#But even MORE SO at UHC

[sbuttnutt]

Fun fact! As well as all of this, United Healthcare is ALSO one of the largest contributors towards anti-abortion lobby organizations, including ones that impacted the Dobbs decision to allow states to fully ban abortion rights. They're using that money that they stole from taxpayers to directly fuck people over even more! 🥰

Here's an article!

“It seems like almost all of those people don’t have HIV,” said Jennifer Kates, HIV policy director at KFF, a health-research nonprofit. “If they did, that would be substandard care at a pretty severe level,” she said.

Ya’ll. United Health just got accused of $17 billion in medicare fraud.

Basically they made up diagnosis which are improbable or impossible, “forgot” to remove ones which had been cured, and overall allegedly stole billions from taxpayers.

The government pays insurers a base rate for each Medicare Advantage member. The insurers are entitled to extra money when their patients are diagnosed with certain conditions that are costly to treat.

… About 18,000 Medicare Advantage recipients had insurer-driven diagnoses of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, but weren’t receiving treatment for the virus from doctors, between 2018 and 2021, the data showed. Each HIV diagnosis generates about $3,000 a year in added payments to insurers.

… He said internal company data for 2022 showed a treatment rate for patients UnitedHealth diagnosed with HIV of more than triple what the Journal found. He said the pandemic disrupted care, lowering treatment rates during the period analyzed by the Journal, and that the analysis failed to account for patients who started treatments in future years.

The Medicare data, however, show UnitedHealth’s patients with insurer-driven HIV diagnoses were on the antiretrovirals at low rates even before the pandemic, and hardly any started the drugs in the years after UnitedHealth diagnosed them.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/medicare-health-insurance-diagnosis-payments-b4d99a5d

I bet United Health really wishes it was a different week right now.

[cyarsk52-20]

If you are on social media thirsting over an alleged murderer you clearly need to go get you some real life dick. That shit is not cute. I feel sorry for you dick deprived b*tches.

Funny how he hooped on that bike to get away quick fast and in a hurry. Traveled all through PA for 6 days sorry I don’t feel for his ass no kinda way. Back pain doesn’t make you murder someone. White people always get a pass. I am sick of it! I’m tired of you heaux slutting out for these yt murderers, close your legs before I verbally kick your slutty arse!

[wilwheaton]

One medical doctor, whose identity the Daily Beast confirmed, commented with sympathy for Thompson’s family and said the killer should be charged with murder, but then wondered about the damage the CEO had done. “I cannot even guess how many person-years UHC has taken from patients and their families through denials,” they wrote. “It has to be on the order of millions. His death won’t make that better, but it’s hard for me to sympathize when so many people have suffered because of his company.” “What has bothered me the most is people that put «fiduciary responsibility» (eg profits) above human lives, none more so than this company as run by him," wrote another medical doctor, who also spoke to the Daily Beast to confirm their identity. “When other’s human lives are deemed worthless, it is not surprising to have others view your life of no value as well.”

Moderators Delete Reddit Thread as Doctors Torch Dead UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson

[fozmeadows]

there is no ethical consumption under capitalism

Years ago now, I remember seeing the rape prevention advice so frequently given to young women - things like dressing sensibly, not going out late, never being alone, always watching your drink - reframed as meaning, essentially, "make sure he rapes the other girl." This struck a powerful chord with me, because it cuts right to the heart of the matter: that telling someone how to lower their own chances of victimhood doesn't stop perpetrators from existing. Instead, it treats the existence of perpetrators as a foregone conclusion, such that the only thing anyone can do is try, by their own actions, to be a less appealing or more difficult victim.

