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UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson fatally shot in Manhattan

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Re: UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson fatally shot in Manhattan

#511

Post by marky1991 »

wnoise wrote: post #485
marky1991 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Murder is wrong and should never be celebrated. Even if you thought someone were evil, murdering a person is inherently evil. What line of thinking led you to make this comment? Do you disagree with any of my positions? If yes, which and why?

This is true, but only by definition of murder as a wrongful killing. There are plenty of killings that aren't murder.

In a country of law, the law determines what a wrongful killing is, not a mob and not a line gunman.

This is a wrongful killing, guaranteed.

Re: UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson fatally shot in Manhattan

#512

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #503
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think perks get better when healthcare benefits get worse? Usually they both get worse at the same time due to the same cost-cutting incentives. We'd need some data showing that savings from choosing terrible healthcare plans get redirected towards improving perks in an equal-or-more-valuable way (including for remote folks) in order to justify the former with the latter. Besides that, most companies can a…

I never said there must be a direct genuine linkage? It could of course be very delayed or simply be used primarily as pretexts for corporate infighting with a very low probability of such a linkage. But nonetheless even in the worst case scenario, a very low probability for the median employee is still better than zero probability.

Without evidence that the savings were being directed towards a cause preferable to employees, I would conclude that there was insufficient convincing justification for choosing a bad healthcare plan other than that it provided extra incentives to the chooser, like money or favor.

'We could theoretically spend greater than 0% of the savings on something that could be better or worse sometime in the future' isn't good enough on its own, and it's not convincing enough that it will ever happen, and if it does, it doesn't leave me convinced that the money will be spent on something better for me.

> even in the worst case scenario, a very low probability for the median employee is still better than zero probability.

The criteria to use here is, "do employees feel they're better off with the new, terrible healthcare plan, given any free sodas etc they might have received in exchange". If the employees wouldn't have voluntarily made the same choice for themselves, then it was a bad healthcare choice for employees.

Re: UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson fatally shot in Manhattan

#513

Post by Molitor5901 »

Molitor5901 wrote: post #331
thewinnie wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did he reload every shot? Is it self made pistol? My best guess that insurance haven't paid his enough to buy glock17

Perhaps subsonic rounds that did not have enough charge to drive the slide. It looks like there may be a suppression device on the end. My first thought was home made.

Just an interesting note. Some in the media have suggested the weapon used is a B&T Station Six, a bolt action pistol. I had no idea such a thing existed. Reviewing the footage again I don't know if it is that model. The hand movement appears more chambering that cycling a bolt.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/police-piece-unitedhealthcare-ceo-...

Re: UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson fatally shot in Manhattan

#514

Post by snakeyjake »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #306
phil21 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Go ahead and get rid of MCOs, and at best you will reduce costs by 5%. That’s an objective fact. That doesn't make any sense. Profit margin is meaningless if you are spending billions on a bunch of useless administrative staff pushing paperwork for no reason. Obviously some of that is necessary, but certainly not nearly all of it. I don't care about a company making 5% on top of a $150k/yr admin salary. I care abou…

> Margin is a meaningless number if you can just pump your expenses to increase the total dollar amount. That doesn’t make any sense. If one MCO were to pump their expenses, there are 4 to 6 others waiting to take their customers with lower premiums. Currently, medical loss ratios are around 85% to 90%, which means MCO administrative costs are 8% or maybe 10%, at most. However, getting rid of the MCO doesn’t mean tho…

>there are 4 to 6 others waiting to take their customers with lower premiums

Why do people believe this?

Healthcare isn't widgets and factories in an ECON-101 class.

The chances of anything short of an extremely large and well-funded consortium of investment bankers and private equity firms starting a new MCO is exactly and precisely 0.0%.

And those groups have the same incentives to maximize the payouts to all parties involved that the incumbents do.

Of course, they would never do that because increased competition would threaten their already-extensive investments in the sector.

The problem isn't regulation, or regulatory capture, or any other buzzword a podcast full of morons bandies about.

The problem is that you need at least $10 billion just to open the doors.

Re: UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson fatally shot in Manhattan

#515

Post by toomuchtodo »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #46
jeffbee wrote: post #42

Always seemed pretty strange to me that you can build and oversee an organization widely perceived (whether fairly or not) as evil, host what those evil-perceivers will view as Bad Rich Guy Conference in public, in a country where anyone can get as many guns as they want, and there isn't more violence like this. Seems like an unstable operating point for a society.

