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Hit men aren't what you think

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Re: Hit men aren't what you think

#191

Post by ruined »

kube-system wrote: post #144
kelseyfrog wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except we're not talking about the choice of being a customer or not. We're talking about the design choices of the system.

The system wasn't designed. There were no design choices. The entire thing is a legacy result of expectations and costs that all started snowballing from the moment FDR decided wage caps were a good way to stop inflation. We're not in the situation we're in because anyone thought it was a good idea. We got here incrementally over ~80 years.

of course the system was designed. of course there were design choices. it's a system implemented and executed by human beings at every step, constantly. every functional atom of this implementation was a conscious choice by someone. if nothing else, a choice is constantly being made to persist with the present system.

yes the design is a result of negotiation between countless people and groups of people, who all have varying power and responsibility and subjective consequence. yes all of these choices were made in context, but they were never the only choices that could have been made in that context.

this negotiation, and these innumerable choices, these designs have been a major if not primary concern of the past twenty years of american politics, economy, and millions of individual lives.

yes we have arrived at the implementation we see today, which seems ill-conceived, over-complicated, and pointlessly cruel. but at every moment that has passed and is passing now, different choices can be made, and a different system of different design can be implemented.

we are still in this system because there is infrastructure that prevents change to a more agreeable system. negotiation tactics may have just changed.

Re: Hit men aren't what you think

#192

Post by FireBeyond »

big-green-man wrote: post #4

This is an interview with someone presented as some type of expert that obviously is not an expert. 1) it is not hard to get a silencer. You can make one in under an hour with cheap parts from a hardware store and a drill. 2) the CEO was at a conference. It's not surprising that this person "knew he would be there", it's interesting that this interviewee stresses this point like it is some big one to be made. The CEO…

> 1) it is not hard to get a silencer. You can make one in under an hour with cheap parts from a hardware store and a drill.

You could, may even still can, buy them on Amazon.

For a while there was a big market on Amazon for "lawnmower mufflers" that were pretty blatant nudge nudge wink wink:

"This muffler fits lawnmowers with a 9mm exhaust. I was able to use my lawnmower all morning long and my neighbor could barely hear a thing!"

Re: Hit men aren't what you think

#193

Post by grecy »

slowmovintarget wrote: post #86
itsanaccount wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theres not a flaw in the logic just because you dislike its conclusion.

[flagged]

When Rosa Parks sat on the bus it was a crime.

Sometimes breaking the law is the right thing to do, and results in great improvement.

Re: Hit men aren't what you think

#194

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

avalys wrote: post #41
itsanaccount wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know why I don't work for a trapping and pest control company? Because structurally they kill animals. They go around with tools of destruction and end the lives of animals. Its the function of their existence. Do you know why I don't work for a _for profit_ health insurance company, who's stated goals are explicitly to make profit by slicing out some amount of premiums that are not spent to provide healthcare in…

By this same logic, you are responsible for the death of every person who could have been saved by you donating all of your income beyond basic living expenses (your personal "profit", if you will) to pay for their medical care. You monster! How many people could you have saved! Instead you spend your money on vacations, television, computer games, music, movies, coffee, whatever. Oh, what's that you say? _You_ (who,…

> By this same logic, you are responsible for the death of every person who could have been saved by you donating all of your income beyond basic living expenses (your personal "profit", if you will) to pay for their medical care.

To a degree yes, absolutely. If moral actions “improve the valence of conscious experience” in some utilitarian sense, most people take a lot of immoral actions every day. When you think of morality as more of a direction rather than an absolute “you either are or are not a sinner,” you can view the average person, and yourself, as deeply immoral, yet still get value from the understanding because you know the correct direction to move in if you want to improve yourself or society.

With this definition, it’s easy to compare the morality of two people. To what degree did each exercise agency in order to either neglect a responsibility to do good, or to actively do harm? The person who deliberately did more harm could be said to be worse in their moral character.

Now imagine a person chooses to become the head of a health insurance company in order to make large amounts of money, while aware of the fact that their industry produces profit by minimizing the coverage they pay out and that this will inevitably deny some people who ought to get coverage coverage; and, furthermore, that this wrongly denied proportion is much higher than it needs to be in order for their company to exist and pay its costs.

Now imagine that, in response, this person actively uses their agency to worsen their company’s contribution to this situation for the gain of themselves and other relatively wealthy higher-ups at their company instead of taking any action within their means to better the situation. We can reason that this person is, when you sum up the raw quantity of harm they’ve deliberately caused, morally worse than the average person, who will likely have done vastly less deliberate harm over their life. Is an extrajudicial murder the solution? Probably not, in that it won’t directly produce the needed changes to move society in a marginally more moral direction. That being said, I sure won’t be shedding any tears, and I’ll shed much less than I would for an absolutely morally mediocre Joe Schmoe.