And the thing is, ever since the assassination of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, I've kept on thinking about how, in this day and age, CEOs of big companies often have an equal or greater impact on the day to day lives of regular people than our elected officials, and yet we have almost no legal way to redress any grievances against them - even when their actions, as in the case of Thompson's stewardship of UHC, arguably see them perpetrating manslaughter at scale through tactics like claims denial. That this is a real, recurring thing that happens makes the American healthcare insurance industry a particularly pernicious example, but it's far from being the only one. Because the original premise of the free market - the idea that we effectively "vote" for or against businesses with our dollars, thereby causing them to sink or swim on their individual merits - is utterly broken, and has been for decades, assuming it was ever true at all. In this age of megacorporations and global supply chains, the vast majority of people are dependent on corporations for necessities such as gas, electricity, internet access, water, food, housing and medical care, which means the consumer base is, to all intents and purposes, a captive market. We might not have to buy a specific brand, but we have to buy a brand, and as businesses are constantly competing with one another to bring in profits, not just for the company and its workers, but for C-suites and shareholders - profits that increasingly come at the expense of workers and consumers alike - the greediest, most inhumane corporations set the financial yardstick against which all others are then, of necessity, measured. Which means that, while businesses are not obliged to be greedy and inhumane in order to exist, overwhelmingly, they become greedy and humane in order to compete, because capitalism encourages it, and because there are precious few legal restrictions to stop them from doing so. At the same time, a handful of megacorporations own so many market-dominating brands that, without both significant personal wealth and the time and resources to find viable alternatives, it's all but impossible to avoid them, while the ubiquity of the global supply chain means that, even if you can keep track of which company owns which brand, it's much, much harder to establish which suppliers provide the components that are used in the products bearing their labels. Consider, for instance, how many mainstream American brands are functionally run on sweatshop labour in other parts of the world: places where these big corporations have outsourced their workforce to skirt the already minimal labour and wage protections they'd be obliged to adhere to in the US, all to produce (say) electronics whose elevated sticker price passes a profit on to the company, but without resulting in higher wages for either the sweatshop workers overseas or the American employees selling the products in branded US stores.

When basically every major electronics corporation is engaged in similar business practices, there is no "vote" our money can bring that causes the industry itself to be better regulated - and as wealthy, powerful lobbyists from these industries continue to pay exorbitant sums of money to politicians to keep government regulation at a minimum, even our actual votes can do little to effect any sort of change. But even in those rare instances where new regulations are passed, for multinational corporations, laws passed in one country overwhelmingly don't prevent them from acting abusively overseas, exploiting more desperate populations and cash-poor governments to the same greedy, inhumane ends. And where the ultimate legal penalty for proven transgressions is, more often than not, a fine - which is to say, a fee; which is to say, an amount which, while astronomical by the standards of regular people, still frequently costs the company less than the profits earned through their unethical practices, and which is paid from corporate coffers rather than the bank accounts of the CEOs who made the decisions - big corporations are, in essence, free to act as badly as they can afford to; which is to say, very. Contrary to the promise of the free market, therefore, we as consumers cannot meaningfully "vote" with our dollars in a way that causes "good" businesses to rise to the top, because everything is too interconnected. Our choices under global capitalism are meaningless, because there is no other system we can financially support that stands in opposition to it, and while there are still small businesses and companies who try to operate ethically, both their comparative smallness and their interdependent reliance on the global supply chain means that, even if we feel better about our choices, we're not exerting any meaningful pressure on the system we're trying to change. Which means that, under the free market, trying to be an ethical consumer is functionally equivalent to a young woman dressing modestly, not going out alone and minding her drink at parties in order to avoid being raped. We're not preventing corporate predation or sending a message to corporate predators: we're just making sure they screw other worker, the other consumer, the other guy.

All of which is to say: while I'd prefer not to live in a world where shooting someone dead in the street is considered a valid means of redressing grievances, what the murder of Brian Thompson has shown is that, if you provide no meaningful recourse for justice against abusive, exploitative members of the 1%, then violence done to those people will have the feel of justice, because it fills the void left by the lack of consequences for their actions. It's the same reason why people had little sympathy for the jackass OceanGate CEO who killed himself in his imploding sub, or anyone whose yacht has been attacked by orcas - it's just intensified here, because where the OceanGate CEO was felled by hubris and the yachts were random casualties, whoever killed Thomspon did so deliberately, because of what he did. It was direct action against a man whose policies very arguably constituted manslaughter at scale; a crime which ought to be a crime, but which has, to date, been permitted under the law. And if the law wouldn't stop him, can anyone be surprised that someone might act outside the law in retaliation - or that regular people would cheer for them when they did?

[possessesnightshift]

maybe if we're REALLY NICE to all the mean trump supporters their hearts will swell three sizes (<3<3<3) and they'll give us back our human rights! :)

maybe if that united healthcare shooter knocks out 33 more CEOs he'll be up to 34 felonies and he can run for president...

[itsbenedict]

That's Right: It's Another Hot Take About That Dead Healthcare CEO

The websites are abuzz with debate on the utilitarian calculus of whether some guy getting shot was a good thing. What are the odds that the assassination will scare the horrible greedy health insurance companies into changing their ways and fixing the system? Is it worth killing someone over? Will the fear of being blasted by some guy with stylishly-engraved bullets put the fat cats in line? Or will their greed win out over their fear, leaving the nightmarish system unchanged?

Well, what if that was totally irrelevant?

