9 ms·

Murder is only justified when it's your business model and behind numbers and profit margins in an Excel sheet are the real people you are sentencing to a lifet

Murder is only justified when it's your business model and behind numbers and profit margins in an Excel sheet are the real people you are sentencing to a lifetime of suffering and/or death.

3a2d29 2y ago
Only the CEO or everyone that works there?
- lenerdenator 2y ago
  How many people in the claims adjudication call center are making ~5 times the median American male's lifetime earnings each year, every year?
  - allturtles 2y ago
    What's the income threshold for people who are eligible for murder? Surely the whole board and the C-Suite. Senior VPs? VPs?
    - lenerdenator 2y ago
      Cynically, this sounds to me like something that people typically suggest we leave up to markets. Is that insane? Yes, but it's already a business model, and health insurance basically does that. These people make vast sums of money every year by asking the American people what it's worth to them to not be ruined by a chance illness or injury, then finding ways to make sure they don't have to save people from financial ruin or death. I don't see how that's really so different from a protection racket, except for the fact that most protection rackets were operated with more good faith effort towards the extorted.
      - gruez 2y ago
        >These people make vast sums of money every year by asking the American people what it's worth to them to not be ruined by a chance illness or injury, then finding ways to make sure they don't have to save people from financial ruin or death. I don't see how that's really so different from a protection racket, except for the fact that most protection rackets were operated with more good faith effort towards the extorted. This definition of a "protection racket" is a bit loose. By similar logic landlords are also a "protection racket" for having a place to hive.
        lenerdenator 2y ago
        > This definition of a "protection racket" is a bit loose. By similar logic landlords are also a "protection racket" for having a place to hive. “As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce.” - known Marxist-Leninist Adam Smith
        gruez 2y ago
        An apartment, or healthcare is hardly "natural produce".
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - chasd00 2y ago
      I was thinking the same thing. Oh and why stay in the healthcare vertical? Surely the CEO and employees of Raytheon deserve to be shot in the back leaving a hotel. What a ridiculous set of conversations…
      - latentcall 2y ago
        Are you being sarcastic here? I just got off work and still have the brain fog.
  - benced 2y ago
    Most of those people are making several multiples the average Indian's lifetime earnings. Should those call center folks pay for the Indians' healthcare?
    - lenerdenator 2y ago
      India already has a multi-payer universal healthcare system. It's also not an American's business to come in and tell India how to run its healthcare system.
      - benced 2y ago
        That's a cop-out. Just as the CEOs could transfer their higher wealth to average Americans, average Americans could transfer their higher wealth to Indians without changing or giving input on their healthcare system. (which is absolutely not universal in any OECD-country sense)
- dwallin 2y ago
  Responsibility for the actions of a company should be somewhat proportional to the amount of profit derived from said activities.
  - IncreasePosts 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - uoaei 2y ago
      It's okay if you are uncomfortable in morally ambiguous situations, the most moral thing to do in those circumstances is recuse yourself.
      - IncreasePosts 2y ago
        [flagged]
    - dwallin 2y ago
      I would seriously wonder how much you understand about proportions given the average nurse makes about 00.000002% of the $4.5 trillion in annual health care spending in the USA. I also didn't say that should be the only factor. Clearly proximate responsibility for the relevant decisions should be (and already is) part of the equation.
      - IncreasePosts 2y ago
        [flagged]
  - ARandomerDude 2y ago
    So if you kill people but you only make $30K a year then no big deal. But if they 100x your salary now you're a real bad guy. That can't be right.
    - capybaraStorm 2y ago
- clarionbell 2y ago
  That's the scary part. It's very tempting to just sentence someone like this. But more you dwell on it, the worst it gets. There is a reason why death penalty is considered an extreme.
- tristor 2y ago
  The entire argument for high CEO renumeration is that they take on total responsibility for all actions of the company. The buck stops with them. So, why do we think it's acceptable for that not to be the case when the company does something bad?
  - 3a2d29 2y ago
    Thats a good argument in a vacuum. But the world has determined "I was just following orders" is not a good defense. We know the crimes against humanity are bad and subordinates are guilty if they do them. We don;t just let everyone off free except the head of state. Not to see that united healtcare (as bad as they are) are anywhere near that, but I am saying that its clear that we, as a society, already hold all people complicit in evil as guilty. Not just the person at the top.
    - defrost 2y ago
      With a good many exceptions. The US as a society allows its citizens actions that the US as a country has prosecuted others for. eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial_of_Henry_Kissinger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial_of_Henry_Kissinger
thegrimmest 2y ago
