UnitedHealth CEO Assassinated
The murder of UnitedHealthcare's CEO is a strange story. On the one hand, the killer obviously was taking steps to avoid getting caught. He was wearing a hoodie. He used a silencer. He clearly had an escape plan.
On the other hand, he was wearing a distinctive backpack. He may have left a food wrapper and a water bottle at the scene. And there was writing on each of the three shell casings (the words "deny," "defend," and "depose").
The same sorts of decisions would have to be made by the government even if healthcare were entirely socialized. Someone who lives in a country with socialized medicine can correct me if I'm wrong, but I assume that there are medical expenses in those countries that the government simply won't pay for.
I wonder if people claiming insurance denials are too high realize that healthcare would cost even more (and quality would be far worse) if denials were lower.
Eh. This isn't entirely fair either. It drives claimants crazy when they feel like their insurer forces them to engage in a byzantine process that seems primarily designed to frustrate claimants and medical providers so much that they give up and absorb the cost themselves. And I understand why.
I wonder if people claiming insurance denials are too high realize that healthcare would cost even more (and quality would be far worse) if denials were lower.
People realize that. They also realize that the solution is not to deny people care, but for healthcare costs to not be determined by for-profit monopolies with primary goals of maximizing returns to greedy shareholders rather than, I don’t know, actually providing healthcare. It’s your myopic worldview that prevents you from seeing that.
And the government is primarily to blame, all of our elected officials in the pockets of big pharma and other bullshit lobbyists and donors with their own agendas. These healthcare companies wouldn’t be getting away with all this if it weren’t for the absolute refusal by our representatives in government to commit to large-scale necessary reform to the drug and healthcare industry. Everyone’s too busy with their insider trading apparently.
I suspect that a lot of the most serious disputes arise in this sort of situation. If you are dying, and there is some experimental treatment that might help you, it is entirely rational to want to give it a try. And it's also the sort of thing that insurance companies probably try to resist paying for, especially if the treatment is expensive.
A common complaint I'm reading is people being prescribed medicine by their doctors then going to fill their prescription and finding out the insurance company has denied the prescription and also how depressing of a job being a pharmacy technician is when you have to deny prescriptions on the daily.
Maybe the pharmaceutical companies are pushing their drugs on the doctors and the insurance companies aren't going to rubber stamp everything and be pharma's cash cow? I don't know but there sure is a lot of anger and it's hard to look past the companies posting billions in profit.
Looking forward to Trumps concepts of a plan to dismantle the ACA
This place sucks
People realize that. They also realize that the solution is not to deny people care, but for healthcare costs to not be determined by for-profit monopolies with primary goals of maximizing returns to greedy shareholders rather than, I don’t know, actually providing healthcare. It’s your myopic worldview that prevents you from seeing that.
Insurance companies don't provide healthcare, healthcare is provided by you know actual healthcare companies (and there is no monopoly there).
There are artificial monopolies in drugs but your myopic worldview thinks that my comprehensive worldview would have "intellectual property" (an oxymoron) protected by laws for decades (it wouldn't).
But even with shorted patents that can't be re-greened (as in my preferred model) the cost centers would keep exploding because of the lack of will to fix it, denying it's regulation that increases the costs.
Regulation is what prevents a german physician to move to the USA and work from day 1 (While he can do that in Australia or Canada) , regulation is what caps the number of people who can become doctors every year, regulation is what forces a doctor to be present even if not medically necessary to perform various healthcare procedures, regulation is what makes drug R&D horrifically expensive, regulation is what makes risk not-priceable so that healthy people have to subsidize unhealthy people choices, and so on.
Apparently so. What I'm curious about is if it's some sort of specially designed assassin's pistol or just some sort of novelty gun.
The original WWII gun was explicitly designed for clandestine operations and assassinations, with an emphasis on silence. They even didn't want the clickety-clack of a semi-auto reloading mechanism, therefore the manual cycle. This is "Where eagles dare" **** to hit guards undetected etc.