You may have seen a graph that looks like this:

I've seen a few of these going around. These are the rates at which various health insurance companies say "no, you don't get the money" when someone says "hey I need money for this medical thing". UHC, the one whose CEO got shot, is notably really bad in this respect. They've got algorithmic claims denials and all kinds of nasty things that people don't like. All that money they're saving on paying out on claims must be making them rich, right? Let's look at their own financial reports:

Whoa! Big numbers! Six percent looks like a small number, but multiply and they make like thirty billion dollars doing this! That's a lot, right?

Well hang on. They're an insurance company. We can roughly model their profit as the amount people pay them for insurance, minus the amount they have to pay out for claims. Let's look at 2023: simple subtraction, their expenses are $339.2 billion. We simplify other overhead and assume that's all claims. So... that represents those 67% of claims they don't reject. What happens if they approve all the claims?

Multiply: $506.3 billion. They don't have that kind of money. They have $371.6 billion in revenue. So okay- they have to deny some claims. That's pretty normal. But let's pretend they're extremely afraid of assassins now and want to be completely non-greedy: they're okay making zero profit. They make $32.4 billion in profit- how many otherwise-rejected claims can they now afford to approve?

...uh. Well, they can afford to pay out, at most, 73.4% of claims. Still a denial rate of 26.6%, higher than most of their competitors. Not a huge improvement. And in reality, they can't afford to make 0 profit- a company that's making 0 profit is a company investors pull out of immediately, leaving it to collapse, because they can make more money investing in the ones that aren't as afraid of assassins. They've got to at least hover around the same profit margin as their competitors. Which is...

That's average profit margins for the whole US healthcare industry. So, okay, if we match those other companies' profit margins and try to hover around 3-4%... uh. Wait. Hang on. Here's another graph with more recent data on UHC specifically:

Wait, they're still just making that little 3-4% profit margin, even with all these shady automated denials- so how are those other companies doing better on claims? They're obviously not less greedy. They must be making more money somehow, right?

(My guess, sight-unseen, would be that they charge more for their plans, or offer less comprehensive coverage, or use a network of less expensive providers, or other things that make the amount they have to pay out smaller and the amount they're taking in larger. I don't feel like doing a comprehensive consumer review of what every insurance provider's healthcare plans are, but there's always these tradeoffs to make. UHC seems to be offering the tradeoff of "better or cheaper care, on paper" for "but there's a higher risk of getting denied", which is one annoying tradeoff among many.)

Okay But That's Enough Graphs

"Yeah yeah yeah shut up about profit margins and coverage tradeoffs. Is it a good thing that the CEO got shot or not?"

Well, their profit margin at the time he was shot was 3.63%. A company can't survive making 0 or less, so whatever effect fear of assassination has on UHC's greediness, it is going to be no larger than 3.63%.

They may learn the lesson that having their denial rates too high will get them assassinated. Accordingly, they may decrease that metric- by charging higher premiums, kicking expensive doctors out of their network, or reducing their stated coverage. They will not (because they cannot, without ceasing to exist as a company) simply start approving more claims without squeezing their customers elsewhere. They legally cannot do that. No matter how afraid you make the CEOs, you cannot make them afraid to a degree larger than their profit margin.

Well What The Fuck, Then

Like, what, are we supposed to accept that things will literally never get better and that this horrorshow is the best we can hope for? That's some bullshit! If we can't scare the CEOs, who can we scare?

Man I dunno.

Like, for some reason healthcare is stupid expensive! People can't afford to pay for healthcare without insurance- it's like thousands of dollars for basic procedures! Why? Maybe...

Doctors inflate their prices 10x because they know insurance companies will use complicated legal tricks to only pay 10% of the asking price, and this is a constantly escalating price war that serves mainly to fuck over the uninsured

Drug manufacturers and health technology companies fight tooth and nail to maintain monopolies over treatment, so they can charge gazillions to make back the gazillions they had to spend on FDA approval trials

(Trials those same companies lobby to keep necessary because the more money you have to pay for FDA approval, the harder it is for competitors to enter the market since they don't already have the gazillions)

Doctors operate as a cartel and lobby to gatekeep access to medical training so that they can keep doctoring a prestigious and exclusive position, and keep their own salaries high enough to pay their medical school debt and make them rich afterwards- leading to a (profitable) shortage of medical professionals

There is no limit to how expensive things can get but how much people are physically capable of paying, because frequently the alternative to "pay a ridiculous amount for healthcare" is "die", and so healthcare is subject to near-infinitely inelastic demand

Also like a thousand other equally annoying and complicated perverse incentives and stupid situations

This is the human condition: Shit is annoying and complicated and difficult to fix, pretty much 100% of the time forever. A few bullets in some fucko's back isn't really going to make a dent.