Refusing to pay for medical care is hardly murder. It’s a standard monetary dispute, and we have a due process for these. If you think that so many claims are being unreasonably denied, why not start a company offering bridge loans, and funding legal challenges? Maybe the courts are too inefficient to handle these disputes, but that’s an argument for reforming the courts, not for shooting executives.
- LetsGetTechnicl 2y ago
  > Refusing to pay for medical care is hardly murder. This is crazy. Maybe it's not "murder" in the traditional sense but you are making a choice on whether someone gets life-saving care, or lives in immense pain for the rest of their lives until they commit suicide. Again, this kind of normalized violence is justified when it's a business making choices to increase profits. We are so disconnected from our humanity that rounding errors in an Excel sheet mean actual lives are being ended, but that's okay.
  - goatlover 2y ago
    What's stopping people from switching to a better insurance provider?
    - lenerdenator 2y ago
      Most Americans get their health insurance through their employers. You are technically free to not sign up for this and purchase your own health insurance, but when you consider that you then give up the employer subsidy to your monthly premium, and that said subsidy often amounts to thousands of dollars each year, it does not make financial sense to participate in the market.
    - danans 2y ago
      Most health insurance (and the lowest cost insurance) in the US is tied to a person's employer, a system that shifts the balance of power substantially to large corporate employers over workers and small companies. Furthermore, absent major life events (job change, marriage, new child, etc) there is only one time of year when health insurance changes can be made, a time of year called Open Enrollment. Finally, if you are self employed and you don't live in a state with a well functioning Obamacare market, your health insurance options are often quite limited.
jkrom3 2y ago
This statement is so far outside of the bounds of reality it's laughable. What about those people that are using United Health Care and getting the support they need? They account for nothing?
- LetsGetTechnicl 2y ago
  UHC has one of the highest rates of claim denials. Sure, there are some people getting the support they need but there are a lot of people who are not. What justification is there for that? The only justification is "profit", and that is not something that should ever be involved in healthcare.
  - fastball 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - eloisant 2y ago
      > There is always going to be an insurance company with "the highest rates of claim denials". On its own that means nothing. Statistically they should all be in the same ballpark. The industry average is 16%, but UHC has 32% so double! No reason for that.
      - fastball 2y ago
        Why should the rates always be the same? Different insurers can make different decisions about who they insure and what they insure and how they insure. This would (entirely reasonably) result in different rates of claims and whether or not they are accepted/denied.
    - nlh 2y ago
      I think this is a bit of a naive take. First off I agree 100% that their employees are not deserving of death so let's get that out of the way here. I'm not trying to argue that murder here is justified. But the take that purchasing insurance is a simple two-party agreement of willing participants who have options to go elsewhere is just purely naive. This is not a simple financial product like buying life insurance or car insurance or fire insurance for your house where you go shopping and buy or don't buy. In the United States, there are just no other choices. You get health insurance as part of your employement (typically), which is insane on the face of it. The government (basically) does not provide health as a service, even though it would seem that health is as fundamental a service as it gets. Health Insurance companies are for-profit entities whose absolute incentives are to maximize financial return to their shareholders, not maximize health in their policyholders. And whether they say it explicitly or not, the way you maximize financial return as an insurance company is take in more money than you pay out. And in situations where you have some amount of leeway over whether to pay out or not, the way you do that is try to pay out as little as possible and deny claims as much as possible. That's just pure logic. This is not "did your house burn down" or "did you car crash" or "did you die" binary type of stuff with typical insurance. This is nuanced decision-making, all with an overarching goal is maximizing financial return and minimizing claims paid. Period. While a specific person at a health insurance company may not be evil, and while the business itself may not be evil, the net result of the entire end-to-end system can absolutely be quite evil.
brodouevencode 2y ago
How far does this carry? Is the charge of the insurance company to keep you alive at all costs?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- LetsGetTechnicl 2y ago
  In a healthy society we wouldn't have "health insurance companies" which are profit driven and are motivated to cut costs, not provide care.
  - brodouevencode 2y ago
    There's no such thing as a free lunch. Someone will have to bear a cost somewhere along the way.
    - LetsGetTechnicl 2y ago
      I would prefer to live in a society that puts the well-being of its people over fretting whether someone is getting a "free lunch" or worrying "how will we make money off of this?" The US is so backwards, we spend so much money on healthcare for the worst impacts in the world, and we pump billions into our military blowing up people abroad. A healthy society would spend that money into taking care of its people, and that includes providing healthcare for everyone no matter the cost.
