It's very interesting to me that everyone is blaming the CEO and not the system. The tethering of health care coverage to employment is the real issue. If decoupled, people could actually shop around and not purchase from companies with high denial rates.
It's baffling to me that people are calling this a righteous cleanse when it was purely the murder of an innocent man with a family.
Being part of the system does not absolve one of consequences of one's actions. Auschwitz management was part of the system. UHC wasn't an average participant it was really pushing the boundaries of abusive practises to the extreme. Go to any place where medical professionals hang out online and read their accounts of UHC shenanigans.
Innocent? No, he was a bad person with blood on his hands, made rich by the pain and suffering of the sick. Those people have families, too.
I think all of these things can be true. It is possible for one person to be ambivalent about the killing of a bad man, acknowledge that he had a family and that is unfortunate, and accept that the system is flawed and that systematic change is required to materially improve things.
> Because I don't want to live in a society where we think that violence is an acceptable solution to injustice.
Personally, I'm with you. I absolutely don't want justice delivered via a mob or a vigilante without due process or the other protections that a fair justice system is supposed to provide us with.
This is why it's so important that congress, police, prosecutors, judges, and even juries do their jobs. If the people have no legal, accessible, and effective means to get justice they might resort to illegal means to get it. The longer people are denied justice, the more likely it is they'll take it into their own hands.
There are peaceful means to affect policy. But not only you have to vote for the right people, you also have to let candidates know what they have to promise in order to gain the votes.
This election cycle nobody quite focused on healthcare; more abstract culture wars were in focus instead.
You can't blame that on congress and on judges etc. The whole society is responsible. The way we talk (or not talk) to our relatives and neighbors has profound effects on the society you'll live in
Even that violence is better when minimized right?
You don't want police to apply excessive force. You won't want innocent bystanders to be shot by the police. You don't want the police to hurt people just because they think they may be guilty, etc. Those things do happen and when they happen people get upset and rightfully so.
Violence is only necessary when people refuse to abide by the rules. If nobody was violent, cops wouldn't need to be. If people adhered to the system and went to jail whem convicted, there would be no problems. Violence begets violence. It is possible to craft a society where we leave it in our past.
Ah, right, it’s never the CEOs blame for bad things, that’s why they get they are paid so little. Or was it the other way around, they are paid a lot because of their responsibility?
Anyway, it’s the State’s and regulations fault, as usual.
This is the legislation’s fault though. As long as insurance payments have to balance with insurance payouts, insurance companies need to strictly control payouts. An insurance company with no checks on treatments will have premiums significantly higher than the ones that do and ultimately won’t get picked.
People are lazy, and blaming an individual is easy, while understanding complex systems is hard.
Understanding that the role of a CEO is essentially a replaceable cog in a vast and complex machine is beyond the capabilities of most people’s good-bad moral system, and so it’s easier to scapegoat one guy instead of looking at the deeper structure.
The concept of a "chief" is deeply rooted in human psychology and thus also in the circuitry behind moral intuition.
We spawned an emergent disembodied super-human organism called "society" that lives through the action of individual humans like an ant colony lives through the actions of individual ants.
But yet we have the strong need to put a human face on it. We need to attribute agency to something that has behaviour.
In order to explain phenomena like thunder, earthquakes etc, humans throughout history have often felt it much easier to imagine some "person in the sky" being the cause of it.
The same mechanism powers many conspiracy theories. "Global financial system that's hard to understand? Nah, it's just the Rothschilds".
Now, in some cases like CEOs of companies that do harm, it's harder to dismiss the individual responsibility, because there is a freedom of choice that the individual could do.
It's easier thus to pin the blame on that single cog rather than blaming the whole society for not voting the right people who would fix the problem at the root.
But ultimately, if that one cog would refuse to do harm then another person would take their place until the rules of the game would be patched to prevent that.
Punishing culpable people is effective only inasmuch it deters from the unwanted behaviour.
Letting people administer "justice" via violence is not conducive to a just and peaceful society. The side effects of letting that happen will backfire and will undo any "justice" improvements you may seek to achieve.
I think we all can personally loathe big bad CEOs and still think that murdering them is the wrong thing you do no matter what your moral theory is.
I agree fully. One additional comment I have is that, while the CEO chooses to work in that role, the general public is not always privy as to what their influences are.
It's possible this CEO was fighting to reduce claim denial rates but was squeezed or cutoff from his legal team in every attempt. It's also possible he pushed to deny as often as possible. But until we have evidence, it seems a bit wild to attribute "willingness to work in an influential role at a company massively disliked" with complicity in crimes against humanity. And as you point out, it is never acceptable to use violence offensively against such a person, even if he was foaming at the mouth to hit the deny button daily.
HN is quite a glass house. Moralizing then back to selling peoples data and ensuring warehouse workers suffer and get our kids get addicted to doomscrolling, while selling people more shit they don't need. Then use that money to push up house prices.
I'm sure there are people here who have caused a lot of harm to others while working at amazon or google or facebook. Probably even a few who should be behind bars. It's possible that some of them were happy to hear that the CEO was killed. I doubt it's most of us though.
There's a lot of space between "knowingly kills people for profit" and "collects user data from an app/works on a manipulative algorithm" which could make it easy for some people to pretend that they aren't doing "real" harm or to believe that the CEO was a "real problem" while they personally aren't.
I hope that the more people are held accountable for what they do (regardless of how that happens) it'll force others to do some self-reflection even if only out of a sense of self-preservation, but I'd be careful about generalizing too much. The people posting here are a pretty diverse lot, and you can find hypocrisy in any sufficiently large group. I wouldn't call HN a "glass house" but it's got a few big windows.
As always, there is a cost benefit analysis one must perform when doing anything, including administering healthcare treatment. Is it worth $40M in costs to save a 94 year old from death today when the expected payoff is 2 more months of life?
I'm all for changing the system, but this action likely won't do that.
Literally every single one of us is guilty, then. You could personally do something today that would save a life, instead of what you'll actually do. That doesn't make you guilty of anything, though.
It's baffling to me that people are calling this a righteous cleanse when it was purely the murder of an innocent man with a family.