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Torrent of Hate for Health Insurance Industry Follows CEO's Killing

nytimes.com

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Re: Torrent of Hate for Health Insurance Industry Follows CEO's Killing

#101

Post by cs702 »

tptacek wrote: post #89
cs702 wrote: post #71

Health "insurance" companies in the US are not actually, primarily insurers. For the most part, they are not in the business of insuring rare events. Maybe they were primarily in the insurance business at some point in the past, but today they are mainly in the business of entrenching themselves in the middle of all interactions between patients, doctors, and hospitals, and extracting rents from all of them. Health "…

Literally the same thing is true of health care providers, which is why we have artificially constrained supply of physicians, sky-high delivery of procedures other countries don't routinely do, and integer multiple compensation across the board for practitioners.

Yes. I almost added a comment about that too. In my experience, all doctors, nurses, and other caregivers with whom I have interacted at hospitals have told me they feel treated like "factory workers" who must meet stringent "quality of care" KPIs, set by hospital executives far removed from actual patient care.

Re: Torrent of Hate for Health Insurance Industry Follows CEO's Killing

#102

Post by Dalewyn »

DrillShopper wrote: post #55
s1artibartfast wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dont find the "lack of sympathy" to be an issue. What I do find disappointing is the lack of concern over people being gunned down in the street, and the not so subtle glee some people are expressing. Murder should not be normalized or endorsed. It isn't healthy for a society and doesn't lead to progress.

People only care about this because of who he was If this were you or I it would be a segment on the 6 o'clock news and a cold case

I actually think the murderer would have been found and either arrested or killed for resisting arrest by now, were that the case.

That the murderer, who killed someone in literal broad daylight on the sidewalk of one of the biggest cities in the world, is still on the loose speaks volumes to me about all sorts of things.

Re: Torrent of Hate for Health Insurance Industry Follows CEO's Killing

#103

Post by tptacek »

bdangubic wrote: post #99
tptacek wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But literally every state in the country disagrees with you and so it's not going to happen.

true but that doesn’t make it right when people are running these states are paid by the same people who benefit from the current system…

The people in those states do not want it, which is why state single payer referenda fail.

Re: Torrent of Hate for Health Insurance Industry Follows CEO's Killing

#104

Post by apsec112 »

cs702 wrote: post #71

Health "insurance" companies in the US are not actually, primarily insurers. For the most part, they are not in the business of insuring rare events. Maybe they were primarily in the insurance business at some point in the past, but today they are mainly in the business of entrenching themselves in the middle of all interactions between patients, doctors, and hospitals, and extracting rents from all of them. Health "…

A lot of private "health insurance" at large companies is just:

- the company pays out-of-pocket for all employee health expenses

- they don't want to directly deal with bills from doctors and hospitals, so they contract that out to a third-party administrator (TPA), which purely handles paperwork and has no financial role at all

but this doesn't remove the tension between the employer wanting to pay less, and the patient wanting more to be paid for

(and for single-payer systems, you still have the tension between taxpayers wanting to pay less and patients wanting more care, although those groups at least overlap a lot more)

Re: Torrent of Hate for Health Insurance Industry Follows CEO's Killing

#105

Post by s1artibartfast »

vundercind wrote: post #85
s1artibartfast wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there is a lot of frustrations. Voters disagree on what they want. That does not justify people to start shooting people when they dont get their way.

The thing you don’t like is that the voters do agree they want this, though.

Want what? I dont think the majority of Americans endorse vigilante murder of law abiding citizens. That is just a vocal and bloodthirsty segment of the online population.

Re: Torrent of Hate for Health Insurance Industry Follows CEO's Killing

#106

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

tptacek wrote: post #81
CamperBob2 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The notion that the providers are the ones sucking up all the money in the healthcare industry is certainly... novel. The majority of people in this particular industry have nothing to do with actually providing health care, just as the majority of employees at a major university have never stood in front of a blackboard.

If you look, you can find pie charts that make the point I'm making directly, so no, I don't think it's novel.