      - LetsGetTechnicl 2y ago
        I meant to say "worst outcomes" here
      - nancyminusone 2y ago
        Why bring the military into it at all? The US government already spends more ON HEALTHCARE than everyone else and still can't seem to figure it out.
jmyeet 2y ago
To your point, there is a concept called "social murder" [1]: > When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains. We can compare this to, say, all the people involved in the death camps in Nazi Germany. Who exactly is culpable for murder? Ther person dropping the Zyklon B? Or were they just following orders? The camp commandant who gave the orders? Or were they just following orders? What about the camp guards? What about the train operators? Those who maintained the trains? Those who built and maintained the camps? Those who loaded the trains? Those who detained Jews and other "undesirables"? In the case of death-by-denail of health coverage, there are many hands involved (hence "social murder"). Personally, I don't blame the people who man the phones, for example. They are coerced into a job. But someone is responsible and you can make a reasonable claim that the CEO fits that bill. Where you draw the line between those two is another question. There are no doubt people working at United whose job it is to come up with creative ways of denying claims. Their bonuses are probably tied to it. You can make a reasonable case that they're aware of the consequences of their action. Are they culpable too? Additionallly, people tend to view violence as violence or not depending on who does it. Like tossing tear gas cannisters at protestors is not violence but throwing the cannister back is [2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_murder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_murder [2]: https://fox11online.com/news/local/charges-filed-against-man-accused-of-throwing-tear-gas-back-at-police-during-riots https://fox11online.com/news/local/charges-filed-against-man...
IncreasePosts 2y ago
[flagged]
- s5300 2y ago
  [dead]
takinola 2y ago
A quick look at United Health's P/L shows a 6% profit margin. This does not quite support the popular rhetoric of a corporation in search of relentless margin (unless the argument is they are bad at it despite all efforts).
- lenerdenator 2y ago
  ... or that they have used creative accounting to come to that number. Regardless, people who are debilitated by injury or illness aren't going to look at 6% and say, "well, jeeze, I guess these guys really are hard done by." They're going to wonder why something that costs them tens of thousands of dollars a year (health insurance premiums) isn't paying for a medically-necessary procedure, profits be damned.
  - takinola 2y ago
    All public companies, especially of this size, have their financial statements audited. Of course, shenanigans still happen but I haven't heard any credible claims regarding UNH just yet. More importantly, corporate hanky-panky is almost always designed to boost revenue and margins and not lower them so I am willing to bet the numbers here are trustworthy. > profits be damned. But, profits cannot be damned, at least not if you plan on being a going concern. At some point, the companies need to make a profit otherwise they go out of business and cannot provide any healthcare at all. My point is not that UNH is a sterling example of healthcare service but to point out that the narrative justifying the public outrage is not really logically coherent or supported by evidence. If there is no public healthcare service, you will need to have private insurers. If you have private insurers, they will need to make profit. The best you can do in this situation is make sure there is competition so the profits are not out of line (which seems to be the case) and there is minimal waste in the system (jury is out on that one). Also, public healthcare is not the panacea that it seems to be promoted as. Healthcare is expensive and at some point, limits will be placed to avoid bankrupting the system. Take a look at any number of the systems of any number of European countries and see the wait times, approvals, etc. BTW, I support the idea of a government provided healthcare system, but I just don't think it will solve all the problems the way people seem to think it will.
arkh 2y ago
I'm gonna play devil's advocate here. How much do you think people should pay for some random person to be afforded one more hour of life free of pain? $1000? $1000000? $100000000? More?
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  We don't need to know this exact number to know that American patients are getting uniquely fucked by their healthcare system compared to every other developed nation. Once we're on-par with what other countries achieve, then we can have the philosophical debate.
- jplusequalt 2y ago
  This is a purposefully disingenuous hypothetical. There are people who have real shots at a better life, or continuing their life for that matter, who get denied the insurance they pay for! It isn't only people who are already on death's door.
  - arkh 2y ago
    The thing is, you have to start somewhere and then you can go backwards. And putting a price on what people should shoulder for other is the main job of insurance companies. Now you can hope for a state owned one which would have "everyone" chipping in so you should be able to cover more extreme cases. Or you can (and should imo) criticize the algorithms used by the current companies. But you cannot expect society to pay for anything, you have to do some triage.

