It's been an incredibly toxic place for years. I tried to ask questions 2 or 3 times only to be chastised by aggressive power users, or to have my posts immediately closed and locked for being "duplicates", even though they were not duplicates.
After the fourth or fifth time I just gave up. It seems like a miserable experience; I can't imagine why anyone would spend time on SE.
This has been my experience since the last 5 years or so. I find the only responses I get to questions are lazy copy pasted.. "we need more info..", the same "power user" doing this on multiple questions even when the question didn't require more info to be provided. And then when you point this out you get a rude response and action. If you do provide the information, they never return. I don't think they have enough qualified people answering questions.
Murder is always wrong. Vigilante justice is wrong. Violence is wrong. Plenty of people, when put to a vote, would have the majority of society deem them “unethical”.
If you want to put men to the sword based on a vote, pray you don’t get into the minority! Trump won the popular vote after all
The fact that he wasn't punished for a laundry list of offenses that would have put a normal person in prison for life has been a pretty clear indication that the rule of law is, in fact, dead, and that it is a popularity contest.
Sorry. Mea culpa entirely. “Rough day” doesn’t even begin to cover yesterday and the past week, and I am apparently acting more like an asshole than usual.
> Can you really be innocent while being a high level leader of an organization that is widely seen acting unethical by majority of the population?
Yes.
Loud social media trolls should not be considered as representative of the majority of people. Even if they were we do not live under mob rule so it wouldn’t matter if they were representative.
The method through which Ulbricht was charged was farcical, and the agents involved later went to prison for money laundering, extortion and obstruction of justice during the case. The Redandwhite situation was clearly a form of entrapment and is a classic example of US intelligence agencies intentionally extremizing political revolutionaries.
That said, Ulbricht has publicly apologized for his actions and confirmed that the chat logs weren't fabricated. He made the fatal mistake of Doing Two Illegal Things at Once, which ultimately tarnished his status as a folk hero.
This case is such an interesting crossroads. He has such insane support — I went to two improv shows this past week where he was the crowd choice for a topic and the shows received insane applause. But what he did was objectively what we consider to be bad… in our society, vigilante justice (especially against nonviolent offenders) is considered to be wrong.
I don’t know what SO should have done (well, probably not ban someone for asking questions, assuming we have the full story). But it’s so fascinating to see how companies have no playbook to work off of.
But what he did was objectively what we consider to be bad… in our society, vigilante justice (especially against nonviolent offenders) is wrong.
What are you talking about? What "vigilante justice"? The innocent victim, Brian Thompson, was murdered by a lunatic. He was not an offender. It was no justice.
Using such a weasel phrase like "by some accounts" means that there's absolutely nothing standing behind this. If there was any concrete thing Brian Thompson did that was any kind of legal crime or moral error, you'd be able to name it.
> UnitedHealthcare in particular denied coverage for post-acute care, or services and support needed after a hospitalization. In 2019, the insurance provider’s initial denial rate for post-acute care prior authorization requests was 8.7%; by 2022, it had increased to 22.7%.
Buck stop with him; between 2021 and 2022 he did that. Being the CEO and all.
And what's the crime here? What's the moral error? Can you elucidate? I hope you're not trying to argue that insurance should not be allowed to ever deny claims?
My understanding is that people are twisting themselves into pretzels to blame the murder victim for something, but they have extremely hard time finding anything explicit to point to, so they just throw allusions, hoping that the reader will complete the bogus argument in their head.
Here, for example, the parent poster brings up some statistic that some very specific category of insurance claim denial went up in some period. The allusion is that this is nefarious, and is a result of some specific action by the murder victim. The reader is supposed to interpret it this way. Of course, there's absolutely zero evidence for any of these claims, and when you lay it down like that, it sounds pretty stupid without anything backing this up.
It's a general category (all claim denials) and it did not go up, it more than doubled; as you are probably aware, it's far, far above the industry average. Also you're misusing the word 'allusion' which means 'to refer to something. You probably meant 'implication'.
You don't see a moral error with a health insurance company going out of their way to more than double the claims they deny, not because it's ethical or necessary but because they find ways to do so legally and the motive is profit?
Perhaps you're not well equipped to evaluate moral errors in the first place.
The only potential crime that article lists is allegation that the murder victim failed to disclose some material fact to the company investors. Are you saying that Luigi Mangione killed Thomson on behalf of the stock holders, who lost money by holding UnitedHealthcare stock?
Your comment is pretty clear example of the attitude around the case. People hate CEOs of companies that must make difficult decision, and so when they are murdered, they will twist themselves into pretzels to somehow justify that they had it coming.
I suppose it depends on how you view things and what tradition you're from.
I have a very old-style view, where courts provide systems that substitute for private vengeance and thus become legitimate by being willing to hear complaints of harm, so from my point of view, if a court hear the matter, the affected person can take whatever measures they wish, which of course has important consequences in cases of legal immunity-- when my view is taken, legal immunity is something one desperately wants to avoid having, because whoever has it must contend with private vengeance.
Again, you exemplify the exact attitude I describe. Can you point to any single decision that Thompson made that cost live and causes suffering? You can’t, but you assume there must have been some, because you start with assumption that the victim here is guilty, and only then try to find reasons why.
> Again, you exemplify the exact attitude I describe.
That's fine. I think you exemplify the attitude that lead to Thompson's murder and will lead to many more similar incidents.
> Can you point to any single decision that Thompson made that cost live and causes suffering? You can’t, but you assume there must have been some,
If denials tripled under his watch, as CEO you don't think he necessarily was involved in that? He clearly approved of profiting off of literal unnecessary deaths.
> because you start with assumption that the victim here is guilty
The most basic of reasoning shows he has some moral guilt, just not legal guilt.
P1 - He was the head decision maker
P2 - Decision was made to actively increase unnecessary deaths for monetary gain
If denials tripled under his watch, as CEO you don't think he necessarily was involved in that? He clearly approved of profiting off of literal unnecessary deaths.
You have yet to show that tripling denials of a particular category of claims is even wrong in the first place. Let me repeat: any system will deny some claims, so denied claims are not prima facie evidence of anything wrong.
Decision was made to actively increase unnecessary deaths for monetary gain
Nobody had shown any evidence whatsoever that anything like that happened. Not only are denied claims not automatically wrong, but also changes in denial rate do not even need to correspond to any decision or change in policy, but may instead result from changes of external factors.
He ultimately approved of that decision
What decision? You just assume that there had been some decision, that Bryan Thompson approved, and that it was nefarious. There is as of now zero evidence for this, this is just your speculation. Murdering people based on speculations like that is profoundly evil, and so is excusing it.
> You have yet to show that tripling denials of a particular category of claims is even wrong in the first place.
Honestly this is a pretty bad faith argument. They are denying at a significantly higher rate than their competitors, their internal policy focused around denying, and enough people are getting screwed over that a murder was committed.
But yeah, sure, assume this is all business as normal and not at all morally wrong to make your argument if you must.
> Nobody had shown any evidence whatsoever that anything like that happened.
Basic. Reasoning.
If claim denials triple during a time when a particular CEO is in place, that CEO would have had to have something to do with that.
> Not only are denied claims not automatically wrong,
They are on this scale and when the denials are bad faith. I can't prove that to you unless their documents get leaked, but that's for legal matters. For moral matters, the evidence supports that the difference from the drastic increase were indeed bad faith denials.
> What decision? You just assume that there had been some decision, that Bryan Thompson approved, and that it was nefarious.
Exactly, because he was CEO.
> There is as of now zero evidence for this, this is just your speculation.
He was CEO.
> Murdering people based on speculations like that is profoundly evil, and so is excusing it.
He was CEO. He oversaw a company going out of their way to deny claims even if you want to play devils advocate and pretend to be ignorant and deny that.
