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Using such a weasel phrase like "by some accounts" means that there's absolutely nothing standing behind this. If there was any concrete thing Brian Thompson di

• thowawatp302 2y ago
  I’m standing behind this. I think that Brian Thompson was a mass murderer. His actions as CEO put profit before people and caused many people’s lives to be lost.
  • xyzzyz 2y ago
    What actions? What did he do? You're just repeating empty phrases to smear the murder victim.
    • thowawatp302 2y ago
      > UnitedHealthcare in particular denied coverage for post-acute care, or services and support needed after a hospitalization. In 2019, the insurance provider’s initial denial rate for post-acute care prior authorization requests was 8.7%; by 2022, it had increased to 22.7%. Buck stop with him; between 2021 and 2022 he did that. Being the CEO and all.
      • xyzzyz 2y ago
        And what's the crime here? What's the moral error? Can you elucidate? I hope you're not trying to argue that insurance should not be allowed to ever deny claims?
        • anigbrowl 2y ago
          I think you understand very clearly what point is being made, and are just pretending not to get it.
          • __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
            [flagged]
          • xyzzyz 2y ago
            My understanding is that people are twisting themselves into pretzels to blame the murder victim for something, but they have extremely hard time finding anything explicit to point to, so they just throw allusions, hoping that the reader will complete the bogus argument in their head. Here, for example, the parent poster brings up some statistic that some very specific category of insurance claim denial went up in some period. The allusion is that this is nefarious, and is a result of some specific action by the murder victim. The reader is supposed to interpret it this way. Of course, there's absolutely zero evidence for any of these claims, and when you lay it down like that, it sounds pretty stupid without anything backing this up.
            • DangitBobby 2y ago
              Just goes to show you how incompatible your morals are from others, I suppose.
            • anigbrowl 2y ago
              It's a general category (all claim denials) and it did not go up, it more than doubled; as you are probably aware, it's far, far above the industry average. Also you're misusing the word 'allusion' which means 'to refer to something. You probably meant 'implication'.
              • xyzzyz 2y ago
                No, denial of “post-acute care, or services and support needed after a hospitalization” claims is a narrow category, it’s not all claim denials.
        • thowawatp302 2y ago
          Why not, I pay them. Do you pay your phone company to not provide service?
          • xyzzyz 2y ago
            Of course, there are plenty of places and circumstances where my phone company does not provide me service.
        • ruthmarx 2y ago
          You don't see a moral error with a health insurance company going out of their way to more than double the claims they deny, not because it's ethical or necessary but because they find ways to do so legally and the motive is profit? Perhaps you're not well equipped to evaluate moral errors in the first place.
      • deleted 2y ago
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• Philpax 2y ago
  Ok: https://fortune.com/2024/12/05/unitedhealthcare-ceo-brian-thompson-lawsuits-social-media-reaction-motive/ https://fortune.com/2024/12/05/unitedhealthcare-ceo-brian-th...
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • xyzzyz 2y ago
    The only potential crime that article lists is allegation that the murder victim failed to disclose some material fact to the company investors. Are you saying that Luigi Mangione killed Thomson on behalf of the stock holders, who lost money by holding UnitedHealthcare stock? Your comment is pretty clear example of the attitude around the case. People hate CEOs of companies that must make difficult decision, and so when they are murdered, they will twist themselves into pretzels to somehow justify that they had it coming.
    • impossiblefork 2y ago
      Yes, but if there were a crime, then there'd be a legal remedy, so any vigilante action would be unjustified. That something harmful is legal or effectively legal is a necessary requirement for a vigilante action to morally acceptable.
      • davrosthedalek 2y ago
        Wouldn't the moral acceptable way be to try making the harmful thing illegal? And if people in their majority, in their stupidity or cleverness, reject your argument, isn't then vigilante action deeply anti-democratic?
        • impossiblefork 2y ago
          I suppose it depends on how you view things and what tradition you're from. I have a very old-style view, where courts provide systems that substitute for private vengeance and thus become legitimate by being willing to hear complaints of harm, so from my point of view, if a court hear the matter, the affected person can take whatever measures they wish, which of course has important consequences in cases of legal immunity-- when my view is taken, legal immunity is something one desperately wants to avoid having, because whoever has it must contend with private vengeance.