Murder is only justified when it's your business model and behind numbers and profit margins in an Excel sheet are the real people you are sentencing to a lifetime of suffering and/or death.

3a2d29 2y ago

Only the CEO or everyone that works there?

lenerdenator 2y ago
How many people in the claims adjudication call center are making ~5 times the median American male's lifetime earnings each year, every year?
- allturtles 2y ago
  What's the income threshold for people who are eligible for murder? Surely the whole board and the C-Suite. Senior VPs? VPs?
  - lenerdenator 2y ago
    Cynically, this sounds to me like something that people typically suggest we leave up to markets. Is that insane? Yes, but it's already a business model, and health insurance basically does that. These people make vast sums of money every year by asking the American people what it's worth to them to not be ruined by a chance illness or injury, then finding ways to make sure they don't have to save people from financial ruin or death. I don't see how that's really so different from a protection racket, except for the fact that most protection rackets were operated with more good faith effort towards the extorted.
    - gruez 2y ago
      >These people make vast sums of money every year by asking the American people what it's worth to them to not be ruined by a chance illness or injury, then finding ways to make sure they don't have to save people from financial ruin or death. I don't see how that's really so different from a protection racket, except for the fact that most protection rackets were operated with more good faith effort towards the extorted. This definition of a "protection racket" is a bit loose. By similar logic landlords are also a "protection racket" for having a place to hive.
      - lenerdenator 2y ago
        > This definition of a "protection racket" is a bit loose. By similar logic landlords are also a "protection racket" for having a place to hive. “As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce.” - known Marxist-Leninist Adam Smith
        gruez 2y ago
        An apartment, or healthcare is hardly "natural produce".
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - chasd00 2y ago
    I was thinking the same thing. Oh and why stay in the healthcare vertical? Surely the CEO and employees of Raytheon deserve to be shot in the back leaving a hotel. What a ridiculous set of conversations…
    - latentcall 2y ago
      Are you being sarcastic here? I just got off work and still have the brain fog.
- benced 2y ago
  Most of those people are making several multiples the average Indian's lifetime earnings. Should those call center folks pay for the Indians' healthcare?
  - lenerdenator 2y ago
    India already has a multi-payer universal healthcare system. It's also not an American's business to come in and tell India how to run its healthcare system.
    - benced 2y ago
      That's a cop-out. Just as the CEOs could transfer their higher wealth to average Americans, average Americans could transfer their higher wealth to Indians without changing or giving input on their healthcare system. (which is absolutely not universal in any OECD-country sense)
dwallin 2y ago
Responsibility for the actions of a company should be somewhat proportional to the amount of profit derived from said activities.
- IncreasePosts 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - uoaei 2y ago
    It's okay if you are uncomfortable in morally ambiguous situations, the most moral thing to do in those circumstances is recuse yourself.
    - IncreasePosts 2y ago
      [flagged]
  - dwallin 2y ago
    I would seriously wonder how much you understand about proportions given the average nurse makes about 00.000002% of the $4.5 trillion in annual health care spending in the USA. I also didn't say that should be the only factor. Clearly proximate responsibility for the relevant decisions should be (and already is) part of the equation.
    - IncreasePosts 2y ago
      [flagged]
- ARandomerDude 2y ago
  So if you kill people but you only make $30K a year then no big deal. But if they 100x your salary now you're a real bad guy. That can't be right.
  - capybaraStorm 2y ago
clarionbell 2y ago
That's the scary part. It's very tempting to just sentence someone like this. But more you dwell on it, the worst it gets. There is a reason why death penalty is considered an extreme.
tristor 2y ago
The entire argument for high CEO renumeration is that they take on total responsibility for all actions of the company. The buck stops with them. So, why do we think it's acceptable for that not to be the case when the company does something bad?
- 3a2d29 2y ago
  Thats a good argument in a vacuum. But the world has determined "I was just following orders" is not a good defense. We know the crimes against humanity are bad and subordinates are guilty if they do them. We don;t just let everyone off free except the head of state. Not to see that united healtcare (as bad as they are) are anywhere near that, but I am saying that its clear that we, as a society, already hold all people complicit in evil as guilty. Not just the person at the top.
  - defrost 2y ago
    With a good many exceptions. The US as a society allows its citizens actions that the US as a country has prosecuted others for. eg: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial_of_Henry_Kissinger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trial_of_Henry_Kissinger

thegrimmest 2y ago

Refusing to pay for medical care is hardly murder. It’s a standard monetary dispute, and we have a due process for these. If you think that so many claims are being unreasonably denied, why not start a company offering bridge loans, and funding legal challenges? Maybe the courts are too inefficient to handle these disputes, but that’s an argument for reforming the courts, not for shooting executives.