What he did was far more evil than a single murder, and what you are doing in defending the system that caused someone to feel that they had to murder it also more evil, the system that allows for shitty health insurance companies to cause so much pain and suffering. THAT, is evil.
What discovery? Are you suggesting that the defense in the murder case will be able to do any kind of discovery on UnitedHealthcare? How would that even be possible?
Ah yes, let's murder people we feel (without even any concretes to support this) are not morally pure, what a perfect idea. Which other CEOs do you think it would be justified to murder? Or are there any that are morally pure enough to you that they can live?
Just a guess, but I think if we found a way to put together a list, perhaps by voting or something, 99% of CEOs would be fine. And if the fear of being found to be in that remaining 1% is an effective deterrent against bad behavior, well maybe we ought to be making such lists.
Detective Chief Inspector Karin Parke and Trainee Detective Constable Blue Coulson unravel a deadly conspiracy involving autonomous drone insects (ADIs). After the controversial journalist Jo Powers dies in an apparent suicide, forensic evidence reveals an ADI embedded in her brain. The investigation escalates as similar ADI-related murders occur, including that of rapper Tusk, targeted after social media backlash.
The detectives uncover a sinister "Game of Consequences" launched by hacked ADIs, where the most-mentioned person under the hashtag #DeathTo is killed daily. The situation spirals out of control when the ADIs are used to surveil citizens, and public engagement with the hashtag results in mass casualties. A manifesto from Garrett Scholes, a former Granular employee and hacker, reveals his motive: to expose societal cruelty and complacency.
Efforts to neutralize the hacked ADIs fail, resulting in the death of 387,036 people who used the hashtag, including a member of Parke's team. The fallout leaves Coulson presumed dead by suicide, though Parke later receives evidence that Coulson is alive and pursuing Scholes abroad, leaving the case ominously unresolved.
Since anecdotes seem to be data points in this thread, I would say that as a non-American, the online public support for incident horrifies me and makes me think that this is a symptom of a collapsing society. It is also horrifying that so many Americans online seem to be bloodthirsty for more. Makes me not want to associate with them.
My intent was merely to point out that it is a commonly held belief, because it seemed like you were not aware. I didn't want to champion that belief.
But since you've invited me to name the moral error, sure. Accepting a fiduciary responsibility to chase after profits in a context where that very clearly means finding ways to deny people access to healthcare is a moral error. If you can't ethically do a job you shouldn't take that job. At best you're lying to shareholders, at worst you're killing people. The only ethical path is to go find a different job.
There is absolutely no way to run an insurance scheme without denying some people coverage. No system anywhere in the world, public or private, accepts every single claim. You must deny some claims, there's no way around it. This means that according to you, there's no ethical way to run health insurance system. I disagree, I think we need insurance to exist, and given that someone needs to run insurance, I don't think that taking such a job is inherently a moral error.
It's really just for-profit health insurance systems that I think can't be made ethical. If you have to deny some claims based on resource availability, that's an uncomfortable necessity, but we can do insurance-like things without asking people to balance human life against shareholder greed.
It seems pretty obvious that opting into a position where you'll have to do that might make you unpopular with the humans.
What is "resource availability"? In a non-profit healthcare systems, how exactly the amount of available resources is determined? Is there no person involved making a decision that causes the amount of available resources to change? Think about it. Consider, for example, politicians who set the healthcare tax rate. If they set it 1% higher, there will be more resources available. Does it mean that by not doing so, they deny care to some?
I strongly encourage you to think very carefully about this. Once you do, you'll find that there are no simple answers: you'll always have limited resources, and you'll always have to deny care to some people, and in fact it will always include some people personally making the call to deny care to some people. Any system that actually exists, public or private, does this.
> In a non-profit healthcare systems, how exactly the amount of available resources is determined?
You would generally count them. Like, if you have three people in need of a ventilator and you only have two ventilators, then one person is getting denied a ventilator today.
> Any system that actually exists, public or private, does this.
That's true, and I don't have a problem with it. Tradeoffs have to happen. What I have a problem with is incentive structures that attribute greater success for the people at the top when they create outcomes that involve more death for the people at the bottom.
Plenty of systems which actually exist don't congratulate leadership for reducing quality of care.
Presumably somebody involved in deciding budgets, a politician perhaps, or somebody with a rather political role in the hospital. Whoever they are, in most cases they're balancing ventilators against test kits or against hiring more doctors or against letting people keep more of their paychecks, or all kinds of other things which might indeed be more important for the patients/citizens/etc...
There's no fundamental reason why they have to be in a position where screwing the people who receive the care would ever be considered the ideal option. But that's how it is when you have a group of shareholders who have no stake in the quality of care. Thompson opted into a conflict of interest which need not exist in order to provide insurance.
Sure, and that's not exactly comfortable (maybe "reelected" shouldn't be a thing, idk). But if the people reelecting you are also the patients then the particular conflict of interest I'm worried about is not present.
True, and we need to get our shit together about that, but it's not an apples to apples comparison. A government allocates 100% of the available healthcare funding towards healthcare outcomes. A corporation (in the US) allocates 80%. You can tolerate a sloppier slicing if you're starting with a bigger pie.
You are right, BUT: Those denials have to follow contractual terms. I know a local (Europe) real world example where a friend of a friend (insurance company area manager) literally was told "this is your sum of money on claims that you can accept in this quarter, it cannot go above that". Which either you get lucky and make the quota, or you screw people over and hope they don't sue. And since we live in a world where the company wants "a little more" each year, well.. I don't see how this ends well.
The same problem does not apply to our social services (including health insurance) as they dont have to make profits at all costs.
The line is on why you are doing the denying. Are you doing so because providing the healthcare is literally impossible, or are you doing so in order to make more money?
In most insurance fields, it would be possible to only deny false claims. Take insurance of your house. The rates could be calculated that they can pay out all real damages to the full amount. Because the maximum damage amount is limited.
That's not true for health insurance, because the total possible damage (cost of treatments) is almost arbitrarily high, so that you cannot pay everything for everyone.
I don't want to defend the US system here. But it's not a problem that any country really solved, and one could argue about advantages and disadvantages of the different systems all day long.
The moral error is by refining and endorsing a company policy that went out of it's way to cheat people out of their due insurance, killing significant amounts of people as a result and ensuring suffering for even more.
Our legal system can't really address this, not until the electoral college gets disbarred or red state voters realize rejecting socialized health care hurts more than it helps.
Until that happens. things are going to get worse and people are going to get frustrated and start acting out. It's what happens when you have such a broken system.
Talking about "we don't do that in society" is ignoring the problem at it's core. You can't expect people to just obey the rules and respect law and order when it clearly isn't working for them or people they care about.
> vigilante justice (especially against nonviolent offenders) is wrong.
is it non-violent when they wield the system in a way to cause immense harm to the point where they are prolific killers indirectly and maybe even straight up directly? 90+ percent error rates in the AI that united used to deny claims is a violence. they denied 30+ percent of all claims.
not to justify murder in the street, but i'm fairly certain you'd be systematically prevented, logistically and businesswise, from building an alternative system.
Nope. You are free to establish an alternate system if you like. There are medical facilities that are flat rate and cash only, like the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, https://surgerycenterok.com/. There are also many cost sharing services, like this one https://altruahealthshare.org. Ultimately you also have the personal option of becoming a physician and setting any rate you choose for your services, including $0.
You are not replying to their point. It was not that murder was non-violent, it was that statistical violence is indeed violence. Even if you hold a “denied and go die bankrupt” stamp and not a gun.
Applying moral and ethical justifications to an event that is fundamentally caused by an ever-widening social rift is pointless.
It doesn't matter if he's right or wrong or justified or evil or a saint. This happened because tensions among non-filthy-rich and filthy-rich people are increasing to a point of non return.
