Given the mismatch between public sentiment and the reporting on all things Luigi Mangione, the establishment is really scared. Trying to scrub him from the internet is really sending a signal that we can influence the c-suite as a class the way Luigi Mangione did, which is incredibly stupid - they are ultimately inviting more murder.
If somebody's getting "shocked" by this, then it's having the intended effect as far as poetry is concerned. It's important reminder to what HN is, really, even though I would expect it to largely fall on deaf ears. Reminds me of “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
I think I would have checked the "unacceptable" box if I took that survey.
At the same time, I can't disagree with the fact that at this point I'm not sure what else will force a change to our absolutely depraved health care system. Every time I think it's as bad as it can possibly be it gets worse.
I also hope Mangione gets at least one mistrial due to jury nullification.
It was 41% approve, 40% disapprove. All the polls are filled with massive numbers of "don't know" people that I think is likely going to be filled with people struggling with cognitive dissonance. How can one oppose murder, but not feel particularly upset, to say the least, about this murder?
The same way people justify killing in wars, regardless of how justified they feel the wars are.
The "enemy" combatants are of course just operating within the parameters of their laws. Nevertheless, war is seen as a battle between two competing powers which discard human lives in their struggle.
This is a different type of war being fought now. Brian Thompson didn't create the system, he was just a high-ranking agent.
Luigi declared war against the system, and people feel so strongly about the necessity for that system to be defeated that they can simultaneously support the resistance (even if the resistance had no choice but to play by its own rules) and recognize the tragedy in a death and the associated impact of that.
It's similar to how a lot of people feel about the Palestinian resistance in their struggle for liberation from the profoundly evil system of violence which has been victimizing them for years and killing them with impunity.
No, they weren't. In the 18-59 age group, they made up about 20% of every response group. Even in the 60+ group it was about 10%. [1] And in the YouGov poll [2] that surveyed all Americans instead of just voters, and also asked the question in a less leading way found 37% "don't know" amongst all Americans.
The Emerson poll quite disingenuously chose to frame the typical "don't know" as "neutral", which is going to be interpreted as a value position - not the lack of a formed position, which their poll completely lacked. Their questions and answers were poorly framed if the goal was to actually query public sentiment and not just get a desired response.
I'd guess that most people that responded "somewhat unacceptable" really wanted to say "somewhat acceptable" but without directly admitting that they semi support the act.
• A significant majority of Americans are medically satisfied with their health insurance provider.
This should not be surprising because a large majority of Americans have only ever used their health insurance for things routine checkups, routine lab tests, common infectious illnesses like colds and flus, minor burns and cuts and other physical injuries, routine diabetes care, routine high blood pressure care, and vaccinations.
Those are all things where almost all of the time any insurance company will cover without any hassle or pushback.
• Older people are generally more likely to have medical problems beyond the kind described above, medical problems where insurance companies do start pushing back on coverage and treatments.
• The older you get the more likely that becomes.
What I'd expect then is that sentiment in favor of killing insurance company officers over the medical decisions of that insurance company to be higher in older people and lower in younger people. But it appears that reality is opposite of that.
> A significant majority of Americans are medically satisfied with their health insurance provider.
Before some life changes that mooted the point, I lived in fear of needing serious medical care, and as far as things go I'm more privileged than most.
> What I'd expect then is that sentiment in favor of killing insurance company officers over the medical decisions of that insurance company to be higher in older people and lower in younger people.
I don't know man, having the loved ones around you get literally killed by the dollar the insurance companies took from them and wouldn't give back sounds like something somebody too young to be beaten down by reality would feel enraged by. The loving heart can only take so much damage before it starts to break.
I just think that it's a bunch of people who developed with their empathy under attack before their emotional armor fully formed. Abuse begets abuse and we see an abused public lashing out. Extremely tragic, but nothing especially mysterious about it.
Polls are only as good as the pollster. Watch how “popular” Kamala was in polls because it was the “right” thing to say.
Most people (including rich boomers) I know are at minimum ambivalent to Luigi with many actively supporting him. But if asked on record they would deny it.
