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"Not brave enough" to shoot an innocent person in the back and then run away?
by pc86 2mo ago
"Not brave enough" to shoot an innocent person in the back and then run away?
- scottLobster 2mo agoHe murdered a guilty man, not an innocent one. Still murder, and murder is wrong, but let's not get things twisted
- pc86 2mo ago[flagged]
- scottLobster 2mo agoThe moral crime of excessive claims denials that resulted in many needless death for no better reason than he wanted a to boost UHC's stock price to get a bigger bonus. He deserved death, but the manner in which that death is administered matters. Vigilante justice corrodes the very foundations of the justice system, if we allow it the end result will be far more dead innocent people than guilty ones. I don't want more innocents to die just to kill those who deserve it.
- pc86 2mo ago[flagged]
- scottLobster 2mo agoWhere do you think all criminal codes come from? Are they mined out of the earth already written? It's a constantly evolving set of rules based on a society's collective moralities. There are many crimes today that did not exist 100 years ago and vice versa. Yes, there are crimes that should be punished that are not yet present in the criminal code, and you don't need to be a legal scholar to propose new ones. I think most people agree deriving financial profit by knowingly denying people necessary medical treatment is immoral.
- lotsofpulp 2mo ago>The moral crime of excessive claims denials that resulted in many needless death for no better reason than he wanted a to boost UHC's stock price to get a bigger bonus. Since you know what excessive is, at what level do the premiums become a moral crime?
- scottLobster 2mo agoExcessive is knowingly denying someone necessary medical coverage solely for financial gain. If private insurers want to play that game then they can register as a non-profit organization or be an optional layer on top of a public backstop, such as medicare-for-all, an arrangement they've lobbied against for deacdes. Sadly, they want to retain the ability to deny you coverage for any reason. Their maximum profit happens when they pay out as few claims as possible. The only reason they don't already operate that way is legal enforcement, so let's take that to it's logical conclusion
- lotsofpulp 2mo agoIf you were in charge of denying or approving claims (millions of them), would you expect to make errors? Would you expect every insured without sufficient medical knowledge to understand which denial was appropriate versus which was an error?
- pc86 2mo agoYou know the answer, they would just steal money from people they don't like the pay for everything, and when that runs out almost immediately they'll implement rationing and waitlists. Tale as old as time.
- scottLobster 2mo agoRaising taxes to pay for the public welfare isn't stealing. Rationing and wait-lists are a problem in some countries, and they're preferable problems to the ones existing in our current system. You don't want to help, and you need a fairy tale to reframe your selfishness so you can lie to yourself in the mirror. Many such people, you aren't insightful.
- ang_cire 2mo agoApologies for the necro, but I wanted to reply here before it got too far past the thread's life. First off, thank you for weighing in here, you were I think a lot more persuasive than me in responding to the assertions of innocence here. I think you and I agree on this topic, including about vigilante justice, with the exception that I don't think it corrodes a system if and when that system is already broken. I think it is in this case a negative outcome of exactly that; were our justice system working properly, the UHC CEO would have been jailed or executed for his actions, like you said. Anyways, I enjoyed the discussions here, and I'm glad you're here too! Cheers.
- timcobb 2mo agonot all crime is illegal, unfortunately.
- BigTTYGothGF 2mo agoWrongful denial of medical treatment. Delay, Deny, Depose.
- pc86 2mo agoThere is literally an entire cottage industry full of people whose entire livelihood depends on getting people medical treatment after it's been denied.
- BigTTYGothGF 2mo agoYeah, what a waste that is.
- pfdietz 2mo agoMedical insurance companies in the US are the agents by which health costs are kept down. In centralized government health systems the government itself does this; in our system the insurance companies do it. They have the negotiating power that individual patients do not. Part of keeping health costs down is rejecting some treatments as too expensive. Without this, costs will balloon forever as there is no one to say "enough".
- scottLobster 2mo agoThat's a nice theory. The stock prices of many of these companies seems to disagree. They aren't performing some tragic triage in the service of preventing the healthcare system from total collapse, they're making money. Lots of it. Directly from vulnerable peoples' needless deaths.
- pfdietz 2mo agoThese companies have very low profit margins (as a fraction of cash flowing through them). They have strong incentive to keep costs down. What does stock price have to do with this? A high stock price can just mean there's relatively few outstanding shares (you probably mean market cap). The largest health insurer in the US has a share of just 16% so the market is highly competitive.
- 0123456789ABCDE 2mo agoyou will note gp did not refer to the deceased as a criminal, nor did they condone their murder, on the contrary.