Oh please, like if it's 1930 and you're walking behind Hitler knowing the future, you probably stab him. Or maybe if you're walking behind Ted Bundy in 1970. At least if you're a future-knowing trolley problem type person.
It's obvious that there are plenty of situations where murder in the streets is justified. Just that we rarely know of them in the moment.
If a terrorist is running down fifth avenue with a bomb, would it be justified to shoot and kill them? What if the shooter isn't a police officer, but a member of the public?
I think the people making those arguments are suggesting not that the murder that Luigi Mangione committed was is right, but that it was good. It is not right by the laws of our nation; it is illegal because it is not right. It is the government's function to investigate and prosecute that crime. The overwhelming popular support for Luigi suggests that there is a collectively-recognized significant justification for the crime. Like Ken McElroy, the town bully who was murdered in 1981, in broad daylight in the town square, by bullets coming in from different angles, and nobody saw a thing.
Hitler was well on his rise to power by 1930. None of us can know who the next Hitler is. We are all familiar with Ray Bradbury and Back to the Future, which told us about how you cannot really know the future or bend it to your will. Furthermore, vigilantism is against the law, and the justice system of the government also has the job of preventing violent uprisings for various and good reasons.
The collective feeling that everybody, and I mean everybody displays, and is clearly being censored on media, is that there is a weighing of the collective morality of the situation which does not add up. This young man has been charged with a multitude of crimes. He has been charged with terrorism. Like, I went to school for international law, and I am going back to my resources, looking at the definitions, and trying to figure out how that fits. To me, a terrorist is somebody who plotted or crashed the planes into the towers. The idea that Mangione's victim, through the decisions of the company, might have caused millions of unnecessary deaths, when there could have been different paths taken, it is an leap, but it is not abstraction that is out of the grasp of many persons who have faced the medical system, specifically with treatment denial letters, on an individual level. By the way, that school that I attended was in another country which gave me free public healthcare during the length of my studies.
New York Penal Law Section 490.25 "Crime of terrorism", which is one of the statues of the second count under which Luigi has been charged, reads: A person is guilty of a crime of terrorism when, with intent to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policy of a unit of government by intimidation or coercion, or affect the conduct of a unit of government by murder, assassination or kidnapping, he or she commits a specified offense.
I do not believe that the Luigi has intimated the civilian population. A shop in his hometown has a portrait of him depicted as Jesus. Luigi did not attempt to target a unit of government; he wrote an explanatory note to "The Feds".
I think that many what many people are saying is that universal, single-payer health care is expected to be a function of government, and in fact something like the opposite is being protected.
I really hope that the District Attorney has the argument for the second count pinned down, or that it is dropped. I think that is where the ethical test for this crime lays.
No, violence is violence only when it's physical and direct. For example, mental violence doesn't exist. Verbal abuse does not exist. And in this case, United Healthcare had committed no sin at all, because due to being a non-physical entity incapable of physically interacting with the world, it didn't physically hurt anyone. Therefore it committed no violence. QED.
Strange rationale. By that logic you are also a prolific mass murderer as you have not paid physicians to provide medical care to patients. Indirectly you have killed, well, everyone because you didn’t pay infinite money to provide unbounded medical care for every person who has died.
This is strange logic because anyone who is insured pay for other indirectly - that’s how insurance works: pull the money together so that anyone that will have bad luck of getting sick will use money from that pull. The assumption is majority of people won’t get seriously ill but once ill normally it would be financially devastating.
Basically, it is your moral obligation to donate everything you have, except for what little you need to survive. If we put that essay into this context, then not donating would indeed be violence, such as not saving a drowning child just because you don't want to.
His case shows that people do not believe that their society is a just one. If the high class do not act on this signal, they leave space for further radicalization and even more disruptive actors will utilize the discontent. Currently, they are attacking the symptoms in the new version of "beatings will continue until morale improves".
If we actually lived in a "just" system, when people are executed for murdering a single individual, which many people have been, we would certainly execute people for things like, say, losing billions of dollars in pensions for the elderly with greedy mathematical trickery.
In a just world, hundreds would have been executed for the financial crimes of 2008.
"Justice" only exists when there's threat of punishment. It isn't enough to have the moral high ground; you have to have the might and the will to enforce the moral ground on others.
Humanity will always live under systems of "oppression", but it's what that oppression looks like that matters, because there'll always be someone who takes advantage of a system's goodwill, and that must be punished swiftly and brutally, to deter anyone from abusing the system's goodwill.
Following the murder, I was thinking about how much non physical violence there is, that isn’t usually seen and judged as violence. Things like denying healthcare, shutting down companies and laying off people to benefit private equity investors, forcing people into bankruptcy, losing their homes, charging overdraft fees, etc.
The people behind that kind of violence can hide behind the layers of indirection.
Any healthcare system must deny healthcare. No healthcare system existing anywhere on this planet provides infinite healthcare to everyone. Denying healthcare is not violence.
In any economic system, units of economic organizations must sometimes dissolve, and people must be laid off. This is unavoidable. Laying people off is not violence.
In any society, debts are expected to be paid off. If people could just stop paying their debts, nobody would make any loans anymore. Forcing people into bankruptcy is not violence.
Frankly, your comment strikes me as exceedingly naive. "I only want ever nice things to happen, and bad things happening to people are violence". I suggest thinking about why these things happen, what would be alternative, and so we put up with these.
Ah, so it's the system that's bad. Can't do anything about it, only shrug and follow orders. Somebody else would have switched the gas chamber on anyway.
> Ah, so by saying that denying insurance claims is not violence, because all insurance systems must deny some claims
> Consider, for example, a public health insurance system like Germany. Do you think that Gesetzliche Krankenversicherung never denies claims? That it never denies care? Is it also violence when it does so?
Denying claims can be violence, it can also not be violence. There are other factors which you keep ignoring. Stop doing that.
I am ignoring that? This thread is literally full of people who take any insurance denial as automatically wrong. It is me who's asking people to think carefully about this!
If you say so. No one else is.
Did you miss the "gas chambers" part in the comment I replied to?
> This thread is literally full of people who take any insurance denial as automatically wrong.
Then go and reply to those people (if they are really in the room with us). In _this_ subthread nobody has said or implied that ANY insurance denials is automatically wrong.
"Literally hitler" wasn't directed at you personally, obviously, but you couldn't help but pick it up that way.
> Ah, so by saying that denying insurance claims is not violence, because all insurance systems must deny some claims, I'm basically Hitler.
You're probably purposefully derailing the conversation, but for the sake of others let me bite: pointing out the resemblance of following orders of a killing system and excusing the individuals working in this system as "order followers", has nothing to do with calling anybody "literally Hitler".
> Do you think that Gesetzliche Krankenversicherung never denies claims? That it never denies care? Is it also violence when it does so?
IIUC, those are also private companies or at least to a degree. So probably similar to american healthcare, just more regulated.
Let's take a look at a 100% pure public healthcare instead, for example La Seguridad Social in Spain.
It denies some claims, care, and can cause some suffering and death. The institution is administered directly by some leadership individuals, and to some degree even by the elected government. Those individuals are not driven directly by the "financial obligation to make the maximum profit" out of healthcare. However they indirectly are, there are decisions to be made on spending, and budget is not magically infinite. These decisions are hard: you can't make everyone happy and healthy, whatever the result, some people suffer and die. See the trolley problem.
So if a public healthcare system works badly, and causes too much pain and suffering, then some of these individuals can also be held responsible. It's just that in practice, in general any public system works more towards the benefit of society than for some shareholders.
To be blunt: if the government individuals take decisions that degrade the public healthcare system, for their own benefit, whatever that is, then those individuals should maybe be shot in public too. This kind of violence, terrorism, works historically well, especially if it isn't targeted at random civilians. Democracy is not simply the rule of the majority.