Presidential polls were "inaccurate" by only a few %, which is to be expected. But to be so inaccurate that >50% support for Luigi is reported instead as only 17% would be staggering and unprecedented, requiring nothing short of fraud.
Kamala did quite well in the election, it was close. In hindsight I don't think there was any particular evidence the polls were inaccurate. Poll-watchers like fivethirtyeight.com predicted that the election was a coin toss (with the toss sliiightly biased towards Trump up until their final forecasts from what I recall) but whoever won the coin toss would probably achieve a comfortable victory. That is pretty much what transpired.
If you want me to refer to private polling you're going to need to hint which poll you mean. I'm working off public data which was pretty accurate on aggregate, there weren't any surprises on election night which was something of a https://www.xkcd.com/1131/ moment.
I dunno. Given the public polls seemed to be accurate in hindsight that just suggests Harris' internal polling was off. They were the C-team that were losing to Trump with Biden and struggling to match his raw charisma with Harris' campaigning. Maybe their pollster wasn't very good or they didn't do that much polling? We can't really assess what was going on inside the campaign in that way.
> People openly cheering for the murder of law-abiding citizens minding their own business.
It is hard to feel sorry when their own business implied throwing thousands of ill people into hardship and reneging on their contract to pad the bottom line. Murder is wrong, but the way these insurance work is very much not right either and when there is no relief valve like fair regulations, pressure is bound to mount.
Asserting that murder is wrong without caveats or discussion, and that the problem’s root is the murder is also bound to increase pressure even further. The future government won’t do anything to help, so pressure will keep increasing and things will get more volatile.
I don't need to feel sorry for anyone to assert that murder is wrong. Morals (and laws) don't depend on how sympathetic the victim is or isn't. The fact that there's a sizable chunk of American society which doesn't see this is scary as hell, and speaks very poorly of those people.
Were you actively telling everyone you thought the murder of Bin Laden was wrong when it happened? I definitely don't remember seeing a single person doing so in the West.
There is a huge difference between killing someone who is actively organizing terrorist attacks versus killing a bureaucrat who is in the unfortunate position to catch heat no matter what because he has to say no to some people. Acts of war are seldom considered murder, even by religious people. Vigilantism against someone who didn't even break any laws is definitely murder.
Both of the examples referenced were the killing of someone who killed tens of thousands (at least) of innocent civilians at random. The only reason one doesn't get called terrorism is that there weren't any action movie fireballs involved.
Thank you, going on my reading list! Definitely not the best example then.
Nevertheless, the person I was replying to has 100% voted for murderers assuming they live in the US, unless they never voted for anyone who won. They consume products by businesses who murder. I strongly doubt they're a pacificism absolutist, given how extremely rare those are nowadays, as most people understand how quickly that falls apart when someone shows up with a big stick who can't be reasoned with.
I'm curious if you'll indulge a hypothetical. Imagine executives could be held responsible for deaths proven to be reasonable caused by their actions (or inactions) with penalties comparable to normal penalties for murder/manslaughter. And now this man was found responsible for a countless number of deaths, and thus himself sentenced to death, or lifetime solitary confinement if you happen to unconditionally oppose the death penalty. Would your view change?
I assume the answer is yes, but I'm sure you see the issue with letting laws define one's own personal code. This isn't a 'gotcha' or anything. I myself have lots of cognitive dissonance on this issue, and am just genuinely curious what your take would be.
It's called the Medical Loss Ratio rule of the Affordable Care Act. From my understanding the law states that health insurers MUST spend 80% of revenue from premiums on health care and if they don't, they must provide rebates to the policy holders. This is one of the reasons why health care costs have gone through the roof; health insurers must be spending all this money on health care costs, so they buy pharmacies and gouge the costs of cheap medicine to make up for the lost profits. Instead of paying $5 for insulin, they make you pay $60, which helps them hit the 80% rule.
> so they buy pharmacies and gouge the costs of cheap medicine to make up for the lost profits. Instead of paying $5 for insulin, they make you pay $60, which helps them hit the 80% rule.
Yah, that's not really true. Sure if they can increase healthcare costs, then they can increase premiums, but that also makes them less competitive.
