OK, so we've established that cheering for the guy's murder is ghoulish and immoral. Great. Congrats for being on the right side of that one.
But spending your life becoming enormously, unreasonably rich trying to find ways to deny fair coverage *does* actually involve people dying so that he can make some more money. That's a totally rea…
OK, so we've established that cheering for the guy's murder is ghoulish and immoral. Great. Congrats for being on the right side of that one.
But spending your life becoming enormously, unreasonably rich trying to find ways to deny fair coverage *does* actually involve people dying so that he can make some more money. That's a totally reasonable observation to be making. I think it does show greater moral clarity than "he never ordered anyone's death so he's not like a drug kingpin". What about Purdue Pharma? Would you say they "killed anyone"? I think they did.
He's not Hitler, but I don't think he's as far from that drug kingpin, morally speaking, as you claim. He made his choices, and the consequence is that a good number of people cheered his death. He took the money, so there it is.
I agree that just because he didn’t murder anyone by beating them with a baseball bat doesn’t mean he/his business didn’t actively contribute to deaths. As a cancer patient myself who recently had my CT scans denied for an unknown reason, I have felt the desire to punch the face of the person at Aetna who denied them. They denied them twice, then overturned the decision a month after appealing with the reason “the member has metastatic melanoma, which has spread to abcdefg locations. The member is approved for CT scans to determine status” like no fucking shit Sherlock, I’ve been getting them for 4 years every 3 months. I was diagnosed in 2020 and been under Aetna the whole time during treatment. This three month delay that I ended up having could have been a death sentence for someone else.
The CEO isn’t reviewing my paperwork, but he supports the way they work that encourages denial or any reason they can come up with. BRB gonna go punch something.
Sorry to hear about your health problems. This one guy isn't responsible for all the bad incentives that lead to this system. But he is literally and personally responsible (as CEO) for devising policies to deny as much coverage as possible. If it wasn't him it would be another guy, but then if it's not one drug kingpin it's another. It's just not a nice thing to be doing.
Yep. And it goes even deeper. United has been a self-dealing crime syndicate from the start. Check out this report from More Perfect Union published a year ago: https://youtu.be/frr4wuvAB6U?si=QWrWaaaOPYP-uWPs
but Noah, this is part of a SYSTEM! You don't understand, when something is part of a SYSTEM, then it totally erases the existence of any individual bad actors. It's cancelled out! There's nothing to criticize here because the SYSTEM is working as intended and that's always a good thing!
Do you feel the same way about the CEOs of automobile manufacturing companies? Their products are directly responsible for many more deaths than those that can be circuitously attributed to the denial of insurance coverage. And the auto worker unions are like the assembly line of genocide, should they get what's coming to them too? Liquor company CEOs? Casino owners?
No, I think selling cars is in principle different. We know the risks, we buy them anyway so that we can get around. If there are specific cases, like in "fight club":
then maybe that's similar, but in general no I think there's a clear difference.
Obviously selling health insurance isn't inherently immoral. That's great. What's immoral is screwing people out of coverage to amass vast sums of money, so that they end up dead despite buying your insurance in good faith.
It's not that simple of course, but also maybe it sort of is.
Insurers (or Medicare) are incentivized to deny claims to keep costs down. Doctors are incentivized to massively over-bill and recommend unnecessary treatment to keep their schedule full of profitable procedures. The AMA is incentivized to act as a guild and limit access to the profession to keep their salaries high. Lawyers are incentivized to sue the shit out of any medical mistake, driving up malpractice insurance costs.
There are plenty of bad incentives to go around, but all of these parties are essential to delivering care to the patient.
Why is the insurer *uniquely* evil for following their incentives?
As for “amass a vast sum of wealth” - UHC paid this guy $10 million a year. They paid healthcare providers $240 BILLION a year. The guy was rich as hell compared to me, but his wealth costs the averaged insured person about 20 cents a year (UHC insures 52 million people).
OK, so we've established that cheering for the guy's murder is ghoulish and immoral. Great. Congrats for being on the right side of that one.
But spending your life becoming enormously, unreasonably rich trying to find ways to deny fair coverage *does* actually involve people dying so that he can make some more money. That's a totally reasonable observation to be making. I think it does show greater moral clarity than "he never ordered anyone's death so he's not like a drug kingpin". What about Purdue Pharma? Would you say they "killed anyone"? I think they did.
He's not Hitler, but I don't think he's as far from that drug kingpin, morally speaking, as you claim. He made his choices, and the consequence is that a good number of people cheered his death. He took the money, so there it is.
I agree that just because he didn’t murder anyone by beating them with a baseball bat doesn’t mean he/his business didn’t actively contribute to deaths. As a cancer patient myself who recently had my CT scans denied for an unknown reason, I have felt the desire to punch the face of the person at Aetna who denied them. They denied them twice, then overturned the decision a month after appealing with the reason “the member has metastatic melanoma, which has spread to abcdefg locations. The member is approved for CT scans to determine status” like no fucking shit Sherlock, I’ve been getting them for 4 years every 3 months. I was diagnosed in 2020 and been under Aetna the whole time during treatment. This three month delay that I ended up having could have been a death sentence for someone else.
The CEO isn’t reviewing my paperwork, but he supports the way they work that encourages denial or any reason they can come up with. BRB gonna go punch something.
Sorry to hear about your health problems. This one guy isn't responsible for all the bad incentives that lead to this system. But he is literally and personally responsible (as CEO) for devising policies to deny as much coverage as possible. If it wasn't him it would be another guy, but then if it's not one drug kingpin it's another. It's just not a nice thing to be doing.
Yep. And it goes even deeper. United has been a self-dealing crime syndicate from the start. Check out this report from More Perfect Union published a year ago: https://youtu.be/frr4wuvAB6U?si=QWrWaaaOPYP-uWPs
but Noah, this is part of a SYSTEM! You don't understand, when something is part of a SYSTEM, then it totally erases the existence of any individual bad actors. It's cancelled out! There's nothing to criticize here because the SYSTEM is working as intended and that's always a good thing!
lol. Of course. Silly me.
Do you feel the same way about the CEOs of automobile manufacturing companies? Their products are directly responsible for many more deaths than those that can be circuitously attributed to the denial of insurance coverage. And the auto worker unions are like the assembly line of genocide, should they get what's coming to them too? Liquor company CEOs? Casino owners?
No, I think selling cars is in principle different. We know the risks, we buy them anyway so that we can get around. If there are specific cases, like in "fight club":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiB8GVMNJkE
then maybe that's similar, but in general no I think there's a clear difference.
Obviously selling health insurance isn't inherently immoral. That's great. What's immoral is screwing people out of coverage to amass vast sums of money, so that they end up dead despite buying your insurance in good faith.
It's not that simple of course, but also maybe it sort of is.
Insurers (or Medicare) are incentivized to deny claims to keep costs down. Doctors are incentivized to massively over-bill and recommend unnecessary treatment to keep their schedule full of profitable procedures. The AMA is incentivized to act as a guild and limit access to the profession to keep their salaries high. Lawyers are incentivized to sue the shit out of any medical mistake, driving up malpractice insurance costs.
There are plenty of bad incentives to go around, but all of these parties are essential to delivering care to the patient.
Why is the insurer *uniquely* evil for following their incentives?
As for “amass a vast sum of wealth” - UHC paid this guy $10 million a year. They paid healthcare providers $240 BILLION a year. The guy was rich as hell compared to me, but his wealth costs the averaged insured person about 20 cents a year (UHC insures 52 million people).