It's not a matter of awareness, the public knows how perverse the incentives of private health insurance are, and how a public system can do much better. But the private system will never be replaced in the current american political landscape - without violence.
OK, I’m glad that we agree that any healthcare system will deny care to some people. That’s my point: this is necessarily the case, so it cannot be automatically “violence” when that happens. It is extremely naive to believe that whenever that happens, the cause must be necessarily nefarious.
> It's just that in practice, in general any public system works more towards the benefit of society than for some shareholders.
I think that this is simply empirically false. You cannot just assert something like this, you need to provide evidence for it.
> To be blunt: if the government individuals take decisions that degrade the public healthcare system, for their own benefit, whatever that is, then those individuals should maybe be shot in public too.
And here is the critical question: is there any evidence whatsoever that Bryan Thompson made any decision like that? As far as I can tell, there is absolutely zero. Many just decided he must be guilty of something, but nobody actually points to anything in particular.
> It's not a matter of awareness, the public knows how perverse the incentives of private health insurance are, and how a public system can do much better.
Again, you are asserting something that’s far from being universally agreed on. Public healthcare systems have their troubles too, and if you ask anyone with experience with both, you will not find people universally preferring their public experience. Ask Canadians or Brits how long it takes to get a visit at a specialist, for example.
> That’s my point: this is necessarily the case, so it cannot be automatically “violence” when that happens.
You're going in circles around an argument that you made up yourself. Do you want a pat on the back?
> I think that this is simply empirically false. You cannot just assert something like this, you need to provide evidence for it.
Now read that out back again loud.
> Again, you are asserting something that’s far from being universally agreed on.
I said: "It's not a matter of awareness, the public knows". That cannot be read as "universally agreed on" in good faith.
> Public healthcare systems have their troubles too, and if you ask anyone with experience with both, you will not find people universally preferring their public experience.
I never claimed public healthcare is perfect, on the contrary.
You will find rich people preferring private healthcare, which are a vocal minority.
> Ask Canadians or Brits how long it takes to get a visit at a specialist, for example.
I don't have to ask nobody because I live in a country with fully public healthcare. I am glad that poor people have the same access as rich people, and that triage by urgency, not money, works well (again not claiming that it's perfect, since you give everything your own meaning).
The USA on the other hand are infamous for the healthcare bankruptcy and literal horror stories. I think you don't realize how non-existant your safety net is. It only works well for you when you don't have a major health problem, and while you have a relatively very good paying job.
> Any healthcare system must deny healthcare. No healthcare system existing anywhere on this planet provides infinite healthcare to everyone. Denying healthcare is not violence.
It is when the care is necessary; when the denial is part of a strategy to goose profits.
There are similar issues with the other statements you made.
> Frankly, your comment strikes me as exceedingly naive.
Frankly, your comment strikes me as willfully blind.
So when the insurance denies coverage, and so the doctors don't work for free on the case, and the patient dies, are the doctors perpetrating violence too?
In your contrarian urge to defend some of the worst of the status quo, you forget the insurance company's whole role is to pay for medical care.
I suggest you read up on this. IIRC, it was UHG's practice to deny claims indiscriminately to increase the personal burden of accessing medical care. Because, you know, if people pay their premiums to the company but it doesn't pay out, it makes lots more money for the shareholders.
It's weird how you seem to consistently elide motivations even when extremely relevant.
An insurance company's "role" is to distribute risk, not to "pay for medical care" without question. The perversion of what constitutes "insurance" in the US medical industry is the fault of our legal system and tax code, and the insane cost of medical care (which is ultimately the root cause of most of these problems) is down to the medical cartel (also legally enforced).
> Any healthcare system must deny healthcare. No healthcare system existing anywhere on this planet provides infinite healthcare to everyone. Denying healthcare is not violence.
Nobody argues against that, but United Healthcare had a denial rate of more than 30%, which is the highest among the major health insurance companies in the US. Coupled with the fact that they make profits off of those denials, it's hard not to call this non physical violence with the aim to generate more capital for share holders and executives.
> In any economic system, units of economic organizations must sometimes dissolve, and people must be laid off. This is unavoidable. Laying people off is not violence.
Again, absolutely agree. But it can be argued that doing so without any regard for individuals, their history with the economic unit and personal circumstances, is non-physical violence. Look at e.g. European employment laws for how this can be mitigated (not without some drawbacks ofc).
> In any society, debts are expected to be paid off. If people could just stop paying their debts, nobody would make any loans anymore. Forcing people into bankruptcy is not violence.
In every just society, the debtor has a responsibility as well to not lend money to people who cannot afford it. Giving somebody a loan they cannot afford and then bankrupting them is definitely non-physical violence.
> I suggest thinking about why these things happen, what would be alternative, and so we put up with these.
You put up with these because the US is a violent society with little regards for individual lives. Great for entrepreneurs and people with access to capital, not so great for much of the rest.
The alternatives have of course their own share of problems, but don't act as if the system is the only reasonable one.
> Nobody argues against that, but United Healthcare had a denial rate of more than 30%, which is the highest among the major health insurance companies in the US.
As it happens, there will always exist a health insurance company with highest denial rate among all companies. That's a simple mathematical fact: a finite set of numbers has a maximum number. You need to do more legwork to show any actual wrongdoing on anyone's part here.
> In every just society, the debtor has a responsibility as well to not lend money to people who cannot afford it. Giving somebody a loan they cannot afford and then bankrupting them is definitely non-physical violence.
This is absurd. When your debtors go bankrupt, you lose money. Nobody wants to lend money to people who cannot afford it.
> As it happens, there will always exist a health insurance company with highest denial rate among all companies. That's a simple mathematical fact: a finite set of numbers has a maximum number. You need to do more legwork to show any actual wrongdoing on anyone's part here.
This isn't correct. Mathematically (as you say), you can have all health companies have a denial rate of 0%.
Realistically it's impossible, but you did say mathematically.
Correct! I was more-so addressing the following statement, not necessarily the mathematical maximum one:
> As it happens, there will always exist a health insurance company with highest denial rate among all companies
If OP was going to start leaning onto "mathematical fact[s]" to support their argument, they should probably be accurate as well. Specifically there will be "multiple" health insurance companies with the highest denial rate (0), not "a" company.
> This is absurd. When your debtors go bankrupt, you lose money. Nobody wants to lend money to people who cannot afford it.
Weren't you just calling someone's comment "exceedingly naive"?
The poor and financially vulnerable (ie, most Americans) are at a systemic disadvantage when dealing with debt, bankruptcy laws, and the justice system. They are preyed upon by all sorts of people offering debt, at a higher rate than ever before, anywhere.
Not to mention government bailouts, which really changed the game with regard to balancing risk.
> This is absurd. When your debtors go bankrupt, you lose money. Nobody wants to lend money to people who cannot afford it.
That depends, amongst other things, on how much interest you charge in the interim. Payday lenders makes lots of money off of people who a) cannot afford their loans by any reasonable metric and b) default on those loans.
If you think payday lenders care one iota about debtors going bankrupt after collecting multiples of the original loan amount in interest, I cannot help you.
I get that you have an ideological position to defend and, based on your other comments in this thread have either an inability or an unwillingness to cede any ground. So while, yes, I do understand how loans work, I do not have any further interest in talking to you about payday lenders. Have a nice day.
And a healthcare system enabled by UHC will deny healthcare at a rate 3 times that of the rest of the industry.
So is every other insurer "under-denying" healthcare?
Or is UHC choosing to deny healthcare more than it needs to?
> In any society, debts are expected to be paid off. If people could just stop paying their debts, nobody would make any loans anymore. Forcing people into bankruptcy is not violence.
Insurance is the reason that these debts are so exorbitant in the first place.
Do you really think the ER trip and a few tests cost the hospital eighty thousand dollars, and UHC, magician negotiators that they are, managed to talk the bill down to $4,000?