The problem with our health insurance system is that it's insidious. Our doctors spend ~25% of their time filling out information that only gets filled out to try to get insurance to not deny the claims, and hospitals have entire billing departments whose only job is dealing with the billing of our stupid ass system. The problem isn't just the ~15% that the insurance companies take directly, it's that since their percentage of profit is capped, they work to raise prices of the entire health care system so that their 15% cut is bigger. Insurance companies literally negotiate pharma companies to charge a larger amount to uninsured people so they get to take a bigger cut.

Re: Torrent of Hate for Health Insurance Industry Follows CEO's Killing

#107

Post by UncleOxidant »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #66
justinclift wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Murder should not be normalized or endorsed. Sure. That includes the US health care system too. The company that person was the key decision maker for has apparently been murdering people for years legally. So, karma?

No, I disagree. We have a system of laws and courts to decide what is criminal. People should not kill law abiding citizens they disagree with because everyone has a different opinion.

> We have a system of laws and courts to decide what is criminal.

We do, but unfortunately it heavily favors the party with the most money. If you want to take a health insurance company to court it's gonna cost you a lot of money in lawyer fees and you'll face a phalanx of corporate lawyers who have a lot of experience in crushing cases brought by their customers. That's not to say that people should go out and take matters into their own hands, but there is a lot of pent-up frustration out there and we really need to start addressing some of these issues before more of this happens.

Re: Torrent of Hate for Health Insurance Industry Follows CEO's Killing

#108

Post by DrillShopper »

defen wrote: post #78
DrillShopper wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I recognize a distinction between a premeditated direct intent to kill someone, and whatever it was this guy did. If you have different values then you might not.

I do recognize a distinction as well - what this guy did was worse.

Don't get my wrong, shooting someone in broad daylight is a bad thing and I will agree that we shouldn't encourage it. In this case I don't have any sympathy for the victim. There's a difference there - I recognize that the assassin is wrong but that's orthogonal to my sympathy (or in this case, lack of) for the victim.

What the CEO did was worse. While someone who premeditates a murder clearly has knowledge of and familiarity with the person being murdered the CEO does not have that for the deaths that are a result of denying care. They feel almost clinical to him, numbers on a balance sheet to be weighed against the bottom line. It's textbook banality of evil - the deaths he was responsible for were just the cost of doing business, and what a business it is.

Re: Torrent of Hate for Health Insurance Industry Follows CEO's Killing

#109

Post by vouaobrasil »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #66
justinclift wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Murder should not be normalized or endorsed. Sure. That includes the US health care system too. The company that person was the key decision maker for has apparently been murdering people for years legally. So, karma?

No, I disagree. We have a system of laws and courts to decide what is criminal. People should not kill law abiding citizens they disagree with because everyone has a different opinion.

The problem with this argument is that it assumes that one killing implies anarchy and and discarding of the system. It does not. Chances are, most reasonable people believe there should be a chain of justice with courts, laws, and investigations.

Someone has turned to vigilante justice here not because they believe that the courts are useless, but because they believe that this is such an extreme case that courts would not have worked in this case.

What I believe people fear is not the rise of anarchy due to one killing, but a fundamental shift in attitudes of the ordinary people in response to the unreasonable rise of the power structure. This threatens not order but the very power structure itself, which implies that a lot of people who benefit from injustice will suddenly be at risk of losing those benefits (money).

Re: Torrent of Hate for Health Insurance Industry Follows CEO's Killing

#110

Post by tptacek »

cs702 wrote: post #101
tptacek wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally the same thing is true of health care providers, which is why we have artificially constrained supply of physicians, sky-high delivery of procedures other countries don't routinely do, and integer multiple compensation across the board for practitioners.

Yes. I almost added a comment about that too. In my experience, all doctors, nurses, and other caregivers with whom I have interacted at hospitals have told me they feel treated like "factory workers" who must meet stringent "quality of care" KPIs, set by hospital executives far removed from actual patient care.

So why are we putting jerseys on and taking the field against the insurers when virtually all of the actual money is going to providers? We could zero out all insurance costs, putting insurers into literal de jure indentured servitude, and get nothing more than a grocery store circular coupon discount on health costs, because insurers are not in fact where the costs are.
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