(But like, sure, fuck that guy. He probably sucked, as do the hundred other identical suits in line to replace him. Just... don't expect this to help.)

[a-very-tired-jew]

So I've seen a few of my mutuals clutching their pearls over the UHC shooter being praised, others cheering him on, and some cheering him on reluctantly. While nobody asked for it, I'm going to give my input as a forensic specialist and consultant.

We have a multi tiered judicial system that splits things into "price points". If you're in certain tax brackets you get tried a certain way. If you're a corporation, CEO of a big corporation, or a board member / officer then you also get special treatment as well.

(In fact, one of the best recent representations of this is the trial scene from the new season of Helluva Boss where Solas is not executed when taking responsibility for the crime Blitz is accused of when Blitz was going to be executed for it.)

We then split all of this into what we call "blue collar" and "white collar" crime. White collar crime does more damage to people than what we classify as blue collar crime.

The latter is what we make television shows and podcasts out of, the former is maybe touched upon in a legal or financial drama.

The latter involves people who fall in the realm of Ed Gein who maybe kill into the double digits, the former involves people who make decisions that harm and/or kill into the hundreds if not thousands.

The latter involves robberies and assaults, the latter involves people going into debt because of a corporate decision and maybe committing suicide because they can't pay it off.

The latter involves vandalism of a building, the former involves a company being slapped with a fine because they polluted an entire area and now the residents have to deal with life altering and damaging health issues.

In my time as a forensic consultant I have worked cases that would fit into Hannibal very easily. So have my colleagues. It's not uncommon for us to encounter something at a crime scene that we would call ontologically evil because it is absolutely horrific to witness. I've been on a few cases where I would definitely classify the perpetrator of the crime as such.

But considering all of that... I would still say the worst crimes are committed by corporations and their leadership because they do so much more damage. They harm so many more people and our legal system is not set up for that.

It's set up to handle the murder, the robbery, and so on. It's set up so that people can receive justice for very immediate and visceral crimes. It's punitive and handles the individual.

It was barely set up to handle something like Love Canal.

It's definitely not set up to measure and act upon the scale of harm that corporations and their leadership impart upon the average citizen through exploiting loopholes in regulations, committing actual criminal behavior, and other unethical acts that simply result in a fine. It doesn't know how to prosecute a company and its leadership for causing lifelong harm to people.

We are still using criminological theory from the 18th century as the basis for a lot of our criminal justice system. So you can understand why it's not set up to handle white collar crime that would impact whole populations.

I personally can't recall any conversation with a colleague where we discussed a CEO or board members actually being charged with something that encapsulated the harm they did to people. It's always some form of fraud or embezzlement, because money matters more.

That's the issue. Those charges usually result in a fine which can easily be paid off and then they're back to it. Maybe they get fired, maybe the company is dissolved, but rarely do we get a Bernie Madoff like ending. Even then, the charge against Madoff was for the ponzi scheme he was running. A financial crime.

And that's the crux of it all. We are all witness to the privileges given to certain tax brackets here in the USA. The blatant corruption, bending of ethics and morals, and exploitation of legal and regulatory loopholes with no real recourse. I'm not surprised something like this happened. I'm shocked that it didn't happen sooner to be honest. Yes, we can change the system in some instances. But in others? You're naive. Completely and utterly. Remember my post about the ghost gun and how the NRA controls firearm research in this country and threatens careers? That's been since the 90s. That's 30ish years. You sound just like the grad student who comes in with big ideas who thinks they can change the system and we all look at you and go "good luck kid, but here's all our attempts, our continuing attempts, and the threats we've gotten." It's a been there, done that situation that only changes when the powers that be actually feel that they're no longer untouchable and under threat. It's the way it has always been (I even have some examples in entomology like this I can throw out there as well).

Now, I'm not saying we should go full Robespierre and drag every CEO out to the guillotine. I'm not an accelerationist or maximalist by any account. But I'm not crying over this at all, nor am I shaming anyone who is cheerfully celebrating. Hell, many of us recently celebrated the death of leaders whose crimes would fall into the blue collar category (and you should be able to understand the impact of both and how bad both things are).

But our legal system needs a complete and utter overhaul to handle white collar crime that happens in the modern era and address the very real harm that these companies and leadership do. I would love to see actual legal repercussions for these companies and have them held accountable for the harm they've done. But I realistically don't think that will happen in my life time, and neither do a lot of others. Hence why something like this did happen, and will likely happen again.

