thread where an insurance CEO was assassinated and the perpetrator is being hailed as a hero.
      • uoaei 2y ago
        This conversation won't last much longer unless you actually listen. People are hailing the shooter because of the resulting society they want to grow out of this, not because of some shallow death-drive diagnosis by an aspiring armchair psychologist.
• mbesto 2y ago
  > how far off the deep end the internet went over the last few days. Side note - the "internet" is very likely a mix of bots and real humans nowadays. What might seem initially like a real person saying "hunt the snitch down" could very likely be a bot that is meant to sow and influence discord. That bot's followers could very likely be real people who then say "ya i agree with this account! get your pitchfork!"
  • iambateman 2y ago
    This is generally true but I've never seen clear evidence of bot activity on HN – have you? I think it's very likely that those reactions on Twitter are 50/50 bot, but I've seen HN people posting their own version of "wow, what a guy" in ways that were convincingly human and very surprising.
    • Aerbil313 2y ago
      Huge disagree - there's no convincingly human anymore for internet text, especially for short internet text. Since the coming of LLMs, when I read HN, Reddit or even blog posts, I always keep it in the back of my mind that whatever I'm reading can very well be written by a bot. Fine-tune/prompt an LLM the right way and you'll get content indistinguishable from human text even for highly specific niche topics/contexts.
      • itchyouch 2y ago
        This is a random reply to a different comment Aerbil313 made for their benefit as their email in hackernews seems expired. ---- I have a family member suffering from multiple exposures to fluoroquinolone (FQ) antibiotics. While the research doesn't understand the root-cause reason for how FQs cause trouble, my journey with dealing with my personal family-history of diabetes and my family's chronic illness has gotten me to go down a road of understanding how to solve some issues. From what I understand, mitochondrial dysfunction appears to be at the core of many issues like I said. However, to expand on what I've found useful in my n=1-2 experiments, juxtaposed against much of the Phd/MD health podcast sphere information, most interventions like exercise and nutrition fundamentally are there to improve metabolic health. Many markers like VO2 Max or A1c are integral that gives a snapshot of one aspect of one's metabolic health. In my family's and my specific journey, I've put together a variety of molecules/supplements we've found useful in their journey and framed it in such a way as to be actionable, but also presentable enough to the public. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Fo2F851i0OE4tIQb0hQ74fUweoxeHh2un5H4RMcPtAs/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Fo2F851i0OE4tIQb0hQ7... It's a lot of information, but hopefully it would be useful for you and others. Feel free to ask any questions on my rationale, thinking, or reasoning behind why certain things are useful, and how I came to certain conclusions.
• pyrale 2y ago
  It seems that people are increasingly convinced that “in this country it is necessary, now and then, to put one health insurance exec to death in order to inspire the others to pay”. That is a sign that people believe they can't obtain redress through widely available legal means.
  • potato3732842 2y ago
    What you are looking at is the people checking the power of the institutions they tasked with providing legal recourse who have mostly been sitting on their hands and/or serving parties other than the people. If the state, courts and other systems don't get people justice or something you can squint at and call justice when they are wronged some fraction of those wronged will go outside the systems and seek to get even instead. Public sympathy for the (rare, perhaps crazy) people who shoot CEOs or armor bulldozers are what gives the parts of the institutions that want to do what the people want the political capital to something other than the status quo.
• harimau777 2y ago
  I'm not sure people are actually leading pretty decent lives. The people I know are working stressful dead end jobs and living with roommates in order to barely make ends meet. They don't have much prospect of improving their lot because doing so requires capital that they don't have (e.g. to start a business or go to college). Even though they have health insurance, they avoid going to the doctor unless absolutely necessary because they can't afford the co-pay. In some cases the states that they live in actively seek to discriminate against them.
  • lotsoweiners 2y ago
    The people I know are pretty much exactly the opposite of you so I think it comes down to age/experience, location, and other factors.
    • juunpp 2y ago
      Yeah, you're quite literally in a bubble.
• hedora 2y ago
  On the one side you have a mass murderer that’s part of the politically untouchable class, and on the other, one of his permanently injured victims managed to survive and deal out frontier-style justice. It makes for a good story. We’ve all seen that movie 100 times. I wonder if the shooter will survive long enough to make it to jury trial. That’s when the real circus will begin. (All I know about this story is that United Health has one of the highest incorrect claim rejection rates in the industry. I know nothing about the CEO, but we’re way past 140 characters at this point, so these things don’t matter to social media.)