I guess using a silenced gun made sense in the case at hand, as the killer wouldn't want to attract random beat cops and the like with widely audible gun shots. But a normal semi-auto with a silencer would have done the trick just as well imo.
Besides all that I have a question for you I don't dare to ask b/c derail, but you know the question I'm sure! 😃
Btw when a market is like this, it isn't controlled by any monopoly
A common complaint I'm reading is people being prescribed medicine by their doctors then going to fill their prescription and finding out the insurance company has denied the prescription and also how depressing of a job being a pharmacy technician is when you have to deny prescriptions on the daily.
Maybe the pharmaceutical companies are pushing their drugs on the doctors and the insurance companies aren't going to rubber stamp everything and be pharma's cash cow? I don't know but there sure is
Profits are redic low, 6% profit margin for unitedhealthcare lol, that's lower than almost any other sector
Crossnerd - Is it your opinion that no cost is too high when it comes to healthcare?
Cost for whom?
Anyway, I’m sure Anthem BC walking back their new barbaric anesthesia policy the same afternoon was a totally unrelated event. Wonder who in the company decided that so quickly 😀
I feel like some of the analyses in the thread are not properly factoring in that CEOs of US healthcare companies are prolific killers of people in that they cause preventable deaths by denying claims and insurance for possible care. They exploit people at the most vulnerable periods of their lives, and even their deaths.
For some reason we don’t call those deaths “murder”.
It’s about temporary, non solutions vs the actual solution. The idea that incremental, short lasting* forms of justice are the way toward lasting justice - this idea is a lie, a delusion.
People need to be honest with themselves. Have you chosen the path of temporary justice or lasting justice? You can only choose one.
If you choose lasting justice, then you have to deny yourself the immediacy of temporary justice. If you do not deny yourself of temporary, immediate justice, then you will continue to live in an inherently unjust world.
*Temporary vs lasting justice is differentiated by satiation of the desire for justice across time, NOT by the level of enforcement. Killing someone and feeling immediately satisfied does not indicate lasting justice. All these people cheering on the death of this CEO, they will desire justice again weeks or months from now. This reality nullifies and undermines any past pursuit of justice — if the aim is lasting justice, which their emotions are signaling this desire.
Usual healthcare discussion:
-people that use their insurance once or twice a year asserting that healthcare/insurance system isn't broken
-people that have had their, or a family member's, doctor's orders declined by the insurance company, or an approved procedure that the insurance company declined after the fact, asserting that healthcare/insurance system is broken
-heated exchange over socialized healthcare (soon to come)
Y'all here about the dude in Oregon on a bicycle that got run over by an ambulance and the ambulance scooped him up and took him to the hospital, and then the ambulance company billed him almost $1900 for the ambulance ride?
Spoiler
Besides all that I have a question for you I don't dare to ask b/c derail, but you know the question I'm sure! 😃
I definitely don't know if he's still alive and that this is a psy-op. Some of it is strange for sure like he how had threats, had a security team, and they weren't there. But I'm still comfortable taking it at face-value..for now.
A common complaint I'm reading is people being prescribed medicine by their doctors then going to fill their prescription and finding out the insurance company has denied the prescription and also how depressing of a job being a pharmacy technician is when you have to deny prescriptions on the daily.
Maybe the pharmaceutical companies are pushing their drugs on the doctors and the insurance companies aren't going to rubber stamp everything and be pharma's cash cow? I don't know but there sure is
I'm not defending the U.S. healthcare system. I've said before that if we had started down the path of socialized medicine, the country might well be in a better place than we are today with our weird public/private hybrid.
I am confused, however, by people who think that you you can get whatever sort of healthcare you want, regardless of cost or perceived efficacy, if you live in a country with socialized medicine. That isn't my understanding of how it works in other countries.
To take an extreme example, if you are 98 years old, and there is a $50K medical treatment that will extend your life by exactly 48 hours, I don't think that treatment is likely to be covered, regardless of whether you live in the United States or Norway.
