Using such a weasel phrase like "by some accounts" means that there's absolutely nothing standing behind this. If there was any concrete thing Brian Thompson did that was any kind of legal crime or moral error, you'd be able to name it.
My intent was merely to point out that it is a commonly held belief, because it seemed like you were not aware. I didn't want to champion that belief.
But since you've invited me to name the moral error, sure. Accepting a fiduciary responsibility to chase after profits in a context where that very clearly means finding ways to deny people access to healthcare is a moral error. If you can't ethically do a job you shouldn't take that job. At best you're lying to shareholders, at worst you're killing people. The only ethical path is to go find a different job.
There is absolutely no way to run an insurance scheme without denying some people coverage. No system anywhere in the world, public or private, accepts every single claim. You must deny some claims, there's no way around it. This means that according to you, there's no ethical way to run health insurance system. I disagree, I think we need insurance to exist, and given that someone needs to run insurance, I don't think that taking such a job is inherently a moral error.
It's really just for-profit health insurance systems that I think can't be made ethical. If you have to deny some claims based on resource availability, that's an uncomfortable necessity, but we can do insurance-like things without asking people to balance human life against shareholder greed.
It seems pretty obvious that opting into a position where you'll have to do that might make you unpopular with the humans.
What is "resource availability"? In a non-profit healthcare systems, how exactly the amount of available resources is determined? Is there no person involved making a decision that causes the amount of available resources to change? Think about it. Consider, for example, politicians who set the healthcare tax rate. If they set it 1% higher, there will be more resources available. Does it mean that by not doing so, they deny care to some?
I strongly encourage you to think very carefully about this. Once you do, you'll find that there are no simple answers: you'll always have limited resources, and you'll always have to deny care to some people, and in fact it will always include some people personally making the call to deny care to some people. Any system that actually exists, public or private, does this.
> In a non-profit healthcare systems, how exactly the amount of available resources is determined?
You would generally count them. Like, if you have three people in need of a ventilator and you only have two ventilators, then one person is getting denied a ventilator today.
> Any system that actually exists, public or private, does this.
That's true, and I don't have a problem with it. Tradeoffs have to happen. What I have a problem with is incentive structures that attribute greater success for the people at the top when they create outcomes that involve more death for the people at the bottom.
Plenty of systems which actually exist don't congratulate leadership for reducing quality of care.
Presumably somebody involved in deciding budgets, a politician perhaps, or somebody with a rather political role in the hospital. Whoever they are, in most cases they're balancing ventilators against test kits or against hiring more doctors or against letting people keep more of their paychecks, or all kinds of other things which might indeed be more important for the patients/citizens/etc...
There's no fundamental reason why they have to be in a position where screwing the people who receive the care would ever be considered the ideal option. But that's how it is when you have a group of shareholders who have no stake in the quality of care. Thompson opted into a conflict of interest which need not exist in order to provide insurance.
Sure, and that's not exactly comfortable (maybe "reelected" shouldn't be a thing, idk). But if the people reelecting you are also the patients then the particular conflict of interest I'm worried about is not present.
True, and we need to get our shit together about that, but it's not an apples to apples comparison. A government allocates 100% of the available healthcare funding towards healthcare outcomes. A corporation (in the US) allocates 80%. You can tolerate a sloppier slicing if you're starting with a bigger pie.
You are right, BUT: Those denials have to follow contractual terms. I know a local (Europe) real world example where a friend of a friend (insurance company area manager) literally was told "this is your sum of money on claims that you can accept in this quarter, it cannot go above that". Which either you get lucky and make the quota, or you screw people over and hope they don't sue. And since we live in a world where the company wants "a little more" each year, well.. I don't see how this ends well.
The same problem does not apply to our social services (including health insurance) as they dont have to make profits at all costs.
In most insurance fields, it would be possible to only deny false claims. Take insurance of your house. The rates could be calculated that they can pay out all real damages to the full amount. Because the maximum damage amount is limited.
That's not true for health insurance, because the total possible damage (cost of treatments) is almost arbitrarily high, so that you cannot pay everything for everyone.