And yet the hospital will charge you, the uninsured, $80K. Yeah, you might be able to negotiate it down some, but not like that.
The US is the only country in the world where deathbed divorce is a thing, so families won't be burdened with medical bills[1].
But I feel like you'd find that immoral, too.
[1] Lack of legal obligation to the debt (even beyond this, to family members in general) won't stop the hospital calling your family and heavily beating on you to pay the bill of your recently departed, even if you had no financial responsibility, using everything from appealing to a sense of pride, to outright deception and claims that they can sue for the unpaid bill.
I believe that healthcare is deliberately limited by insane policy. Contrary to opinion insurance is not the problem. It’s doctors charging exorbitant fees.
We allow this because we let them scare us into voting for strict education.
But the reality is education could be fixed to cut the price by probably 80% - making the much smaller insurance amount negligible.
I hate to say it but pinning it on a ceo doesn’t seem right. His job was to ration a scarce resource. But why is it scare? Because the authorities thru the police force puts an end to unlicensed people regardless of their skills.
I was talking to a friend/acquaintance. Her dad was a doctor did all kinds of innovative surgeries on animals. But wasn’t licensed. She said he’d be called in by doctors to do surgeries all the time because he was the best.
But he wasn’t licensed. So California shut it all down.
The price of healthcare is 5x because we let people go to jail without a crime. If they went to jail for reckless I e untrained practice of medicine i understand. But seriously right now the problem is lack of supply that has to be rationed.
> Thank you for your comment, I thought that there's nobody left here who understands this.
Dude, plenty of people understand that. However, it's no good playing the circular pass-the-buck game, where the insurance apologists blame the doctors for everything, then the doctor-apologists blame the insurers for everything, everyone blaming someone else for everything, ad nauseam; with the end-result of the status-quo being defended by mentally exhausting everyone.
And why do doctors make 5x what normal people make? It's because they have to pay off a million dollars in school debt and risk ruining their entire lives if they fail.
There are systems that cannot deny life saving care, and where everyone is necessarily insured.
It’s facetious to compare those to a system where 30 million have zero coverage and the rest are systematically denied life saving care as a profit making mechanism.
And yeah letting someone die when you could help them live is violence. When it’s baked into the rules it’s called systemic violence.
There are no systems anywhere in the world which don’t deny life saving care. All systems make life and death decisions. British NHS, for example, will generally deny life saving care, if such procedure will cost more than 30,000 pounds per quality-adjusted year of life you’re expected to gain as a result of the procedure.
Again, my point is that denying healthcare is not automatically something wrong or evil. This is something that must necessarily happen, and so the details as to why some healthcare was denied are very important. You can’t just say that someone being denied care is basically murder, like some people here, or point to some percentage of denied claims and pretend that this is prima facie evidence of wrongdoing. No, you need to actually do some legwork, and the haters of murder victim are not interested in that, they just want some release by dunking on a literal scapegoat.
I mean it seems you’re dunking on a strawman yourself. Like if I said Denmark virtually denies no life saving claims, and when it happens it’s due to edge cases, you’ll insist just because it occurs it’s indistinguishable from a system where it happens systemically and regularly?
I live in a European country with public free healthcare. Sure, you pay a portion of your income towards healthcare, so it's not really free etc. etc. If you don't have income, the state pays it for you.
There isn't any denial of healthcare. I never heard about anything like that. Sure, there are limits on availability of healthcare, particularly if it's some advanced or expensive procedure. For example, there is a place where they do radio surgery on the brain. There may only be one such place in the country (it's a small country). If you need that kind of procedure done, obviously there is a waiting list. And certainly some of those on a waiting list must have died.
But there is no denial of healthcare per se with someone making a decision to deny healthcare.
I'm confused, you said that there isn't any denial of healthcare where you are, but then described very clearly and explicitly how some people are denied healthcare, and they sometimes die as a result. Maybe you understand the word "deny" differently?
Of course it does. The patients wanted care early enough to save their live. They denied them that care. Hypothetical care after death is worthless.
Whether they denied that care by not paying for it (which means people could have gotten that care if they would have had the means), or by limiting the amount of care in a period of time, doesn't really matters for the person who didn't get it.
Why do you think the healthcare resources (number of beds, hospitals etc) are limited? Why isn't there a second hospital?
By the way, would they have paid for an operation in a different country if space would be available there? No? So they denied that healthcare.
Except it just doesn't, denial of claim has a very specific meaning, there's no reason to go all philosophical.
I'm sure there's plenty of cases where United health approved the claim and the patient also didn't get treated in time, it doesn't count as a denied claim.
This sub-thread is about denying healthcare. Not about denying claims. In fact, denying a claim (i.e. payment for healthcare services) has the moral implications discussed here mainly if not only because denial of payment is tantamount to denial of healthcare.
the big point you are missing is the denial of paying for treatment after it has been applied.
in germany (and probably most other european countries) you can be denied treatment if it is deemed unimportant and it is known that insurance does not cover it. you will never be put in a situation where treatment is applied but then the insurance doesn't pay leaving you with the bill unless you were made aware that the treatment is optional or you specifically chose a treatment that you could not be sure would be paid. payment for any treatment that is not optional can not be denied. if there is uncertainty you can also ask your insurer in advance, and they must give you a binding response whether the proposed treatment will be paid or not.
most importantly the doctors must inform the patient in advance if the treatment is insured or not. if they don't tell them that something is not insured then they can't demand payment from the patient.
Because you mentioned Germany and surprise bills...
My partner suffered a medical episode while we were traveling in Germany. Bystanders called an ambulance which turned up and checked her out and asked her to be taken to hospital for more tests.
She/we elected to not go with them.
To our surprise, about 6 months later after we returned home (to Australia), we received a letter in the mail (in German) that said we owed something like $500 for the ambulance, I forget the exact number.
How does that line up with "you will never face a surprise bill" in Germany? Or is it because we are foreigners?
We never paid but I sometimes wonder if something would happen should we return to Germany.
it's most likely because you didn't have insurance at all. if you had travel insurance you should have forwarded that to them. (but see below about calling an ambulance that is not needed)
if you don't have insurance you have to pay for everything of course. the surprise in your case comes from the unusual situation that the people who called the ambulance didn't know that you had no insurance, or more likely and you weren't even aware of how your situation is going to be handled.
it's unlikely that anything will happen if you return since the ones issuing the bill would not be notified in any way that you entered the country.
it is also possible that you could have disputed the payment since you didn't call the ambulance yourself (and i assume didn't ask anyone to call them). on the other hand if you had insurance you should have gone to the hospital because apparently insurance doesn't pay if an ambulance is called but not used. so actually, you didn't receive a surprise medical bill, but a bill for calling a service that was not needed (and potentially inconveniencing someone else who might have needed the ambulance, but now had to wait).
however, if you didn't ask anyone to call the ambulance then the bill is inappropriate because the law here is that if you call an ambulance but you don't need it, you pay, but if someone else calls the ambulance without you asking them, and it turns out to be unnecessary, then nobody pays.
since i lived in china i also don't have insurance in europe, so when we were visiting and needed treatment for a burn we had to shop around different hospitals to find out which one charged the least. costs for an ER visit ranged from 80€ to 250€ if i remember, and later we found a special hospital that was funded by a charity for the uninsured were we could go for after care for free. that works because the number of people without insurance is extremely small. mostly foreigners who somehow fell through the gap.
indeed. while i was reading up on this i kept wondering if there is no way to call a doctor without calling an ambulance. i know there are private doctors that you can call (i recently saw a report about a doctor who said that he gets called specifically because his patients do not want to be taken to a hospital (and don't need to)), but when you call emergency services then an ambulance seems to be the only option.
I live in a Nordic country and the state-owned insurance provider often denies healthcare, much like health insurance companies in the US.