Profits are redic low, 6% profit margin for unitedhealthcare lol, that's lower than almost any other sector
No it's not, and you're making things up again. When I worked in the automobile industry profit margins were way lower. Marketing companies operate on a much slimmer profit margin too.
When there are 300M people who will need medical treatment at some point 6% is huge.
UnitedHealth Group is one of the largest corporations in the country, with a market capitalization of more than $560bn. Its size puts it on par with major US financial institutions and tech companies, rather than just its peers in the health space. Cry me a ****ing river with your 6%.
They use algorithms to decide how much the lives of you and your loved ones are worth, and pay their C-suites tens of millions of dollars every year to do it. Insurance charged my mom, who is on a fixed income, 1000 dollars for an ambulance transfer when she was having a pulmonary embolism bc “she could have driven herself.” I can’t understand how anyone doesn’t hate them.
This is true, but I think the greater issue is we have a system that is deliberately designed to cost 2x as much as any other system. It is also designed to kill and bankrupt people who don't pay the exorbitant fees. So it's a big extortion racket.
Of course, yeah, they can make extra money by killing or torturing even some people who do pay.
Nobody, outside of the ignorant and people who are very far into particular political doctrines actually believes it is a good system. No other country uses it, for good reason.
The only reason our system exists is political corruption, engineered by people like the victim.
It is also true that these massive rent seeking corps/extortion rackets create tons of jobs, which is a big reason we pay 2x for hc. We are paying for their offices, lawyers, advertising and everyone from the receptionist to the ceo. But this is about the dumbest and most destructive "make work" program imaginable. It's like we took the worst elements of socialism and capitalism and combined them in the worst possible sector.
If these people for whatever reason are entitled to have jobs producing nothing we can just pay them all to make bad art or something and have decent hc.
But these huge companies will pay whatever it takes to stay in business and politicians from both sides are happy to take the money, so change by regular political means is almost impossible.
This is true across many issues, more so than in the past, as one can now potentially become a billionaire as a politician without breaking any laws and many billions are spent legally influencing the political process and there are only 2 parties.
We are seeing a backlash to this from both left and right. Said before, but it reminds me a lot of the reformation. So far we have seen efforts to reform from within the church, and as then, they have failed.
I feel like some of the analyses in the thread are not properly factoring in that CEOs of US healthcare companies are prolific killers of people in that they cause preventable deaths by denying claims and insurance for possible care. They exploit people at the most vulnerable periods of their lives, and even their deaths.
For some reason we don’t call those deaths “murder”.
Color me surprised that you are openly in favor of violence against groups of people you don't like. I was personally shocked at the reactions to this murder on Reddit, but I'm flabbergasted that a supposedly older and more mature user base on this site is also celebrating a vigilante killing an innocent person because he has an unpopular job. When did this become a hate site???
We can only hope that the cheering on of an apparent act of terrorism is not going to lead to copycats, such as Columbine leading to many school shootings. If not, I can assure you that almost nobody is safe. You think this guy is a bad guy? There are millions of people that are doing unpopular jobs, at least as perceived by some people. If this is justified, then why not start gunning for rank and file insurance workers, lawyers, doctors, religious leaders, politicians, anybody that works in the oil industry, jewelers, bankers, farmers, butchers, and the list goes on and on. There are people on this site that make money from gambling that are arguably just parasites that add nothing of value to society, how about if people would just cheer on as you are murdered in public after you win a few too many hands?
This is getting out of control. I seriously hope that the whole "everybody I don't like deserves to die" sentiment that is currently popular dies down, as I personally don't look forward to living in some Hobbesian nightmare where I may be murdered at any moment and have people dance on my corpse because of what I do for a living.
Where have I said that I’m in favor of violence, or even this particular crime? I think you may have leapt to a conclusion that isn’t there, but that’s so you, friend 😀