[somethingmissingthiswaycomes]

So the thing about the UHC killer I would like everyone to internalize is that, in terms of the importance and impact of what he did, his identity literally does not fucking matter.

If he had done this in the dark, if the act had been hidden, if the CEO's death had been reported as a quiet tragedy, then the killing wouldn't be even close to the same event that it has been.

In my opinion, it's the response by the ENTIRE non-owning-class world that makes this moment a potential historical crossroads. The glee, the relief, the rage exposed by this one act of violence—the fact that it's been unifying, and the way it's carved open the surface of our for-profit systems to reveal the very real suffering caused by people who are flesh and blood and human and mortal.

If you've pivoted from that realization to the identity of the man who was arrested, to whether he did it or not, to what his politics are, to how privileged he has been, to whether he's a genius or a fool—then you are being distracted from the very important fact that the world's pulse has been exposed and more people than you might have thought are angry about the same things, could be talked to, organized with, could join community efforts out of a realization that we are not powerless and they have shared grievences.

I don't care who did it and I don't think you should either. I'm angry that the guy they've caught has had his life ruined whether or not he did it by a cruel system that would put out a $10,000 bounty on the killer of a mass murderer while responding to protests of police violence by giving more money to these gangs of killers and huffing about how they do it in self-defense and he was a scary homeless guy so he really didn't matter anyway.

Don't start eyeballing the hand that pulled the trigger when you can look around at the supporting crowd you've found yourself in and take note of the power we could have together.

[pandavalkyrie]

If it isn't already obvious, I work in utilization management. For those that don't know, it's a department that exists in most hospitals with the single minded purpose of getting health insurance companies to pay their due.

It's usually staffed by a lot of overworked nurses and one or two physicians, usually doing UM alongside actual clinical practice.

The nurses use whats in the patient's chart to justify the diagnostic code. They then upload those clinicals to the insurance company's portal, or fax them over.

Then, if we're lucky, a human being compares the clinicals with the MCG or other clinical standard guidelines and decides whether or not the chart justifies the diagnosis and treatment.

If we're not lucky, it's UHC which uses an automated system with a 90% error rate that denies 1/3 of the claims they receive.

In that case our nurses, who have to do this and so much more for about 90 patients a day *each*, have to go back in and highlight the criteria and hope it escalates to a human being.

The denial will usually be upheld.

So the case is forwarded to a contracted consultant company that staffs physician advisors. Their job is to narrow down exactly what needs to be done to beat the insurance company at their own game. The hospital pays for this service. Sometimes it works.

Often it doesn't, and the denial is still upheld.

So it goes to peer to peer. This means one of our doctors will have a phone call with a doctor on staff at the insurance company. There is no guarantee their doc will know anything about the specialty involved. I've seen OBGYNs make final calls on psych cases. This is the last chance.

Sometimes the physician on staff at the insurance company has a heart, and remembers what they got into medical school for. But often they have only a few minutes to make a judgement before the next peer to peer, and they have a quota of denials to maintain to keep their jobs.

So usually it's denied, and that's it. There's nothing else to do. The insurance company smugly gloats about protecting consumers from overuse of healthcare resources, the hospital bills the patient directly hoping to recoup something from it (even giving the patient services to help reduce their bill) and the patient is fucked at best, forgoes life saving care at worst.

All of that for such a shit ending. All of that money, time, administrative resources, look at it. Look at how many people are employed in the attempt to get insurance companies to pay and how many are employed to prevent it. There is so much bloat in the industry around this one thing, this one process, and it all goes back into the already inflated bill.

I go through insurance communications, I open the medical record with a photo of a child undergoing chemo. She's so small and so brave, smiling for the camera. Weeks of fighting back and forth to guarantee her care until one day I open it to forward yet another denial, and see the big gray 'deceased' tag under her now black and white photo. And I take a minute, I cry, I forward the fax, and I continue on. And this exact scenario repeats at least twice month.

We don't have to live this way. We don't have to.

[ladyluscinia]

The thing about the UHC shooting is Brian Thompson was killed for being arguably the purest embodiment of the private health insurance system that has caused unfathomable amounts of suffering and death for normal US citizens. He lived that. He encouraged that. He did not give a fuck no matter how many people attest "he was a nice guy." His tenure as CEO was marked by ramping up denials in increasingly shady ways and bringing in lots of blood money to make that profit line go up. And just to really drive home the evil exploitation aspect, we can't ignore the fact that abusive health insurance practices are something that you can't combat on an individual level.