This is the comment that has been in my head since the news broke, and I feel like we are only at the beginning, like the pause before the first drop of a rollercoaster with the forward looking macro (political and economic tension, broadly speaking). Laws and rules only matter so long as we're all willing to believe they do.

Matt Stoller does a far better job explaining than my comment did.

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/an-assassin-showed-just-h...

Re: UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson fatally shot in Manhattan

#516

Post by ModernMech »

Teever wrote: post #367
LightHugger wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who are so sick often can't do very much, it's truly evil to scam people in that position. Maybe relatives though.

But enough people are given a terminal diagnosis from relatively minor symptoms that will lead to their death in 6 months. I think it's a really good open question as to why more unhinged Americans do school shootings than healthcare insurance executive shootings. I'd love to read a sociology paper on it.

There's enough social pressure telling us the system works and is fair and just, and that violence is wrong and doesn't change anything.

When you have an event like this, with the overwhelmingly positive reception by regular people, and within 24 hours BCBS rolls back a plan that has been years in the making to limit anesthesia during surgery, it shows two things:

1) murdering people who themselves murder people is not really socially unacceptable

2) direct action works in ways that the system does not

Maybe that changes the status quo a little, who knows?

Re: UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson fatally shot in Manhattan

#517

Post by ModernMech »

kerkeslager wrote: post #330
s1artibartfast wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> You keep saying killed, but there is a difference between letting people die and killing them. There's also a difference between letting people die for whom you have no responsibility, and actively taking on the responsibility to prevent deaths in exchange for profit, and then letting the people whose lives you're responsible for die. If you don't want to be held responsible when you let people die, don't take on t…

> If this isn't "murder" or "killing" in your eyes, then maybe we just need a new word for the callous abdication of responsibilities that you signed up to provide for profit, when doing so results in the deaths of thousands.

We already have a word for that, it's called "capitalism".

Re: UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson fatally shot in Manhattan

#518

Post by ModernMech »

klipklop wrote: post #413
nameless912 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how to write this comment in a way that won't land me in a CIA black site so I'll just start with a disclaimer that this post in no way celebrates or condones any violence, but I wouldn't be surprised if political assassination attempts go up 10-fold in the next 10 years. We already saw two different assassination attempts against Trump during the lead up to the election. You can read my older comments t…

I know you are half-joking, but it shows how worrying things are related to public discourse where you need such a disclaimer at the start of your argument. The scenario you describe is rather frightening. Let's hope the "CEO class" (for lack of a better term) and the general public will allow reason and ethics to win out. One thing that is for certain, there should be better legal limits to what companies can get aw…

> Let's hope the "CEO class" (for lack of a better term)

The term you are looking for is "oligarchs"

Re: UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson fatally shot in Manhattan

#519

Post by lazystar »

sleight42 wrote: post #431
ryandrake wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. With as many guns and victims of corporate greed that we have, I'm actually pretty shocked that we don't see this happening as routinely as, say, school shootings. I wonder if we'd see slightly more ethical behavior from corporations if their C-level staff and board members had to routinely practice lock-down drills because they were getting offed once a week.

See "cyberpunk", Gibson et al. The rich will isolate themselves further behind even more surveillance technology, more physical barriers, and, because that is never enough, inordinate amounts of paid thugs.

and what health insurance will they provide to those paid thugs and the thugs' extended families, hmm?

Re: UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson fatally shot in Manhattan

#520

Post by lotsofpulp »

snakeyjake wrote: post #514
lotsofpulp wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Margin is a meaningless number if you can just pump your expenses to increase the total dollar amount. That doesn’t make any sense. If one MCO were to pump their expenses, there are 4 to 6 others waiting to take their customers with lower premiums. Currently, medical loss ratios are around 85% to 90%, which means MCO administrative costs are 8% or maybe 10%, at most. However, getting rid of the MCO doesn’t mean tho…

>there are 4 to 6 others waiting to take their customers with lower premiums Why do people believe this? Healthcare isn't widgets and factories in an ECON-101 class. The chances of anything short of an extremely large and well-funded consortium of investment bankers and private equity firms starting a new MCO is exactly and precisely 0.0%. And those groups have the same incentives to maximize the payouts to all parti…

> Why do people believe this?

Because there are.

UNH/Elevance/CVS/Cigna/Humana/Centene/Molina are just the biggest publicly listed ones. They might not all offer plans in all states on the exchange, but there’s a decent amount of competition for employer subsidized plans.

The low single digit profit margin proves the competition exists such that the sellers don’t have pricing power to earn a higher profit margin.

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