But the bigger reason it's not true is that insurance companies don't set the reimbursement rate for drugs in the first places. Instead that's set by PBM's, which are separate companies. Insurance companies hate PBM's because the PBM's prevent the insurance companies from doing exactly like you describe.
(This hate translates into a lot of badmouthing which I'm sure you'll find if you lookup PBM's. They get called "middlemen" who take money and don't provide a service - this is just propaganda by insurance companies.)
The whole hero worship of Luigi is based on a complete misunderstanding of who actually causes healthcare costs to be high. It's not insurance companies or PBM's! It's actually Dr's and hospitals.
> This is one of the reasons why health care costs have gone through the roof.
I doubt that it has much affect, for two reasons.
1. Looking at graphs of US health care costs over time I don't really see much change in the growth of health care costs during pre-ACA times and post-ACA times.
2. Looking at health care costs of other first world countries, their health care costs over the 50 years have been growing fairly similarly to the way US health care costs having been growing.
This suggests that the reasons for most health care cost increases in the US are neither things we do differently than most other first world countries (e.g. more heavily relying on private for-profit insurance companies) nor any relatively recent changes to how we regulate things.
So... if claims (and thus expenses) are reduced but we have the same revenue, we simply need to increase some other expenses: raise C-suite salaries! :) I'm speculating/joking, but wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be accurate.
Unfortunately that link doesn't say anything about profit margins, or revenue/expenses. It only talks strictly about premiums, which is a monthly fee for insurance coverage, and is just one source of revenue for such a company. (at least it did help me learn more about the US healthcare system and some of its regulation, so thanks regardless haha)
> Robin Young: ...you testified before Congress during the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and at that time, that law demanded that health care plans spend 80 to 85% of premiums on patient care. This is called the Medical Loss Ratio. So what happened?
> Wendell Potter: They figured out how to work around that. For one, they've gotten more and more into health care delivery, and they now own physician practices and clinics and big pharmacy benefits middlemen, and none of that is affected by the medical loss ratio. So in other words, they've figured out how to work around it, plus it also has enabled them to jack up their premiums. So the more premiums they take in, the more money they have.
> Congress would ultimately include language in the ACA to require health plans to spend at least 80% to 85% of premiums insurers take in on enrollees’ care, known as the medical loss ratio. But big insurers have figured out if they also become health care providers — by buying physician practices, clinics, and pharmacy benefit managers — they can meet that threshold by paying themselves and avoiding payment for their customers’ care.
> An argument could be made that the medical loss ratio provision of the ACA has contributed to or even fueled the vertical integration of the big insurers, UnitedHealth especially. UnitedHealth is massively bigger and more profitable than it was on the day I first testified as a whistleblower, June 24, 2009, when it ranked 21st on the Fortune 500 list of U.S. companies. Its share price at the close of trading that day was $24.81. Hundreds of acquisitions later, UnitedHealth is now the fourth largest U.S. company — just behind Walmart, Amazon, and Apple. At the end of trading on Monday of this week, the share price was $560.62. That’s an increase of more than 2,100% since June 24, 2009. By comparison, the Dow Jones average has increased 438%.
> In the years since then, UnitedHealth, Cigna, and a handful of other New York Stock Exchange corporations have cemented their roles as unelected gatekeepers to care, and Americans are now waking up as they never have before to the consequences of that. If their rage can be harnessed and channeled with clear policy proposals, that dike the industry built might just give way without more violence.
> But it has nothing to do with the claim that "denying claims increases profits", which is simply not true.
Well, it's kind of transparently true. If the worst-case scenario is that you need to return some premiums, then you should always deny enough claims that you're always returning some amount money, as you should always hit your profit cap. The second reason issue is that an approved claim has Opex costs. The platonic ideal of an insurance company in the current system is one that collects (# of patients * annual premium), and approves 0 claims. If you don't approve any claims, you'll have the lowest possible Opex costs, because there's no processing to do, no fraud to check for, no follow up visits that might take you below the profit cap, etc.
What does following the law have to do with someone's character? I judge someone based on their ethical compass, not how good they are at manipulating a compromised legal system.