Re: Hit men aren't what you think

#195

Post by seanhunter »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #83
avalys wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

United Healthcare is a publicly-traded company which makes a 6% profit margin and pays a dividend, which means that those profits ultimately benefit people's retirement accounts, pensions and middle-class investments. The person who was killed made $10M last year, while UHC provided care to 52 million patients. So, the CEO was paid approximately $0.20 per patient treated last year. What part of all this do you believ…

The purpose of a system is what it does. It's functionally isomorphic to a black box where I make a deposit, every time it denies someone medical treatment I get back monetary reward and I can withdraw my deposit at any time. If we ask ourselves, "Should this black box exist?" I cannot reasonably expect people to say, "Yes." Yet, here we are.

I never thought I would be defending health insurance providers yet here we are.

Do you honestly, after reflection, think this comment is fair?

They don’t only deny healthcare to people - if that was true no-one would pay them money because having healthcare would be no different to not having healthcare. Therefore they are not functionally isomorphic to a black box that collects money when it denies medical treatment.

If you want to make a mental model and then ask questions of the model you should have the confidence to make your model robust enough to approximate the “other side” of whatever argument exists on the topic.

Re: Hit men aren't what you think

#196

Post by jiggawatts »

nickff wrote: post #102
cogman10 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are to apply it the way health insurance works, the skipper is asking the drowning victims to give them all their money and then is deciding on who they rescue, mostly leaving the people far away to drown because that will have added fuel costs and they'd rather save that to go fishing on tuesday.

This analogy is already a stretch (I didn’t come up with it, was just responding to someone else), and you’re torturing it beyond reason.

Brian Thompson's net worth was $43M.

He definitely has a yacht or two.

Re: Hit men aren't what you think

#197

Post by seanhunter »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #133
kube-system wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most countries do have private health insurance, even if they also have more robust public options.

But we're talking about our inability to avoid the box. The existence of public options in other countries has no bearing on that.

Your argument would be stronger if your black box mental model wasn’t so obviously exaggerated.

I live in the UK where we have universal healthcare that is free at the point of need. We also have private healthcare. In most countries in Europe both private and public healthcare exist side by side. Per capita spending on healthcare (across the private and public provision) in the UK is a tiny fraction of what it is in the US and outcomes in terms of quality adjusted life years and measured in individual life expectancy and patient outcomes for given conditions were significantly better than the US last time I checked (which is admittedly a while ago).

The US healthcare system is definitely expensive and delivers a poor outcome, but you’re not convincing when you try to make a pastiche of the system that paints it as purely bad and say that health insurance simply should not exist for pure moral reasons.

Re: Hit men aren't what you think

#198

Post by seanhunter »

tetnis wrote: post #149
kelseyfrog wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The purpose of a system is what it does. It's functionally isomorphic to a black box where I make a deposit, every time it denies someone medical treatment I get back monetary reward and I can withdraw my deposit at any time. If we ask ourselves, "Should this black box exist?" I cannot reasonably expect people to say, "Yes." Yet, here we are.

off topic but what is the difference between functionally isomorphic and isomorphic?

Isomorphic in normal use means corresponding in form[1], so functionally isomorphic means “functions the same as” whereas there are other types of isomorphisms, so for example minerals form groups which are considered isomorphic because their crystal structure is somewhat different but equivalent. They’re not functionally equivalent they are structurally similar.

[1] In mathematics the meaning is somewhat stronger. In maths, two things are isomorphic if they cannot be distinguished in terms of structure in a particular context.

Re: Hit men aren't what you think

#199

Post by refulgentis »

itsanaccount wrote: post #53
nickff wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your definition of responsibility is so broad, wouldn't every Head of Government for every country be deserving of assassination? Even more broadly, every police chief in every large city, along with all military officers, most mayors, governors, and premiers would also be 'natural targets'. This seems a bit drastic to me, is it your view?

I think in philosophy there's something to be said for the difference between action and lack of action when it comes to culpability. Is a surgeon responsible for not being good enough to save a persons life? No, I don't think so. Is a surgeon responsible for not being sober for a planned surgery? In our society, yes. I think a lot of responsibility is determined by mens rea, and when you run a health insurance compa…

if you're saying they actively decide denial rates at management level to hit profit targets, I don't buy it.

He has much closer culpability to the CEO of the company that sells me cigarettes than the guy who murdered my grandma. The world is a fallen place.

I thought the example up thread re: not being an animal trapper was a Jonathan Swift-esque send up of the whole idea though, so I might be missing a screw or two.

Re: Hit men aren't what you think

#200

Post by pfannkuchen »

avalys wrote: post #60
aijdosaijd wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal income, that which sustains someones family, is vastly different then the billions made by United off the backs of those suffering. What, are you some healthcare exec or something? This is not the own you think it is.

United Healthcare is a publicly-traded company which makes a 6% profit margin and pays a dividend, which means that those profits ultimately benefit people's retirement accounts, pensions and middle-class investments. The person who was killed made $10M last year, while UHC provided care to 52 million patients. So, the CEO was paid approximately $0.20 per patient treated last year. What part of all this do you believ…

On a slight tangent I’m a bit confused by Reddit type internet reaction acting like this guy is an evil mastermind of the insurance industry while he was apparently making $10M per year.

Now that’s definitely a lot of money, but as far as industry masterminds go it’s not indicative of being top tier at all. Second or maybe third tier really.

Is it the sort of situation where the company has 10 people all labeled “CEO” of different functions? Or was the $10M salary alone?

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