LetsGetTechnicl 2y ago
> Refusing to pay for medical care is hardly murder. This is crazy. Maybe it's not "murder" in the traditional sense but you are making a choice on whether someone gets life-saving care, or lives in immense pain for the rest of their lives until they commit suicide. Again, this kind of normalized violence is justified when it's a business making choices to increase profits. We are so disconnected from our humanity that rounding errors in an Excel sheet mean actual lives are being ended, but that's okay.
- goatlover 2y ago
  What's stopping people from switching to a better insurance provider?
  - lenerdenator 2y ago
    Most Americans get their health insurance through their employers. You are technically free to not sign up for this and purchase your own health insurance, but when you consider that you then give up the employer subsidy to your monthly premium, and that said subsidy often amounts to thousands of dollars each year, it does not make financial sense to participate in the market.
  - danans 2y ago
    Most health insurance (and the lowest cost insurance) in the US is tied to a person's employer, a system that shifts the balance of power substantially to large corporate employers over workers and small companies. Furthermore, absent major life events (job change, marriage, new child, etc) there is only one time of year when health insurance changes can be made, a time of year called Open Enrollment. Finally, if you are self employed and you don't live in a state with a well functioning Obamacare market, your health insurance options are often quite limited.

jkrom3 2y ago

This statement is so far outside of the bounds of reality it's laughable. What about those people that are using United Health Care and getting the support they need? They account for nothing?

LetsGetTechnicl 2y ago
UHC has one of the highest rates of claim denials. Sure, there are some people getting the support they need but there are a lot of people who are not. What justification is there for that? The only justification is "profit", and that is not something that should ever be involved in healthcare.
- fastball 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - eloisant 2y ago
    > There is always going to be an insurance company with "the highest rates of claim denials". On its own that means nothing. Statistically they should all be in the same ballpark. The industry average is 16%, but UHC has 32% so double! No reason for that.
    - fastball 2y ago
      Why should the rates always be the same? Different insurers can make different decisions about who they insure and what they insure and how they insure. This would (entirely reasonably) result in different rates of claims and whether or not they are accepted/denied.
  - nlh 2y ago
    I think this is a bit of a naive take. First off I agree 100% that their employees are not deserving of death so let's get that out of the way here. I'm not trying to argue that murder here is justified. But the take that purchasing insurance is a simple two-party agreement of willing participants who have options to go elsewhere is just purely naive. This is not a simple financial product like buying life insurance or car insurance or fire insurance for your house where you go shopping and buy or don't buy. In the United States, there are just no other choices. You get health insurance as part of your employement (typically), which is insane on the face of it. The government (basically) does not provide health as a service, even though it would seem that health is as fundamental a service as it gets. Health Insurance companies are for-profit entities whose absolute incentives are to maximize financial return to their shareholders, not maximize health in their policyholders. And whether they say it explicitly or not, the way you maximize financial return as an insurance company is take in more money than you pay out. And in situations where you have some amount of leeway over whether to pay out or not, the way you do that is try to pay out as little as possible and deny claims as much as possible. That's just pure logic. This is not "did your house burn down" or "did you car crash" or "did you die" binary type of stuff with typical insurance. This is nuanced decision-making, all with an overarching goal is maximizing financial return and minimizing claims paid. Period. While a specific person at a health insurance company may not be evil, and while the business itself may not be evil, the net result of the entire end-to-end system can absolutely be quite evil.

brodouevencode 2y ago

How far does this carry? Is the charge of the insurance company to keep you alive at all costs?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
LetsGetTechnicl 2y ago
In a healthy society we wouldn't have "health insurance companies" which are profit driven and are motivated to cut costs, not provide care.
- brodouevencode 2y ago
  There's no such thing as a free lunch. Someone will have to bear a cost somewhere along the way.
  - LetsGetTechnicl 2y ago
    I would prefer to live in a society that puts the well-being of its people over fretting whether someone is getting a "free lunch" or worrying "how will we make money off of this?" The US is so backwards, we spend so much money on healthcare for the worst impacts in the world, and we pump billions into our military blowing up people abroad. A healthy society would spend that money into taking care of its people, and that includes providing healthcare for everyone no matter the cost.
    - LetsGetTechnicl 2y ago
      I meant to say "worst outcomes" here
    - nancyminusone 2y ago
      Why bring the military into it at all? The US government already spends more ON HEALTHCARE than everyone else and still can't seem to figure it out.

