#uhc kill

[chemicalarospec]

i dont really get what's so funny about Mr Luigi having The Lorax on his Goodreads -- I think I do too. however i did also make my goodreads at the ripe age of 11. so when it had me rate books I'd already read, the set was very much limited to children's books. Also I literally still a child. I think I was on that website illegally.

[chemicalarospec]

here's his full review

*through tears* ladies and gentleman, they got him

[mwagneto]

starbucks AND mcdonalds?? girl no the boycott. today's lesson is if he'd followed the boycott he wouldn't have even been caught

[nando161mando]

[travelingtwentysomething]

You know what's funny? The minute people start aiming higher and taking out the powerful and wealthy and "elite", they're going to change the gun laws. Because their goal has always been for us to stay fighting each other instead of looking towards them as the real threat to our life, liberty, and freedom.

[ididnineeleven]

the world in death note if light just started killing all the billionaires instead

[porrimina]

[batty4her]

This morning, I mentioned the assassination to my coworkers. 2/3 of them said they would turn in the shooter for the reward money, and I think it says a lot about capitalism as a whole simply for the simple fact that Brian Thomason has a body-count of people I feel it would be impossible to count that he has killed due to his selfishness, laziness, and overall greed.

Not one person I have seen has been upset about his death. Not one. In fact, when they announced his murder on Facebook, the majority of reactions to it were out of the (last seen) 65k+ reactions, just over 58k were laugh reactions. The GP is not unhappy this man is dead.

It’s the fact they know the GP has suffered in the hands of (capitalism) Brian Thompson, and still beg for their help in the name of reward money. They’re asking a public that has been brutalized and robbed by this man to help find him and are only offering them a measly 60 thousand dollars to anyone who has any information that will lead to his arrest. Money that will probably go back to paying debts — some maybe caused by Brian Thompson and his team.

$60k.

That won’t even buy you a house.

So sure, turn him in for that money. That money they stole and are giving back to you. But just like I seen someone say — this is is like Katniss shooting the arrow up into the arena.

This is why capitalism continues to keep devastating the population of the world, not just the American population. Conquer, divide, control.

Raise a glass to the new world, it only gets scarier from here, folks.

[chemicalarospec]

i haven't watched hasan in a while but tuned in (I've been thinking of doing so recently because of ALL the political news lol) and he's being so based "the solution to this isn't more vigilante justice, it's large sweeping legslative reforms"

[thequeenofsastiel]

People be like "You didn't even know who Brian Thompson was a week ago and yet you're celebrating his death??"

Uh, yeah, sorry man, just because I don't know the name of every evil person in the world doesn't somehow mean that I can't appreciate it when they die. Like, sure I didn't know who he was then, but I sure as fuck know who he was now, and he was a goddamn monster, so excuse me for not knowing that I should've hated him before now.

[b1tch-b1nary]

[citraforever]

well damn...

[msnihilist]

"you guys are celebrating a murder" yes, I am aware?? 🤨 that's literally The Whole Point

[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.

[fangirl-nadir]

Oh ffs, now they're threatening him with the death penalty? God, those fuckers are scared shitless of this guy and are desperate to cover things up