• wat10000 2y ago
  It’s funny how we treat these things. Kill a bunch of people by putting lead in their drinking water and it’s a shrug. Occasionally you might lose your job over it. In extremely rare and egregious cases you might end up with a minor criminal conviction. Kill one person by putting lead in their heart at high speed and now it’s a serious crime. If the victim is Important then you get a massive manhunt and national news coverage.
  • hollerith 2y ago
    >Kill one person by putting lead in their heart at high speed and now it’s a serious crime. I wish this was an attempt at a joke.
    • wat10000 2y ago
      Me too. I’m describing it flippantly for effect, but I’m deadly serious. There are ways to kill people that get the attention of law enforcement, and ways to kill people that are de facto (and often de jure) legal. And wouldn’t you know, the latter category tends to include the methods used by the rich and powerful.
      • hollerith 2y ago
        >I’m deadly serious I figured that. It feels a little like the country is going crazy.
        • wat10000 2y ago
          How could we not, when the rich and powerful kill with impunity?
        • merrywhether 2y ago
          Or coming to temporary clarity? Things like the “culture wars” are distractions pushed by the elites to keep the lower classes fighting amongst themselves and not their true enemy. But extractive robber barons are the real problem behind everyone’s life getting worse all the time, and for a brief moment everyone has seen that and been in alignment.
• markus_zhang 2y ago
  Back in the 19th century a lot of Russian Revolutionaries came from families of well being, or are even aristocrats.
• brodouevencode 2y ago
  [flagged]
• game_the0ry 2y ago
  > ...so much pent up anger amongst people who actually lead pretty decent lives. This is the part of the story that must be discussed more, lest there will be more killings like this one.
• gosub100 2y ago
  > so much pent up anger And one reason it's pent-up, as opposed to released, is due to corporations taking over our society and ruining human lives. All within the confines of the law and democracy. That's what this is about. There is no recourse or effective vehicle to be heard.
• gruez 2y ago
  It's not surprising. Most people don't comment. The tiny minority that comment likely have extreme views. Sorting algorithms that drive engagement makes this worse. https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_of_what_you_read_on_the_internet_is_written/ https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most...
  • computerthings 2y ago
    So everybody online can be dismissed, except the people posting online that everyone who posts something online can be dismissed? How does that work? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42371412 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42371412 It's everywhere. You're simply wrong. Sort by date, sort by score, look on any broader news story and check out the comments. They're not "extreme", either. Even if their content was, which it isn't, it still wouldn't be extreme by definition at this point.
    • gruez 2y ago
      The point isn't to dismiss everything outright, it's simply cautioning that online commenters are a tiny minority of the overall population, and if you see a surprising opinion showing up in the top comments, you shouldn't extrapolate that everyone holds those views. This only holds for opinions. If someone posts a link to a survey that says out of a representative sample of Americans, 70% of them support abortion or whatever, you should believe that (assuming there are no issues with the organization conducting the survey). Same with other forms of argumentation. You shouldn't distrust the top answer on stackoverflow just because it's from 1% of the population, although you probably not think the average person is some sort of expert on every programming question either.
      • computerthings 2y ago
        Sort by date, no difference. And FWIW so far I only heard the idea that this CEO deserves empathy online
• rrix2 2y ago
  i think its because the accused dude is just as online as the average social media user who has latched on to this.
• torified 2y ago
  Everyone is walking a tightrope. I, and probably a lot of people reading this on HN, are outwardly very comfortable. I have cash/assets that would be life changing for most people (especially when I read comments on reddit where people say that $10k would be life changing for them) - and a "good" white-collar job. I'm also lucky enough to be old enough to have not been 100% screwed like our even younger generation has (I only got 90% screwed). I've been very lucky in life, but when I see the level of wealth inequality and how corporations have completely captured our government, and our two-tiered justice system, it makes me feel sick and angry. I still feel like I'm being held hostage by the 0.1%, under pressure to keep working to line other's pockets for much longer than I would otherwise have to, and like the whole thing could all come crashing down in a week's time given some improbable but far-from-impossible set of circumstances. I also don't feel like I would be supported by my government, corporations, or society in general if those circumstances actually occurred. So I definitely sympathize with the frustration of people who feel unsupported by society and unrepresented by government - especially those who happened to be unluckier in life than I. And with the current state of affairs, there must be a LOT of them around. I sympathize with that frustration a hell of a lot more than I sympathize for a dead CEO who made a career out of systematically denying treatment to people who paid him for coverage. In fact, I'm happy he died as a reminder that nobody is untouchable, no matter how much lobbying your corporation has done to make social murder legal, and no matter how much you've tried to isolate yourself from the consequences of your terrible actions. I read a reddit comment about the alleged shooter's arrest before: "murder is such a strong word, can't we just call it removing a cancer?"