Are you kidding? It is rare for someone to deliberately break the law and also be ethically upright. I'm saying that he is not obviously compromised. His murderer on the other hand apparently is. You can imagine a world in which murdering someone you have no connection to, based on a bunch of BS, is ethical. But civilized people don't think that way. If you don't like the way insurance is done, the civilized thing to do is to lobby for better regulations or something, not go on a killing spree.
The justice system generally doesn't tolerate revenge, even when the average person might feel it justified. If someone murdered your child in cold blood right in front of you, you don't get a free pass to go out and lynch them. Civilized people know this is necessary to keep innocent people safe and ensure some kind of consistency in outcomes. How much less justified is "revenge" like this case, where there is no connection between the attacker and the victim, the perceived offense is abstract and arguable, and taking the guy out does essentially nothing to make the world a better place?
> It is rare for someone to deliberately break the law and also be ethically upright
Strawman. Your goal is to prove that there is full alignment between ethics and law in our current system. If there isn't, then we cannot use one's adherence to the law as an indicator of their ethical standing.
The Holocaust was legal once. Harboring Jewish political refugees was not.
The Palestinian genocide is legal now (according to the US, not the ICC). Speaking out about it at univerities is met with extreme police action.
Slavery used to be widespread in the West, and freeing/harboring escaped slaves would land you in prison or a grave.
> The justice system generally doesn't tolerate revenge
That's an idealistic take. The reality is that the justice system is frequently used to make examples out of political dissidents.
This has been true for millennia. My patron saint, Joan of Arc, was burned to the stake for essentially wearing pants. Are you going to sit here and try to tell me that burning a 17 year old at the stake for not being "womanlike" is ethical?
Intentionally/ostensibly mistaking the legal system for a system of ethics is such a colossal red flag that someone is willing to allow the exploitation of innocent people in order to improve or protect the quality of their own life.
You would think on a forum called Hacker News that people here would be more sensitive to how Corpgov warps society's perception of political dissidents, given the history of our own kind.
You should post this higher up . It's the most succinct way I've seen anyone put it across the many threads on here with hundreds of comments, most of which I read.
Most political dissidents don't kill anyone. There's no indication that this guy tried to do anything within the system to effect positive change. How would you feel if a tech company CEO was murdered because someone's life was wrecked by automation? Nearly any business or government official could be targetted on the basis of such ridiculous self-righteous vigilantism. It's the kind of rationale that leads to political purges, lynchings, and even mass murder. We have legal systems in place to protect everyone from the tyranny of mob rule and other forms of uncivilized behavior.
It depends on what the "meaningful change" actually is. Lots of possible changes are meaningful but not worth killing people over. Not all proposed changes are actually possible. Mobs of people are usually really stupid and bloodthirsty. Look at the 1970 Cambodian coup for example. You don't want to open that Pandora's box unless there is a real urgent emergency or violation of natural rights. If people were as excited about losing weight as they are about some CEO getting shot, we could all have much cheaper insurance and maybe the government could even afford to give us free health care. You should look into what the government pays for and how much they pay for it. It's really eye-opening. The government isn't a magic money machine. If they pay for something, the value is extracted from somewhere in society either in monetary form or through inflation.
What a stretch. So you're insinuating I'm racist because I don't approve of a guy being gunned down for no good reason in broad daylight by another guy who could have had a bright future, and even been a successful activist for the cause he was allegedly trying to advance. Two lives ruined, two families wrecked, and probably more to come as this is egged on.
The comparison of violent vigilantism over what is really a financial issue to a peaceful civil rights movement is so classy. You don't know what you're really supporting, and if things continue in this uncivilized trajectory, you will regret it.
>Your goal is to prove that there is full alignment between ethics and law in our current system. If there isn't, then we cannot use one's adherence to the law as an indicator of their ethical standing.
This is the real straw man. Have you ever heard of a generalization? Of course we can and do use adherence to the laws of the land as an indicator of general moral character. They rarely deviate far from the moral demands of society, and are in fact the only rules that we all have in common with our compatriots.
>That's an idealistic take. The reality is that the justice system is frequently used to make examples out of political dissidents.
That has nothing to do with vigilantism, and in our country dissidents are almost never murdered like this.