jmyeet 2y ago

To your point, there is a concept called "social murder" [1]: > When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains. We can compare this to, say, all the people involved in the death camps in Nazi Germany. Who exactly is culpable for murder? Ther person dropping the Zyklon B? Or were they just following orders? The camp commandant who gave the orders? Or were they just following orders? What about the camp guards? What about the train operators? Those who maintained the trains? Those who built and maintained the camps? Those who loaded the trains? Those who detained Jews and other "undesirables"? In the case of death-by-denail of health coverage, there are many hands involved (hence "social murder"). Personally, I don't blame the people who man the phones, for example. They are coerced into a job. But someone is responsible and you can make a reasonable claim that the CEO fits that bill. Where you draw the line between those two is another question. There are no doubt people working at United whose job it is to come up with creative ways of denying claims. Their bonuses are probably tied to it. You can make a reasonable case that they're aware of the consequences of their action. Are they culpable too? Additionallly, people tend to view violence as violence or not depending on who does it. Like tossing tear gas cannisters at protestors is not violence but throwing the cannister back is [2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_murder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_murder [2]: https://fox11online.com/news/local/charges-filed-against-man-accused-of-throwing-tear-gas-back-at-police-during-riots https://fox11online.com/news/local/charges-filed-against-man...

IncreasePosts 2y ago

[flagged]

s5300 2y ago
[dead]

takinola 2y ago

A quick look at United Health's P/L shows a 6% profit margin. This does not quite support the popular rhetoric of a corporation in search of relentless margin (unless the argument is they are bad at it despite all efforts).

lenerdenator 2y ago
... or that they have used creative accounting to come to that number. Regardless, people who are debilitated by injury or illness aren't going to look at 6% and say, "well, jeeze, I guess these guys really are hard done by." They're going to wonder why something that costs them tens of thousands of dollars a year (health insurance premiums) isn't paying for a medically-necessary procedure, profits be damned.
- takinola 2y ago
  All public companies, especially of this size, have their financial statements audited. Of course, shenanigans still happen but I haven't heard any credible claims regarding UNH just yet. More importantly, corporate hanky-panky is almost always designed to boost revenue and margins and not lower them so I am willing to bet the numbers here are trustworthy. > profits be damned. But, profits cannot be damned, at least not if you plan on being a going concern. At some point, the companies need to make a profit otherwise they go out of business and cannot provide any healthcare at all. My point is not that UNH is a sterling example of healthcare service but to point out that the narrative justifying the public outrage is not really logically coherent or supported by evidence. If there is no public healthcare service, you will need to have private insurers. If you have private insurers, they will need to make profit. The best you can do in this situation is make sure there is competition so the profits are not out of line (which seems to be the case) and there is minimal waste in the system (jury is out on that one). Also, public healthcare is not the panacea that it seems to be promoted as. Healthcare is expensive and at some point, limits will be placed to avoid bankrupting the system. Take a look at any number of the systems of any number of European countries and see the wait times, approvals, etc. BTW, I support the idea of a government provided healthcare system, but I just don't think it will solve all the problems the way people seem to think it will.

arkh 2y ago

I'm gonna play devil's advocate here. How much do you think people should pay for some random person to be afforded one more hour of life free of pain? $1000? $1000000? $100000000? More?

llamaimperative 2y ago
We don't need to know this exact number to know that American patients are getting uniquely fucked by their healthcare system compared to every other developed nation. Once we're on-par with what other countries achieve, then we can have the philosophical debate.
jplusequalt 2y ago
This is a purposefully disingenuous hypothetical. There are people who have real shots at a better life, or continuing their life for that matter, who get denied the insurance they pay for! It isn't only people who are already on death's door.
- arkh 2y ago
  The thing is, you have to start somewhere and then you can go backwards. And putting a price on what people should shoulder for other is the main job of insurance companies. Now you can hope for a state owned one which would have "everyone" chipping in so you should be able to cover more extreme cases. Or you can (and should imo) criticize the algorithms used by the current companies. But you cannot expect society to pay for anything, you have to do some triage.