Denying healthcare doesn't necessarily mean "leaving someone bleeding to death on the street" but rather refusing to provide certain treatments or medications. This issue isn't unique to the US. Granted, the healthcare system in the US is, in my opinion, significantly worse but claiming that healthcare denial doesn't happen elsewhere is simply incorrect.
In the US they deny treatment that is considered essential by their own doctors. I know you were saying the same thing, but your comment seems to minimize the difference.
It’s impossible for all instances of these things to constitute violence. I do, however, find the idea that they are sometimes akin to violence very enticing. Can you argue that? Can the actions of a stereotypical slumlord, one behaving within local law and never physically touching one of his tenants, potentially constitute violence? If not, how are you defining it?
> Running a shitty business, even an exploitative one, isn’t violence.
You know, it just hit me: the issue here might just be a semantic one, where people feel the need to lump very unacceptable and wrong actions into the category of "violence," because of the consensus belief that violence is almost always wrong.
There are things that are as unacceptable and wrong as violence but are not violence.
I really don’t think it’s that simple. The violence we’re talking about might be most easily defined as a particularly extreme form of coercion, one which causes deep trauma and/or physical harm. Doesn’t this capture the nature of a lot of violence? Isn’t it also evident that this wouldn’t always require physical contact by the aggressor, or even a single, tangible aggressor at all? I’d argue, for example, that whether or not hitler personally pulled the trigger on holocaust victims, he absolutely did violence against them. The level of indirection doesn’t preclude this.
People lump the inappropriate denial of necessary resources into "violence", as well as actions which happen because of the threat of physical harm.
For example, if a slumlord wants to evict me, even though I'm still paying the rent, the eviction is violence. It can either go two ways: either armed thugs will come to the building and physically grab me, rough me up and throw me on the street (at best) or in jail (at worst). Or I'll anticipate that happening, and lock myself out of the building in advance. In the latter case, is it still violence? Many people say yes, a shortcut around violence, coerced by the certainty that violence will happen otherwise, is still violence.
Or consider an abusive relationship: she knows he will beat her if she doesn't obey, so she obeys. No beating actually happens. A lot of people consider this violence too.
And consider a siege on a city (there's at least one happening right now). The people try to grow their own food in city parks, but whenever they do they, the parks are hit with big bombs dropped from planes. So they call on their allies to deliver food in. The first food trucks are also bombed. The second food trucks don't go in, they try to negotiate safe passage first. Is it violence against the people in the city (who have never been hit by a bomb)? Many people say yes.
In the narrow definition, violence is only when my fist hits your face, but in the broader definition, violence is whenever I use the laws of physics to force something to happen to you - whenever I take away your agency.
We can define violence as “that guy hit that guy,” and leave it at that and you’d be right. I think this alternative view is a recognition that a lot of other behaviors look very similar in how they work, like when the slumlord chains the emergency fire exit and a family burns alive because of it (an extreme example, but I do recall reading about a case along those lines). I feel like calling that sort of thing violence perpetrated by the slumlord is accurate to everyone but the pedant. It captures the essence of the behavior to me, this bringing about of great personal harm through either malice or sociopathic apathy.
> Things like denying healthcare, shutting down companies and laying off people to benefit private equity investors, forcing people into bankruptcy, losing their homes, charging overdraft fees, etc.
These things are objectively not violence. Violence isn't a word for "things that harm people", it very specifically means direct, purposeful physical harm. Don't distort the meaning of words for rhetorical flair.
Distorting the meaning of words is how these people justify their actions. Not giving them what they want? That’s violence now! Thus justifying retaliatory - or even pre-emptive - violence.
This is the same 'get out clause' that the antagonist in the Saw films uses: "I didn't harm those people directly, I only created the conditions under which they would be harmed."
The WHO defines four types of violence: a) physical, b) sexual, c) psychological, and d) deprivation. Denying healthcare feels incredibly close to d) and — semi-indirectly — involves a bit of c) and a) too.
By your strict definition of violence (direct harm) Hitler would walk free because he didn't personally gass the jews. Luckily we had trials[2] to determine that we still hold indirect perpetrators responsible.
"The people behind that kind of violence can hide behind the layers of indirection."
>[B]ureaucrats can be expected to embrace a technology that helps to create the illusion that decisions are not under their control. Because of its seeming intelligence and impartiality, a computer has an almost magical tendency to direct attention away from the people in charge of bureaucratic functions and toward itself, as if the computer were the true source of authority. A bureaucrat armed with a computer is the unacknowledged legislator of our age, and a terrible burden to bear. *We cannot dismiss the possibility that, if Adolf Eichmann had been able to say that it was not he but a battery of computers that directed the Jews to the appropriate crematoria, he might never have been asked to answer for his actions.*
Just a reflection, when you say: "especially against nonviolent offenders", I‘m pretty sure that a lot of people see it like this. People will directly die when a treatment is denied and for impacted people this is seen as a violent crime (even if indirect). This case is triggering more support as it has a potential impact on a the life of a lot of people.
Let's be real: the original super heroes avoided killing because children were their target market, and unlike with cowboys and outlaws or indians, it would have been unseemly by the standards of the time. Not because of some kind of big point about "just vigilantism."
A Dexter reboot where the protagonist targets extremely powerful people who commit mass violence within the confines of the law might actually be entertaining
I think if Luigi had merely assaulted the CEO to teach him a lesson, and not killed him, then we probably wouldn't be having this discussion nationally. Or at least not to the same level of debate. That (admittedly arbitrary) line is a reason most DC characters like Batman and Superman generally refuse to kill even the most deserving of villains.
Everyone you listed don't kill people. Very few people consider Batman, Superman, or Spider-Man to be objectively wrong. They consider them to be objectively right, and it's because they're enforcing the law when the police aren't around to do so.
"Law" is just another way of saying, "The bare minimum standard that we as a society will accept."
So when we have a society that sends a drunk driver to prison for 70 years for killing a family of four in a head-on collision, but we don't send people to prison for their lives for gambling with the pensions of teachers, firefighters, etc., for polluting the waterways and the earth itself, of course this is the ultimate, eventual outcome.
The only shocking thing to me about Luigi's case is that it didn't happen sooner.
1 point by thowawatp302 0 minutes ago | root | parent | next | edit | delete [–]
Yeah I listed all of those because it’s funnier when people mistake the vigilante justice’ thing for a ‘not killing people’ thing and then I can trot out Clint Eastwood and Dirty Harry, which was so popular it gets quoted regularly and had four sequels.
Batman, Superman and Spider-Man are not real. And that does matter. It is super normal to watch a movie and sympathize with what would be clearly bad guys in real life.
So yes, batman in particular would be considered bad by most people. He is just another gangster cause quite a lot of damage to the city on the regular. We do not care, because it is made up movie city.
Superman and Spider man afaik do not go around randomly assassinating people, but it is a long time since I watched that.
The ”nonviolent” part is interesting. We as a society has many examples of holding such people responsible for ”legal” and ”non-violent” actions that clearly resulted in deaths of lots of people.
Sorry about the rather extreme example and inviting Godwin. But consider for example Krupp (CEO) and Ribbentrop (Diplomat) who were both entirely ”non-violent” people, they personally did not draw a single drop of blod as far as I know. And the holocaust were perfectly legal according to the law at the time.
Violence with the stroke of a pen, killing via a rubber stamp, violence through withholding safety.
Mangione support is largely isolated to young age groups of certain demographics, according to polling numbers.
It’s actually really interesting to see when people think his support isn’t even a debated topic, when the numbers show most people, especially adults, don’t support his actions.
It's not most people, it's a plurality. There's a large 'don't know' contingent who either haven't made up their minds or don't want to share their opinion. Also, I would expect this data to skew toward younger people because anyone at or above retirement age is eligible for medicare, and thus not impacted by the decisions of private insurers to anything like the same degree.