>Are you going to sit here and try to tell me that burning a 17 year old at the stake for not being "womanlike" is ethical?
I think notions of what is ethical change over time, and so do the laws. Your example is way off topic and misses the point. This guy was a boring bureaucrat who was probably doing his best to run an upstanding business that inherently pisses people off sometimes. You can't be a terribly evil person in modern times without breaking some laws. There is no way to see this random act of violence as "eye for an eye" no matter how much you hate insurance companies. There is no equivalence between walking up to someone unprovoked and shooting them dead versus making necessary financial decisions that might give people vaguely worse health care. Even if you could calculate that a specific change in policy that this CEO did result in some deaths, the nature of the business makes such things inevitable (short of gross negligence or evident malice for the customers). It certainly isn't as contemptible as armed robbery, murder, felony theft, or burning someone alive for bad fashion.
> This is the real straw man. Have you ever heard of a generalization? Of course we can and do use adherence to the laws of the land as an indicator of general moral character.
The irony of claiming that the fundamental principle of my argument is a straw man and then presenting a new straw man directly after. Who said anything about morals? We're talking about ethics. Do you know the difference? Society does not have moral demands, it has one or more ethical consensus. Please learn the difference between the two before trying to argue with authority on them.
> in our country dissidents are almost never murdered like this
What are you talking about? I was talking about domestic smear and ruination campaigns on a slew of political dissidents from the past such as Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcom X, Timothy Leary, etc... COINTELPRO?
> There is no equivalence between walking up to someone unprovoked and shooting them dead versus making necessary financial decisions that might give people vaguely worse health care
This sentence does a lot of hand-waving. Vaguely, indeed. I think, if you look for it, you will find the quantification you're looking for. The difference is one act of direct violence vs tens of millions of every day acts of indirect violence, in a system where the class perpetrating the latter acts of violence continually gain the upper hand incrementally over time, like a political ratchet. Our forefathers would have revolted over much, much less than we put up with today.
>The irony of claiming that the fundamental principle of my argument is a straw man and then presenting a new straw man directly after. Who said anything about morals? We're talking about ethics. Do you know the difference? Society does not have moral demands, it has one or more ethical consensus. Please learn the difference between the two before trying to argue with authority on them.
Your argument IS a straw man. You literally put words in my mouth. Try learning what a straw man is before using the expression.
>Society does not have moral demands, it has one or more ethical consensus. Please learn the difference between the two before trying to argue with authority on them.
You should try using a dictionary. The first definition of "moral" on dictionary.com is this:
> of, relating to, or concerned with the principles or rules of right conduct or the distinction between right and wrong; ethical:
If you go to 'ethic' then all two of the definitions are here:
> the body of moral principles or values governing or distinctive of a particular culture or group:
> a complex of moral precepts held or rules of conduct followed by an individual:
So you're wrong, plain and simple. I don't care about some philosophy class attempt to split hairs here. The distinction is really a red herring that you're getting obnoxious about.
>What are you talking about?
You said that the state would retaliate against dissidents, in response to me saying that the state will not tolerate acts of revenge in general even in the face of popular support for the offender. Again, it will not suffer people who are following the law to be murdered. You brought up the dissident thing presumably to relate Mangione to a dissident. But dissidents don't murder people. MLK, Malcolm X, all the dissidents most people admire, are not murderers.
>This sentence does a lot of hand-waving. Vaguely, indeed. I think, if you look for it, you will find the quantification you're looking for.
Perhaps I would find it, but the real numbers are discovered through trial and error and are not at all straightforward to interpret. You really want to get people in a frenzy over some unintentional policy mistakes with outcomes that can only be understood with advanced statistics and a mountain of data?
>The difference is one act of direct violence vs tens of millions of every day acts of indirect violence, in a system where the class perpetrating the latter acts of violence continually gain the upper hand incrementally over time, like a political ratchet.
Apparently you don't understand the definition of "violence" either. Unfortunately the word has been so abused that the dictionary now has totally wrong definitions in it.
>Our forefathers would have revolted over much, much less than we put up with today.