The average American cannot opt out of health insurance, because companies like UHC have made being uninsured into a cruel and unusual punishment. Being insured (especially under UHC) still results in ridiculous medical expenses and lack of care. Most people have basically no say over who their coverage comes from or what kind of plan it is, since it's through their employer. Finding a good doctor who will say "you need this treatment" does not guarantee treatment. Government representatives have broadly abdicated responsibility to try and fix this situation, and half of them in fact would like to make it worse as quickly as possible. You can't vote for a better system, or boycott, or try to find a better option to deny the bad ones your money, or even challenge a blatantly flawed denial without a huge obfuscating headache that you probably lose anyway.

No fucking wonder the general public is responding to the killing with general apathy or discussing how little sympathy they have for a victim who did so much evil.

No fucking wonder someone shot him.

And then almost the entire government and media response to this very valid anger has been tripping over themselves to make it very clear that this is NOT how we deal with these kinds of problems in a civilized society. Murder is bad. He had a family. Which given the way they've gone about it - sparing no expense on their manhunt, balking from discussing how the system has eliminated the "civilized" means of dissent, misquoting people in headlines to pretend no one else is discussing it, overcharging Luigi with terrorism while treating him like the worst criminal to ever exist, treating Briana Boston as a copycat for being angry on a phone call - actually just really efficiently conveys a different but far more honest message:

The lives of people like Brian Thompson are worth infinitely more than the lives of you and me. Get fucked, I guess.

[blockgamepirate]

#it's okay x I don't know what's going on either

I know you didn't actually ask and I have no idea if you even meant this situation specifically or just like life in general...

but for anyone who's confused; the context for this clip is that Badgerspanner is a longtime Xisuma viewer who has been part of his community for like at least five years now, probably more, and they also happen to be engaged to Joe Hills

(I know some people were confused (including Cleo) but X does in fact know who Badgerspanner is, as you can tell from the fact that he was surprised to hear they were moving to America, because he knows they're British. He just didn't know that they're engaged to Joe. Even though Joe had definitely told him and the other hermits.)

For extra context, realPhali who made this video is also a longtime Xisuma viewer and a longtime friend of Badger's (Badger is actually still a mod on Phali's own Minecraft server, Shamblecraft)

oh my god

[hatchan]

the UHC CEO assassination is fascinating to me, this is a story I'm gonna follow

so far the consensus is that it was a targeted attack--there were other people in the area and the assassin shot this guy specifically. CEO had no security with him, didn't seem to know he was in danger. shooter seemed to know exactly where he'd be and he was waiting for him

According to NYT: "The pages on the UnitedHealthcare and UnitedHealth Group websites with headshots and bios for company leadership were not available after the shooting on Wednesday morning. It was not immediately clear why the pages were no longer accessible." fascinating! why?

"He had been chief executive since 2021, during a time in which the parent company and his division were rattled by federal investigations, even as it enjoyed profitable growth. The division has been criticized by congressional lawmakers and federal regulators who accused it of systematically denying authorization for health care procedures and treatments." hmmmmmmm you don't say. I wonder why someone would have it out for this CEO specifically hmmmmm

there was an INVESTOR PRESENTATION happening in the same hotel when everyone in the room starts getting alerted of the CEO being shot, and then dying, right outside. oh man if I could've been a fly in that room....

Again from NYT: "The insurance arm of UnitedHealth Group has also been under federal scrutiny because the parent company was the victim of a broad cyberattack on its billing and payment system, ChangeHealthcare. Private information, including health data, from more than 100 million Americans was compromised in the ransomware attack. The parent company paid $22 million in an effort to stop the hackers." f a s c i n a t i n g

apparently this was printed hella fast:

I wanna know, who works in the printshop for the NYPD? how'd they get that job? do they like it? who's their graphic design people? how fast did they get this big thing printed? calling the victim a "50-year-old male" who met "his demise" is a choice. I wonder why they made that choice.

the mayor apparently had to specify to the press "This was not a random act of violence" haha new york is totally safe don't worry about it

"Officials with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which runs New York City’s transit system, said that the shooting did not impact subway or bus service during the morning commute." LMAO. OF COURSE WE HAVE TO ASSURE EVERYONE THEIR SUBWAYS WONT BE DELAYED LOOOOOLL that is the most important thing after all

"On the third floor of the hotel, the company's annual investor conference continued seemingly without interruption as news of the shooting was just beginning to spread. Attendees mingled over cups of coffee, shaking hands and talking shop. “Someone got shot outside,” one attendee said to another as they made their way up from the lobby. Others took photos of the news crews gathering outside on their phones." yep this checks out

[sophie-frm-mars]

I just had a long convo with someone about the UHC ceo being shot and how he felt it's wrong in the long time term to celebrate the shooting of Anyone in broad daylight. Claims vigilanteism is not the answer bc bad actors can justify violence against minorities and something about this argument feels off to me? Even if he agrees that billionaires/corporations are responsible for untold amounts of systemic violence

There's a bunch here I could get into about trying to determine the morality of past events but it might come across as quite up my own ass so I'll save it for now

Look, fascists don't need a justification to do violence to minorities and if they do the justification is in a guy they like being in power saying they should do it, not in anti-millionaire political violence.