I don't want to defend the US system here. But it's not a problem that any country really solved, and one could argue about advantages and disadvantages of the different systems all day long.
The line is on why you are doing the denying. Are you doing so because providing the healthcare is literally impossible, or are you doing so in order to make more money?
The moral error is by refining and endorsing a company policy that went out of it's way to cheat people out of their due insurance, killing significant amounts of people as a result and ensuring suffering for even more.
Our legal system can't really address this, not until the electoral college gets disbarred or red state voters realize rejecting socialized health care hurts more than it helps.
Until that happens. things are going to get worse and people are going to get frustrated and start acting out. It's what happens when you have such a broken system.
Talking about "we don't do that in society" is ignoring the problem at it's core. You can't expect people to just obey the rules and respect law and order when it clearly isn't working for them or people they care about.
> UnitedHealthcare in particular denied coverage for post-acute care, or services and support needed after a hospitalization. In 2019, the insurance provider’s initial denial rate for post-acute care prior authorization requests was 8.7%; by 2022, it had increased to 22.7%.
Buck stop with him; between 2021 and 2022 he did that. Being the CEO and all.
And what's the crime here? What's the moral error? Can you elucidate? I hope you're not trying to argue that insurance should not be allowed to ever deny claims?
You don't see a moral error with a health insurance company going out of their way to more than double the claims they deny, not because it's ethical or necessary but because they find ways to do so legally and the motive is profit?
Perhaps you're not well equipped to evaluate moral errors in the first place.
My understanding is that people are twisting themselves into pretzels to blame the murder victim for something, but they have extremely hard time finding anything explicit to point to, so they just throw allusions, hoping that the reader will complete the bogus argument in their head.
Here, for example, the parent poster brings up some statistic that some very specific category of insurance claim denial went up in some period. The allusion is that this is nefarious, and is a result of some specific action by the murder victim. The reader is supposed to interpret it this way. Of course, there's absolutely zero evidence for any of these claims, and when you lay it down like that, it sounds pretty stupid without anything backing this up.
It's a general category (all claim denials) and it did not go up, it more than doubled; as you are probably aware, it's far, far above the industry average. Also you're misusing the word 'allusion' which means 'to refer to something. You probably meant 'implication'.
The only potential crime that article lists is allegation that the murder victim failed to disclose some material fact to the company investors. Are you saying that Luigi Mangione killed Thomson on behalf of the stock holders, who lost money by holding UnitedHealthcare stock?
Your comment is pretty clear example of the attitude around the case. People hate CEOs of companies that must make difficult decision, and so when they are murdered, they will twist themselves into pretzels to somehow justify that they had it coming.
I suppose it depends on how you view things and what tradition you're from.
I have a very old-style view, where courts provide systems that substitute for private vengeance and thus become legitimate by being willing to hear complaints of harm, so from my point of view, if a court hear the matter, the affected person can take whatever measures they wish, which of course has important consequences in cases of legal immunity-- when my view is taken, legal immunity is something one desperately wants to avoid having, because whoever has it must contend with private vengeance.
Again, you exemplify the exact attitude I describe. Can you point to any single decision that Thompson made that cost live and causes suffering? You can’t, but you assume there must have been some, because you start with assumption that the victim here is guilty, and only then try to find reasons why.
> Again, you exemplify the exact attitude I describe.
That's fine. I think you exemplify the attitude that lead to Thompson's murder and will lead to many more similar incidents.
> Can you point to any single decision that Thompson made that cost live and causes suffering? You can’t, but you assume there must have been some,
If denials tripled under his watch, as CEO you don't think he necessarily was involved in that? He clearly approved of profiting off of literal unnecessary deaths.
> because you start with assumption that the victim here is guilty
The most basic of reasoning shows he has some moral guilt, just not legal guilt.
P1 - He was the head decision maker
P2 - Decision was made to actively increase unnecessary deaths for monetary gain
If denials tripled under his watch, as CEO you don't think he necessarily was involved in that? He clearly approved of profiting off of literal unnecessary deaths.