This much I agree with. I don't think they would tolerate income tax or gun laws. As for health insurance I think they'd just say, nobody is forcing you to buy it, so you don't get to just go on a murder spree as revenge against the industry.
Friend, I'm not going to use the literally lowest common denominator dictionary.com as a source of the distinction between the concepts of morality and ethics. This is the definition of cherry-picking on your part. There are centuries of philosophical literature on the subject. Google "morality vs ethics" and actually spending some time to understand what you're talking about.
> Try learning what a straw man is before using the expression
No, my argument was not a straw man. It is literally the basis for the original discussion, but you can't seem to comprehend that.
Now you're just sarcastically parroting back things that were said to you. This is just immature, you're arguing in bad faith and becoming increasingly vitriolic, so this conversation is over. Please review HN guidelines, and learn to argue in good faith and without a bad attitude.
I don't believe you were here arguing in good faith either. If you are then you at minimum don't understand what a straw man is, and accused me of having constructed one while doing the exact same (the Fallacy Fallacy plus a factual error). How ironic is it that you, someone arguing that someone who followed the law (specifically our laws) can be overwhelmingly immoral to the point of deserving to be murdered, is going to lecture me now about the art of civil conversation and the rules of the site. I think you knew deep down how ridiculous your premise is and refused to let it go. All of your pedantic red herrings are not going anywhere with me. I hope you reflect on the real topic of conversation and think about how your family would feel if you were murdered because one of your products made someone's life somewhat worse.
"I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is
unjust, and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of
the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the very highest respect for the
law."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
This quote is painted onto one of my lockboxes and I have read and internalized it daily for over a decade now. Such a powerful sentiment, and I wholly agree. In my pursuit of accountability of law, I have come to understand just how much I respect the importance of law, as an anarchist.
Thank you for the kind words. Adding them to the pile of inspiration to finally start blogging. I'll be on the lookout for your account. Currently my bluesky feed is garbage and I need to train the algorithm.
The CEO was minding his own businesss, putting his head down and getting busy to use the SOTA AI and other technologies to dslover the most efficient way to decline healthcare for people paying for it. Sure, some fraud was prevented, at the cost of denying service for people in legitimate need, surely causing premature death in some cases. He might only wanted to make the line go up, but that does not relieve him of his responsibility.
This is simply not true. Denying claims does NOT increase insurance company profits, it actually DECREASES it. Read this thread I posted: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42642405
Maybe he just bought into the AI hype as so many other business leaders are. Any kind of fraud prevention method is going to have false positives and associated costs, and in health insurance it can cost lives. But not handling fraud also costs lives by making insurance more expensive. If people just trying to do their best to manage a business and its customers are murdered over honest mistakes then nobody is going to want to run such a system. The fact it's an insurance company is not relevant. A government-run system could involve the same kind of mistakes.
Doctors themselves make a lot of potentially questionable choices that may be seen as costing lives. We have a fairly high bar for proving malpractice because any given patient could choose to blame the doctor personally. A business guy who is not egregiously messing things up on purpose or through gross negligence deserves some benefit of the doubt as well.
> That law abiding citizen openly cheered for the murder of the people as a business method.
I think you've drank the Kool aid straight from the firehouse.
The general reaction to the assassination of a health insurance exec in protest to depriving people from life-saving healthcare treatment is not endorsing it but completely understanding and even sympathizing why anyone would do it.
The very fact that you're framing this issue as "murder of the people" instead of wondering why anyone would cheer when someone targets a health insurance exec speaks volumes to how effective the propaganda around this has been.
Do you have proof of that? Look I know insurance companies are rarely eager to pay out. If they were, they would quickly go out of business or else have to charge you so much as to make the coverage pointless. Nobody would be allowed to be a CEO of a health insurance company for long if they "openly cheered for the murder of people" as you claim. The business involves tough decisions affecting the lives of people who are often deathly ill and/or mentally unstable. It's really easy to blame businesses for things that really aren't their fault.
This it no run of the mill insurance company. This is the absolute worst insurance company, putting it mildly. I would really recommend looking into it first before trying to downplay what they did and continue doing.