If we're asking a practical question about what effects this will have politically, there are a few reasonable assertions we could make and some whacky conjecture

It would be reasonable to say that this will not have a chilling or marginalizing effect on political struggle against private healthcare, because if being shot dead in the street is the new most radical option facing healthcare CEOs, the previous most radical options are more moderate by comparison. They would rather cede ground to single payer healthcare than literally die

It's reasonable to assume that this will inspire more political violence against the rich, as political violence tends to beget political violence of the same kind. There have for example been a whole spate of self immolations in the wake of Aaron Bushnell's, which itself came after someone in Atlanta did it a few months prior.

I could conjecture that the ruling class might push for tighter gun control, as they have done in response to working class armed resistance in the past. I think it's an often repeated fact that gun control only really gained any ground in American politics after the black Panthers started arming themselves

But no, I don't think it's reasonable to say or even to conjecture that this creates a higher temperature for violence in general, and while I agree with the assertion that "vigilantism is not THE answer", it simply will put the fear of God into some of these murderous fucking scumbags in a way that we are already seeing is making them walk back some of their worst impulses, as with the reversal of a cap on surgical anesthesia

[ethosiab]

His black eye is the natural one, and the red scarred one is a prosthetic! He can't see out of it, since there's really not enough space to do anything technical and fancy like that with the redstone (unlike with Doc's eye+faceplate which tbh is probably connected to his brain). It does, however, have a few little things he can do, like use it as a camera or a torch. So it's still a pretty neat redstone prosthetic.

proper PPE is reccommended for all redstone work, especially if you are tangotek, master of flinging his arms around forgetting he's holding a lit redstone torch.

[kvothbloodless]

Looking into the business side of the UHC shooting has really shifted my perspective on how to approach the practicalities of "greedy" businesses and similar things. To be clear, it hasn't in any way affected (and thus I'm not at all talking about) the purely moral side of things.

Disclaimers: Obviously for profit healthcare is morally repugnant, etc. etc. Please do not yell at me about the morality of private healthcare or how this entire post is evil because I'm discussing the situation at hand rather than the ideal world where we have public healthcare. Also, while I've done a decent amount of research over the past few days, I am still the furthest thing from an expert here, so please take everything I say with a heaping handful of salt, and feel encouraged to correct me if I make any dumb mistakes. Also also, most of this was realized by talking with friends, I did not just have an epiphany on my own.

That aside though, I've been looking at profit margins, and what contributes to costs. Mostly for the healthcare industry (insurance, hospitals, pharma, etc.) but I think this applies to most businesses (at least in America; this entire post is from a very American perspective). To vastly oversimplify, there are two types of corporate "greed", and the general categories of possible solutions look different.

The first is the one that Tumblr seems to treat as the only category, the one that we’re all thinking of when we say "corporate greed". This is where companies fuck over their customers/public to make big numbers even bigger, so they can keep expanding, make shareholders absurd amounts of money, etc (even this isn't actually that simple, but it is relatively kinda simple). This kind of greed can be affected/"fixed" by public pushback, government regulations, etc. Pharma companies fall into this category. The industry average for profit margins for pharma corps is in the large double digits, somewhere upwards of 50% (and to be clear that's taking into account the genuinely massive amounts of money they're investing into research and development, just to head off that line of argument). If a drug company is price gouging on a medication and it becomes a public scandal, they can easily afford to cut the price by A Lot, and still make a profit overall. If you pass laws that simply impose stricter regulations on production, or that cap prices, the companies will object and grumble and try to get around them, because that's what companies do. But at the end of the day, it's theoretically possible to just tell them to cut that shit out, and they Can do it.