...then it follows HN isn't. I happen to know they are both real for the purposes of existing and as a meta commentary on topics, since I participate in both. I also don't know anyone who wouldn't give Luigi a pass on a Jury, and these people don't vote the same.
Disregarding the existence of the sentiment, is the kneejerk noise of people thinking they are uber-rational thinkers or arbiters of reality.
I'll assume, in good faith, what your wrote was simply not what you meant.
> This case is such an interesting crossroads. He has such insane support ... But what he did was objectively what we consider to be bad… in our society, vigilante justice (especially against nonviolent offenders) is considered to be wrong.
It's worth noting that in our society lots of other things are also considered to be wrong, things which are done openly every day by some of the richest and most powerful people and organizations in the country.
That's why he has "insane support": the system is broken and has proven itself incapable of policing that other bad behavior.
Condemning people to death and bankruptcy is violence.
That said, we consider vigilante justice wrong because we believe there is supposed to be actual justice from a functional system. When the system does not function, extrajudicial attempts at justice will become more common. Just like people will poach more in a famine.
Non-violence...lines get blurred while being cut throat and cold hearted when you do it to thousands or millions of people. I'm surprised the GFC didn't have anything like this given the damage it did.
Bringing justice to the person responsible to hundreds/thousands of deaths and immense suffering is right - was the murder of Mussolini unjust? Hitler's?
If the justice system won't take care of it, there has to come a tipping point, IMO.
Unless they have a general policy of scrubbing records of everybody indicted for (but not yet proven guilty of) violent crimes, why do anything at all?
It’s so weird to me that people
say vigilante violence is so universally abhorred, when we literally have Batman and the Punisher as major draws at the theatre.
As Evan points out in TFA, this has happened before.
I'll add that it has happened more than a few times.
Past response was to shut down inappropriate behavior in the now (folks rambling on about the person in comments under some programming question, etc.) and let the temporary interest die out on its own.
This time... The response seems to be inviting the Streisand Effect.
NOTE TO ALL PERSPECTIVE WHISTLE BLOWERS
EVEN THE ANNOYING ONES THAT HAVE A LONG
ESTABLISHED HISTORY OF BEING JERKS:
YOU CAN REACH EVAN VIA SIGNAL
281.901.0011.
OLIVE BRANCH, ETC.
>Today's best known examples of damnatio memoriae from antiquity concern chiselling stone inscriptions or deliberately omitting certain information from them.
>The term is used in modern scholarship to cover a wide array of official and unofficial sanctions through which the physical remnants and memories of a deceased individual are destroyed.
Certainly not exclusively from official accounts. Not sure what your point here is?
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.”
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]
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
The point raised about removing the attributions of Luigi Mangione is valid and important. I don't sympathise much with the authors whining about being suspended for upvoting Mangione's post, just because they were Mangione's.
>Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".
And you missed my main point. There will always be trolls. Now think about how many people just stumble on SO, find a good answer, and up vote it without realizing that person is a murderer. They may not even recall a name of whom they upvoted.
Don't miss the forest of the trees if you don't wanna normalize social media taking action the law should (and is) doing.
The post makes it clear that the author made the votes because of who wrote them. He did it intentionally and systematically. That was the reason to suspend the author.
Reading before commenting saves everyone time, not only mine and yours, but everyone else’s that might stumble upon this thread.
This is SE's modus operandi, protest their choices around AI training, policies, etc., by deleting your content and you'll get your account locked and your posts reinstated because you're "hurting the community" and that is more important than your (now non-exclusive) right to your own words (and by non-exclusive, I mean SE's wishes about what to do with your own words matters more than your wishes).
My account was locked for deleting my own comments. I sent them a GDPR request to delete my comments. They ignored it. I posted on meta asking if they followed GDPR. It was deleted and I was banned from meta.
Actually, I don't think this is covered by GDPR, but if you are European (which is implied by the fact you invoke GPPR) you can and should file a GDPR complaint to your local DPA.
> This is SE's modus operandi, protest their choices around AI training
All of StackOverflow is already scraped and archived, so this is not a good argument, as you are actually just hurting StackOverflow while helping AI companies
Actually it's the opposite. If he were "ugly" by society's standards, the difference is that Corpgov would have an easier time burying this because they could rely on programming people through generational propaganda that ugly people are less deserving of compassion or are more likely to be crazy or creepy. Instead, they're having trouble tarnishing his public perception and it scares them.
Look no further than what Christians did to Jesus' image to see the effect in reverse. Now we're allowing the murder of babies and children in Jesus' hometown, because they don't look like the common Western perception of beauty, an effeminate white guy.
Let's leave physical appearance or other trite observations out of it and have a real conversation about the issue at hand.
Your claim was that him being handsome absolves him of his crime to the public.
My claim is that him being handsome only prevents Corpgov from successfully employing their typical associative propaganda. It's still up to the public to judge him as they see fit.
...Crooks? IE Trump Shooter? Or is there a different person just named Thomas Matthew? I'd think there's (a) a significant difference when someone fails, (b) more unity in dislike of the insurance system, and (c) Crooks is weirdly inscrutable in terms of motivation.
Yeah, him. Well, he was killed, hard to perform questioning in his current state. I bet he would be used as a martyr if he would have a prettier face. I bet if the roles were reversed, Luigi would try to kill Trump and failed, and Crooks would successfully shoot the CEO, all attention would still go to Luigi.
But yeah, this is cheap talk, I don't have any proof obviously.
I agree that there's like a true crime fangirl sort that probably goes for Luigi either way just on looks maybe, but I don't think that would really be more than a marginal difference. There are still a fair variety Christopher Dorner shirts in circulation, for example, and he's no model, despite police issues being more divisive than insurance and the whole situation being kind of murky.
tl;dr it seems your attribution on StackOverflow can be stripped without providing any reason.
There may be several good reasons (eg to avoid spending time on cleaning up unrelated to SO issues due to the notoriety of the account) but none was communicated to the community.
There is a certain irony in this, given that such behaviour (demonstrating that rule of law applies only to the peons) is what has so inflamed the public in support of Mangione.
Ok, show me a non-peon who shot a man in broad daylight and on video and didn't face the law afterward.
Edit: I mean on purpose, obviously. Drunk driving hardly counts. (Nobody gets in a car drunk with the intention of hurting anyone, they are usually just trying to get from A to B.) Accidents don't count. We're talking about a comparable action here, something that meets the legal definition of murder and which was also not prosecuted. Deeds from war probably don't count because it doesn't meet the definition of murder under law (although, many war crimes and misdeeds abroad are punished) and soldiers are peons. Cops killing people on duty don't count because they aren't doing it unprovoked (when they do, it is usually prosecuted as murder), and they too are peons.
Also, to the people complaining about the edits, sorry I can't reply to 50 comments all saying about the same kind of stuff. I keep hitting the rate limit.
As someone else mentioned Duck, I’ll add all the questionable police shootings that gets a slap on the wrist as the Police can be seen as the enforcers of the upper class / c-suite
They ad up though. How many DUI murders are equivalent to a single premeditated murder?
But yeah, people in these positions rarely need or want to directly kill someone, they have other means to achieve their goals.
Yet many financial or other white collar crimes are usually never prosecuted or result in a slap on the wrist.
Obviously they are not the same as murder but still the impact ads up. Defrauding or ruining thousands of people or crashing the global economy is not that far off.
Then you have police officers regularly getting away with outright murder and facing no consequences (of course that’s a different class)
Right! It was an accident, not murder! Even if they were drunk. And high. And on Valium. And doing 70 in a residential neighborhood. And on a restricted license from a previous DUI...
...Doesn't mean they meant to kill someone! Completely different crimes.