• lend000 2y ago
  It's kind of sad. But I think that most people are fundamentally good -- they're just reactive and understand our broken healthcare system so little that they actually consider the victim to have actually earned a death sentence. When really, he was still a cog in the machine, not much closer to harming people than a software developer whose code ends up being used in military drones. The problems with US healthcare boil down to there being more demand for healthcare than supply, and a fat bureaucracy sprouting up to partition that limited healthcare, often screwing over people who need exceptionally special care or who can't afford insurance in the first place. Who is to blame? You could reasonably apply some blame to the shortage of doctors created by the AMA, the FDA's guidance and the sugar industry's lobbying resulting in people being less healthy, lack of consumer protection laws around opaque medical pricing/gouging, and private insurance. Would changing any one of these alone fix healthcare in the US? Maybe the first 2, if given a long time to materialize. But do any of these people deserve to die? It says a lot about you if you automatically dehumanize these people and say yes.
• spl757 2y ago
  Unfortunately, sometimes the law allows for the legal murder of people by pen. More people are killed by keyboards and pens, and I don't mean like John Wick, than are killed by guns because we have "for-profit healthcare". That means that the motive of the company is not determined by whether their decisions will kill people by the policies they create, but whether the decisions they make will be profitable. As long as those decisions don't run afoul of the law, they can kill at will. If that sounds fucked up, it is because it is fucked up.
• gambiting 2y ago
  I imagine that's what the start of the French revolution felt like too - one day you could walk down the streets of Paris as a noble minding your own business, the next day you had your head chopped off because people got fed up. Not saying that this is what's happening in the US right now, but I imagine the societal feelings of anger against "the elite" are similar.
  • bloomingkales 2y ago
    Americans burned down a police station over George Floyd, stormed the capitol, and there were two assassination attempts on Trump last year. Basically, we’ve begun normalizing events that fit a timeline of domestic turmoil.
• avmich 2y ago
  Imagine modern Russia. You can't have much of an opinion on pressing subjects of today unless that opinion is sanctioned by Russia's authorities - otherwise you're dead, or incarcerated or at best left the country. The propaganda machine is working 24/7. Now, Russia is a young country - counting from the last big turmoil in 1991, it's only 30+ years old - but some of the people there lived through USSR times. And some 100- years ago USSR was going through grim times itself, with millions suffering in purges, and even more millions and tens of millions learning to conform. And, as some prized artists and writers said there, the country killed a lot of progressive and inspired and very many of who're left are those who did purges, participated in them or from their families. So now the Russia's population - many involuntarily - support the war which was started for, frankly, really wrong reasons. And the future the Russia is perhaps looking towards is grim, hard and thankless no matter how things will progress. Can you imagine the scale of the task of getting back from the proverbial pit towards what we'd see as a more normal way of a country, what's going on in the heads of those people trying to live a normal life there? Now, you might be surprised but America also has problems under the surface. America likes to project the good impression, but certain problems exist, aren't addressed enough for some time, got accumulated and it's harder to gloss them over. And since those problems are decades old, you have some parts of generations quite familiar with them. And we have Trump - first winning in 2016 and then even more triumphantly winning in 2024 - and those "normal", "good" sort of decidedly lost this November to those who's combined message might well be "things aren't well". Maybe we need to look at what's normal, as in if we have that state? Should we consider normal something only 40% think? 50%? 70%? That is, if 30% have long running reasons to think things aren't normal - is it enough for you to pause? To the melting pot. What would you think if, looking into the pot, at the extreme you'd see the whole pot is full of that pent up anger, and nothing - or almost nothing - of what's "normal" here? Do numbers matter here? And, if they are suddenly too large, what you're going to do with lots and lots of those who'd think, figuratively, that lynching is still a good idea? Or in other somewhat known words, what would you do the good from, if the only thing you can do that is from evil?
• ahazred8ta 2y ago
  Given the number of people who think that Oswald did not shoot three people, that James Earl Ray did not shoot anyone, that Mumia Abu-Jamal did not shoot anyone, the mental gymnastics are not surprising. It's always been like this; the internet just allows us to know about it in real time. There are still people to this day who will tell you that the Yippies really DID levitate the Pentagon.