Critically though, at least in healthcare, this is Not the category health insurance falls into. Nor most healthcare! This category only applies to businesses with a decent profit margin; the industry average for profit margins for both health insurance and hospitals is in the low single digits (and even though the executives are obviously insanely overpaid and ridiculously greedy, they still account for only a tiny fraction of these companies' budgets! Slashing the pay and bonuses of execs is not going to solve this problem)! Yes they're making Billions of dollars, but they're also spending billions. “Necessary” spending. We can discuss and debate Why this is the case (though it seems clear to me that the main culprits are massive inefficiency due to lack of centralization and the artificial, imposed scarcity on the number of new doctors and medical facilities), but I'm not interested in that here.

My point here is that, while obviously the execs of United Healthcare are greedy bastards willing to screw people over to make an extra .1% profit, the current system is set up such that they sort of have to be (again, this is not a moral justification). Like, the money has to come from somewhere! In the absence of government subsidies, a private insurance company is operating pretty close to the razors edge; if UHC wants to accept more claims, they've got to have higher premiums, or screw over their own employees across the board, or make up the money somewhere else (and again, slashing exec salaries and bonuses will not make a big dent here). This means that they are Not going to be nearly as amenable to public pushback, and even simple government regulations won't really work. If the government told UHC that they needed to accept more claims without raising premiums a corresponding amount (or slash all employees' salaries, etc.), then either UHC will find a way around those new regulations, or they will go bankrupt, and everyone they insured will have to go buy insurance from another company that did one of those other things.

While you Can rightfully still call this behavior greedy, it seems to me an obviously different Type of greed compared to the first category. It's a sort of systemically Enforced greed, rather than one owing to any given board's choices. Like, in the absence of single payer healthcare (obviously a better option), insurance companies Must be horrible and greedy because if they are not they will stop being a functioning company. And you can't really pass the buck! The profit margins for medical facilities and specialists and such are all equally small. This isn't a situation where you can say "well the insurance companies are unnecessary", because healthcare (in its current form, in the USA) itself is pretty expensive to pay for!

Prices are negotiated between a healthcare facility and each insurance corporation, so it gets a bit more complicated, but at the end of the day, these businesses rely on both the reliable but individually lower income from insurance companies, and the sporadic but insane price gouging they charge for people without insurance. And this sucks! But that doesn't change the fact that if you tell a hospital or whatever that they must significantly reduce how much they charge for, say, an MRI, or even an annual checkup, then they must either find a way to charge more elsewhere and make it up; they must fire employees or lower wages, lowering the quality of care; or they will go out of business. They just don't have a large enough profit margin to handle any sort of significant reduction in income.

Aha! I hear you say. While slashing executives salaries and bonuses wouldn't put a dent in expenses, slashing doctor's salaries would! And you'd be correct, to a degree. However, doctors have massive amounts of medical debt, and also regularly work 12+ hour shifts. Until that changes, significantly reducing their salaries (and it would need to be a Large reduction to make a useful dent in costs) is an extremely thorny issue.

So where am I going with this? No idea, to be honest. Except to say that, issues with murder and such aside, putting the fear of god into insurance CEOs quite literally Cannot make a major difference long or even medium-term. They simply do not have enough profit margin to play around with. As I said way earlier, this is not the sort of corporate greed that can be significantly "fixed" by public action or simple government regulations; without a major change in the entire system, private insurance companies are fairly essential to people getting decent healthcare, and those companies are obligated to be awful and greedy, or they will go bankrupt. I know I'm coming dangerously close to mentioning game theory and summoning Moloch, though this is really a couple levels below that, so I'll stop here.

Oh, except to say that, if you're dead set on shooting a CEO, go for a pharma corp one rather than health insurance.

[brehaaorgana]

More fascinating things about the UHC CEO assassination:

Reddit has taken to calling the assassin of the UHC CEO: "The Adjuster." Delay deny depose.

All of the medical professional subreddits hate UHC with....a truly deep level of passion and fury. Doctors and nurses hated that CEO on a visceral level.

One nurse wrote a rather detailed denial of claim letter as a comment satirizing denying care for the bullet wounds which honestly summarizes how bad our healthcare system is. There's also follow up comments denying the appeal.

Turns out the CEO was flown to a hospital not covered any longer by United, in true irony.

The identifiable backpack was apparently like...a Peak Design backpack, and they're famous for being a camera accessories company. (Also possibly the company is not great I'm learning bc they started supporting AI shit...)

The supposed hoodie (Levi's) and the Peak Design backpack keep selling out.

To be clear I am against the guillotine, as far as politics goes. I uh, saw what happened after the revolution and it was fucking terrible so I don't actually think this is a viable political stance to have. I also don't think that this death will cause long term changes that are needed.

But goddamn you've fucked up in life if you're not even involved in politics or a military, and people hate you this much.