You have yet to show that tripling denials of a particular category of claims is even wrong in the first place. Let me repeat: any system will deny some claims, so denied claims are not prima facie evidence of anything wrong.
Decision was made to actively increase unnecessary deaths for monetary gain
Nobody had shown any evidence whatsoever that anything like that happened. Not only are denied claims not automatically wrong, but also changes in denial rate do not even need to correspond to any decision or change in policy, but may instead result from changes of external factors.
He ultimately approved of that decision
What decision? You just assume that there had been some decision, that Bryan Thompson approved, and that it was nefarious. There is as of now zero evidence for this, this is just your speculation. Murdering people based on speculations like that is profoundly evil, and so is excusing it.
> You have yet to show that tripling denials of a particular category of claims is even wrong in the first place.
Honestly this is a pretty bad faith argument. They are denying at a significantly higher rate than their competitors, their internal policy focused around denying, and enough people are getting screwed over that a murder was committed.
But yeah, sure, assume this is all business as normal and not at all morally wrong to make your argument if you must.
> Nobody had shown any evidence whatsoever that anything like that happened.
Basic. Reasoning.
If claim denials triple during a time when a particular CEO is in place, that CEO would have had to have something to do with that.
> Not only are denied claims not automatically wrong,
They are on this scale and when the denials are bad faith. I can't prove that to you unless their documents get leaked, but that's for legal matters. For moral matters, the evidence supports that the difference from the drastic increase were indeed bad faith denials.
> What decision? You just assume that there had been some decision, that Bryan Thompson approved, and that it was nefarious.
Exactly, because he was CEO.
> There is as of now zero evidence for this, this is just your speculation.
He was CEO.
> Murdering people based on speculations like that is profoundly evil, and so is excusing it.
He was CEO. He oversaw a company going out of their way to deny claims even if you want to play devils advocate and pretend to be ignorant and deny that.
What he did was far more evil than a single murder, and what you are doing in defending the system that caused someone to feel that they had to murder it also more evil, the system that allows for shitty health insurance companies to cause so much pain and suffering. THAT, is evil.
What discovery? Are you suggesting that the defense in the murder case will be able to do any kind of discovery on UnitedHealthcare? How would that even be possible?
Since anecdotes seem to be data points in this thread, I would say that as a non-American, the online public support for incident horrifies me and makes me think that this is a symptom of a collapsing society. It is also horrifying that so many Americans online seem to be bloodthirsty for more. Makes me not want to associate with them.
Ah yes, let's murder people we feel (without even any concretes to support this) are not morally pure, what a perfect idea. Which other CEOs do you think it would be justified to murder? Or are there any that are morally pure enough to you that they can live?
Just a guess, but I think if we found a way to put together a list, perhaps by voting or something, 99% of CEOs would be fine. And if the fear of being found to be in that remaining 1% is an effective deterrent against bad behavior, well maybe we ought to be making such lists.
Detective Chief Inspector Karin Parke and Trainee Detective Constable Blue Coulson unravel a deadly conspiracy involving autonomous drone insects (ADIs). After the controversial journalist Jo Powers dies in an apparent suicide, forensic evidence reveals an ADI embedded in her brain. The investigation escalates as similar ADI-related murders occur, including that of rapper Tusk, targeted after social media backlash.
The detectives uncover a sinister "Game of Consequences" launched by hacked ADIs, where the most-mentioned person under the hashtag #DeathTo is killed daily. The situation spirals out of control when the ADIs are used to surveil citizens, and public engagement with the hashtag results in mass casualties. A manifesto from Garrett Scholes, a former Granular employee and hacker, reveals his motive: to expose societal cruelty and complacency.
Efforts to neutralize the hacked ADIs fail, resulting in the death of 387,036 people who used the hashtag, including a member of Parke's team. The fallout leaves Coulson presumed dead by suicide, though Parke later receives evidence that Coulson is alive and pursuing Scholes abroad, leaving the case ominously unresolved.