>HealthPartners, a major health care provider (...), has announced its decision to leave UnitedHealthcare's Medicare Advantage network (...), HealthPartners says the decision stems from the insurer’ high rates of coverage denials and payment delays, which adversely affect patient care. (...) The health system highlights that
>UnitedHealthcare's denial rate is up to ten times higher than other insurers in the market. [0]
Different source:
> in 2023 UHC claim denial rate was flat out highest in the industry, 1.2x more than the second highest rate, and twice as high as industry average. [1]
https://qz.com/unitedhealthcare-denied-claim-1851714818
Denial rate went from 10% to 22% between 2020 to 2022. Furrher, the CEO has said he saw this as good for business, and seemed to imply it’d be a good thing to deny more.
The headline of your link says that nobody knows how often insurance companies deny claims, but it also includes some percentages which you reproduced in this comment. Do you understand the reason for the apparent contradiction between those two statements? Turns out, the answer is interesting!
> Do you have proof of that? Look I know insurance companies are rarely eager to pay out. If they were, they would quickly go out of business or else have to charge you so much as to make the coverage pointless.
That's not how it works.
Insurances charge monthly payments in return to providing access to healthcare services for free or reduced cost. This means the bulk of their customers is people who do not need the service right away, and instead are investing in assuring they will get the treatment they need when and if they need it.
Those who do not get access to healthcare services and die will not be able to vote with their wallets. They are gone. The same holds if you are bankrupted by having to pay your treatments out if your own pocket, specially if you lose your livelihood in result of your health issues.
On top of that, there's the question of whether there's a free market on healthcare insurance. Big if.
>Those who do not get access to healthcare services and die will not be able to vote with their wallets. They are gone.
While I agree with most of what you said, if the insurance company lets a person die, then that person no longer pays them for insurance and never will again - essentially "voting with their wallet", even if not directly. While that may be an insignificant amount of money to the insurance company, if their policies led to many people not getting the treatment they needed, the people would either die or seek other insurance, and either way stop paying the company for insurance. Though this can be problematic if the insurance is supplied by an employer, as they don't always offer a choice of insurance companies.
But the real problem with the US medical system is the medical treatments costing far, far far more than is reasonable. In other countries medical care costs are way more reasonable. People don't get bankrupted by medical expenses. And there's too many stories out there about hospitals and doctors billing insurance ridiculously high costs, and if the bill isn't being paid by insurance companies then the price is lowered substantially.
It's a fucked up system, through and through. Many/most hospitals are for-profit ventures, and they really do try to extract the most money that they can, however they can get it - and that usually means sending a ridiculously high bill to the insurance company and then insurance tries to negotiate it down. A routine operation should not cost over $100,000, but that is often what the insurance company gets billed.
But if their basic business model is to collect premiums while denying coverage as much as possible (which evidence suggests is the case), that's basically murdering and bankrupting people for money.
And it's hard to say it's not the case when you're denying claims at 2x the industry norm.
You do understand several countries have solved this, right? Several "third world" countries even. This business argument reeks of the inability to understand how shitty healthcare has been planned and executed in this country.
Are you willfully ignorant, or arguing in bad faith?
Private health insurance exists as a pure "middle man", and hence 100% of their profits are at the cost of less health care being delivered by the actual supplier of medical help. Hint: Not them.
Imagine if a car insurance company simply refused to pay for a third of all accident claims!
"I see that you car was totalled, but you can clearly see a scratch in a previous social media post you made, so that's a pre-existing condition, and based on that we're required to reject your insurance claim. Have a nice day!"
PS: The USA is the only western country with this kind of madness going on. Whatever your follow-up argument will be, just consider that nobody else in the modern, developed world is so stupid as to simply give a bunch of billionaires 15% of all money expended on medical services.
No problem with destroying lives and indirectly causing many deaths for pure personal gain, as long as under some definition of 2025 US law, it can be argued to be legal.
Much better than breaking the law by going 10 mph over the limit!
For what it's worth, there's 0 chance that the CEO had been a "law-abiding citizen" for their whole lives. Far too many laws open to interpretation for that to be the case for anyone.