• jimbob45 2y ago
  No one will have concrete answers until discovery during Mangione’s trial. That is, if United doesn’t find themselves their own Jack Ruby.
  • xyzzyz 2y ago
    What discovery? Are you suggesting that the defense in the murder case will be able to do any kind of discovery on UnitedHealthcare? How would that even be possible?
• deleted 2y ago
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• madaxe_again 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • xyzzyz 2y ago
    Ah yes, let's murder people we feel (without even any concretes to support this) are not morally pure, what a perfect idea. Which other CEOs do you think it would be justified to murder? Or are there any that are morally pure enough to you that they can live?
    • __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
      Just a guess, but I think if we found a way to put together a list, perhaps by voting or something, 99% of CEOs would be fine. And if the fear of being found to be in that remaining 1% is an effective deterrent against bad behavior, well maybe we ought to be making such lists.
      • CaptainFever 2y ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hated_in_the_Nation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hated_in_the_Nation Detective Chief Inspector Karin Parke and Trainee Detective Constable Blue Coulson unravel a deadly conspiracy involving autonomous drone insects (ADIs). After the controversial journalist Jo Powers dies in an apparent suicide, forensic evidence reveals an ADI embedded in her brain. The investigation escalates as similar ADI-related murders occur, including that of rapper Tusk, targeted after social media backlash. The detectives uncover a sinister "Game of Consequences" launched by hacked ADIs, where the most-mentioned person under the hashtag #DeathTo is killed daily. The situation spirals out of control when the ADIs are used to surveil citizens, and public engagement with the hashtag results in mass casualties. A manifesto from Garrett Scholes, a former Granular employee and hacker, reveals his motive: to expose societal cruelty and complacency. Efforts to neutralize the hacked ADIs fail, resulting in the death of 387,036 people who used the hashtag, including a member of Parke's team. The fallout leaves Coulson presumed dead by suicide, though Parke later receives evidence that Coulson is alive and pursuing Scholes abroad, leaving the case ominously unresolved.
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• __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
  My intent was merely to point out that it is a commonly held belief, because it seemed like you were not aware. I didn't want to champion that belief. But since you've invited me to name the moral error, sure. Accepting a fiduciary responsibility to chase after profits in a context where that very clearly means finding ways to deny people access to healthcare is a moral error. If you can't ethically do a job you shouldn't take that job. At best you're lying to shareholders, at worst you're killing people. The only ethical path is to go find a different job.
  • xyzzyz 2y ago
    There is absolutely no way to run an insurance scheme without denying some people coverage. No system anywhere in the world, public or private, accepts every single claim. You must deny some claims, there's no way around it. This means that according to you, there's no ethical way to run health insurance system. I disagree, I think we need insurance to exist, and given that someone needs to run insurance, I don't think that taking such a job is inherently a moral error.
    • __MatrixMan__ 2y ago
      It's really just for-profit health insurance systems that I think can't be made ethical. If you have to deny some claims based on resource availability, that's an uncomfortable necessity, but we can do insurance-like things without asking people to balance human life against shareholder greed. It seems pretty obvious that opting into a position where you'll have to do that might make you unpopular with the humans.
      • xyzzyz 2y ago
        What is "resource availability"? In a non-profit healthcare systems, how exactly the amount of available resources is determined? Is there no person involved making a decision that causes the amount of available resources to change? Think about it. Consider, for example, politicians who set the healthcare tax rate. If they set it 1% higher, there will be more resources available. Does it mean that by not doing so, they deny care to some? I strongly encourage you to think very carefully about this. Once you do, you'll find that there are no simple answers: you'll always have limited resources, and you'll always have to deny care to some people, and in fact it will always include some people personally making the call to deny care to some people. Any system that actually exists, public or private, does this.
• ruthmarx 2y ago
  > moral error, The moral error is by refining and endorsing a company policy that went out of it's way to cheat people out of their due insurance, killing significant amounts of people as a result and ensuring suffering for even more. Our legal system can't really address this, not until the electoral college gets disbarred or red state voters realize rejecting socialized health care hurts more than it helps. Until that happens. things are going to get worse and people are going to get frustrated and start acting out. It's what happens when you have such a broken system. Talking about "we don't do that in society" is ignoring the problem at it's core. You can't expect people to just obey the rules and respect law and order when it clearly isn't working for them or people they care about.