Adolf Hitler was a law-abiding citizen who never harmed a fly. He just changed the laws to make his actions legal and got other people to commit the holocaust on his behalf. So yeah, the fact that someone follows the law is meaningless. Sometimes the law is bad. Sometimes really really bad.
German people still have this mentality btw - that if you follow the law you are good. They think since the Holocaust is no longer the law and the constitution says there shall never be another one, that means they are safe.
>You know what else invites more murder? People openly cheering for the murder of law-abiding citizens minding their own business.
It's a testament to the staggering weight of antipathy the lower classes bear towards the CEO class.
Let's not delude ourselves by pretending Brian Thompson was just a normal law abiding citizen. He was living a lavish lifestyle funded by his company's industry-leading rate of coverage denials, which bankrupted families.
If there exists a definition of social parasite, I suspect "health insurance executive" fits. Is it any wonder why Americans, living under their dystopian healthcare system where one essentially spins the roulette wheel to decide between being bankrupted by cancer or being able to afford to send one's children to college, might feel some schadenfreude?
> lavish lifestyle funded by his company's industry-leading rate of coverage denials
It's really astonishing how many people believe this. But actually in the US the higher the coverage denials the LOWER the company profits. What actually happens is more denials reduces premiums, making the insurance cheaper to buy.
I wonder how many “outraged” about Luigi killing are also outraged at the capital punishment that gets celebrated by a large fucking portion of Americans.
If anything, the news media has been trying to push the Mangione debate and controversy at every chance, like the above article that was selectively written to highlight demographic groups that showed higher approval of Mangione first.
Thinking that “the establishment” is a collective of all major companies that act in unison is conspiratorial thinking. Don’t think for a second that the news media wouldn’t hesitate to push and profit from the controversy.
> Polling numbers (actual gauge of public sentiment)
Polls have never been faithful of actual public sentiment on any political subject since the end of times. People will not give their true opinions in polls on any subject that could be perceived as complex. Also it is actually very hard to have a good representation of the entire population of your country.
Just take the crosstabs of the survey you linked: about the 2024 election vote, in this survey, 70% of people polled are negative toward trump. The 2024 election results gave almost 50% of the popular vote to trump.
My point is only that this poll do not bring any valuable information here, just like any poll. The public sentiment toward Luigi Mangione seems favorable in appearance, but twitter is not representative of the US population either. So, who knows?
>in this survey, 70% of people polled are negative toward trump. The 2024 election results gave almost 50% of the popular vote to trump
This isn't surprising, as you don't have to like someone to vote for them. Especially in a two-party system. Trump is uniquely disliked by many Republicans, but those voters still prefer to have a Republican in office rather than a Democrat. It's "hold your nose and vote". The (center-)left even developed a slogan for it: "vote blue no matter who".
Polls have not proven the most reliable in recent times. I can tell some folks avoid him as a topic, but I've yet to see anyone I know in any socioeconomic class or age group seemingly do anything besides avoid acknowledging him, express support, or express support with some kind of caveat.
You live in a bubble, even in the real world. In fact, your real-world bubble is usually stronger than your online bubble. Just because your bubble shows support for murder doesn't mean that most people do.
From a brief look at their "people" page, it seems like they're all involved with chapters of the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America). If anything, this suggests against foul play, as their incentive would be to denigrate for-profit healthcare and overstate support for Mangione.
I am wary of the accuracy of the poll because it was an online one, but it does generally agree with a similar Economist/YouGov poll.
Owen Jones "the establishment and how they get away with it" points to the _evidence_ for the conspiracy without providing the mechanism. The existence of an establishment (in the conspiratorial sense) is rather like gravity - hard to deny but who knows how it works. Just saying..
I can believe it to some degree. Believing that what the killer did is wrong, and being unsympathetic to Brian Thompson's death isn't mutually exclusive.
They don't even need to do anything especially conspiratorial, I would expect those polls to have substantial anti-Mangione bias by construction.
Many people will want to avoid being on record as supporting a murderer, for fear of any consequences down the line. I know polls are almost certainly anonymous, but you need to trust the pollster to actually abide by that. If you have even an inch of worry, it's easier to just not answer (or answer insincerely) and move on.