There has been worse, such as the affluenza case. I don't think peons get away with running over a bunch of people and then claiming they didnt know better because they grew up too rich.
The thing here is, the non-peon has other means to get the same result, just caring about if he did it or not does not make the situation less worse - same intention, same severity.
Not a conspiracy-theory fan or anything but this basic power distribution is obviously skewed for people who are rich(er) and that's a fact.
Absolutely blows my mind that, in 2025, anyone can treat getting in a car drunk and causing death as anything less than premeditated. Motonormativity strikes again, I guess.
CIA officer Allen Lawrence Pope flew a B-26 bomber targeting civilian merchant vessels in Indonesia as part of an operation to overthrow the Indonesian president by weakening the economy and inspiring local discontent. He personally claimed to have "enjoyed killing Communists". His plane was shot down, and he was eventually returned to the US, where he continued to fly planes for the CIA.
Does this count? Or is the government allowed to indiscriminately kill civilians whenever and wherever they feel like it?
Bug issue is we have more than enough research and awareness that you can consider drunk driving a "choice" not just some unfortunate accident. You're not relieved of all mental cognition when you're drunk.
This is the reason why Kamala was predicted to win. In reality, the "I don't care which candidate is in the office" was the top choice this recent election.
I would argue the 2024 election was quite the opposite.
> More than 155 million Americans voted in 2024: 156,302,318 to be exact. That’s the second largest total voter turnout in U.S. history in absolute terms. It is also just the second time that more than 140 million people voted in a presidential election.
The relative turnout is always going to be more interesting given that population growth means you'll almost always soon exceed your total turnout within a few election cycles:
> In relative terms, voter turnout nationally in 2024 was 63.9 percent. That is below the 66.6 percent voter turnout recorded in 2020, which was the highest voter turnout rate in a U.S. presidential election since 1900. Nonetheless, turnout in 2024 was still high by modern standards. The 1960 election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon (63.8 percent) is the only other election in the last 112 years to exceed 63 percent voter turnout. If you are wondering, the election of 1876 holds the record for the highest percentage voter turnout: 82.6 percent. That was one of America’s most controversial and consequential elections—and not in a good way. It was also an election in which more than half the adult-age population was ineligible to vote.
Don't use absolute numbers here, that's lying with statistics.
The correct metric would be relative turnout and that doesn't support your claim:
> In relative terms, voter turnout nationally in 2024 was 63.9 percent. That is below the 66.6 percent voter turnout recorded in 2020, which was the highest voter turnout rate in a U.S. presidential election since 1900
Speaking of relative: since the term "landslide" has been thrown around in the direct aftermath of the election quite a bit, it's interesting to note that nationwide, Trump only received 1.5% more votes than Harris.
This is especially telling in the light of the numbers you just gave on voter turnout.
The enthusiasm gap was entirely on the Democrat side this past election. Donald Trump won considerably more votes this past election than he ever has. There are also a significant number of prominent former lifelong Democrats that switched to being Trump supporters. Joe Rogan, RFK Jr., and Elon Musk come to mind.
> Trump won 77,284,118 votes, or 49.8 percent of the votes cast for president. That is the second highest vote total in U.S. history, trailing only the 81,284,666 votes that Joe Biden won in 2020. Trump won 3,059,799 more popular votes in 2024 than he won in 2020 and 14,299,293 more than he won in 2016. He now holds the record for the most cumulative popular votes won by any presidential candidate in U.S. history, surpassing Barack Obama. Running three times for the White House obviously helps.
Quite astonished to see Elon Musk being used as an example of someone whose views are worth following. If someone goes from e.g. Red Cross employee to ever more worrying statements and eventually outright racism and misinformation, I'm worried what happened to them (some disease?) more than thinking "ah crap, the racism party was right after all, let me go and vote AfD now"
People can care and think the two candidates with a chance to win are too bad to endorse with a vote, leading them to stay home and spend their time more wisely than in what they might consider to be a farce of democracy.
They may also live in an area where their preferred candidate has no chance of winning, making their vote a waste of time.
Of course it makes a difference to vote for what you actually want, no matter if they win this time. If you don't have an appointment at the euthanasia office and you (or someone who can vote in your name) is in good enough health to reasonably go, I can't (currently) think of an argument why it wouldn't be worth one's time to vote for who should govern you
So, turnout was still really high but not literally the highest in 120 years. Who's talking about lying with statistics again?
This is all worthless anyway. We don't use the popular vote to determine presidency. Reports show That turnout among youth was lower than 2020, but still really high in battleground states. That tells me the youth already lost faith of their vote counting.
In the case of Mangione, some stats proved his support reached the real world. If I remember correctly, something like 43% of <30s approved of his crime.
31% positive for those under 45, 8% positive for those above 45.
41% negative for those under 45, 77% negative for those above 45.
Not the majority, even for younger people. And remember, this is just U.S. opinion; people in other countries might view this differently (likely even more negatively).
Not an American, so I don't really have much say in it. But, if 31% of your younger population is thinking that assassination was justified... That's tens of millions of people. I would be wondering why, and how that is even acceptable. It's definitely showing how it can't be categorized as black/white issue.
Ah, thanks, I forgot the real numbers. That's still tens of millions of people supporting an assassin, which majority or not, should tell you something about this country.
Look at the website for that polling company. It is bizarre. None of the people on the people page have the company on their LinkedIn pages. Seems to be astroturf.
Edit: look at the photos of the people… AI generated perhaps?
There are actual statistics about this past memes though.There were conservative personalities dogged down in trying to reject Luigi.
I get your point. But the key difference is that "giving support" is a lot different than getting out to vote (which pains me to say). Statistically, 58% of those young people voting for Kamala didn't even bother going to the polls.
The worst spreader of this was the justice system though. You escalate crimes so high in a hug profile case, of course it will spread like wildfire.
This entire song-and-dance from executives, media, platforms, and the general "status quo preservationists" over the last month in response to Luigi is priceless.
They seem to have a high desire to place any disrespect they can on what seems to be an otherwise revered political activist in recent times; and it's only further fueling the discussion, and in all likelihood - probability for successors.
They would have been smart to play a leveling field, to treat Luigi's act with an element of absurdity, which would cause everyday people to question if their relatability towards Luigi was warranted or even made sense. Instead, they played a hand that the fearful would - because they are, and only validated the vigilante's narrative - because it is.
Administrators reflexively lie. They are committed to preserving whatever institution employs them, not to any objective standard of truth or behavior. I have lost count of how many times I have highlighted such behavior over the alst decade.
Me as well, but instead highlighting their lack of commitment to morals and integrity; rather than standard of truth or behavior - equally valid take, mind you!
I find it hilarious that they can't even keep their power in check to save it for when it would REALLY matter... but they just cant help themselves, they love to execute the control as quickly as it is available even though this leaves a trail of erosion.
An obvious worldwide trend of complete speech control, right in the open for all of us to follow and see. Instead of just waiting a bit longer... until there was no way to stop it (maybe its already too late?) But i feel like this is too soon to pull this trigger, we still have time to stop using all these large platforms that aren't even vital to our lives, to make open and peer to peer alternatives
Sure -- the two ends of the political horseshoe do seem to admire political violence more and more. But I'd take issue with "revered". Perhaps "revered" among the very liberal and very online, all of whom must certainly be mentally ill to revere political violence in the US in this climate.
And to think what will rise from the ashes of lefty political violence will be a lefty utopia? Of course it will be fascism. Of course.
"Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control."
The UN isn't going to build you a house or grow you any food or really do anything. It doesn't matter what they say. I can write lots of pretty words about how everyone should have a pony and never be sad when I'm not responsible for making it happen.
It's a set of guidelines, not a set of promises from the UN. Countries/societies/communities are who implement policies and systems that support and correlate with these extremely-broadly-agreed-upon guidelines.
My point is that health care is absolutely an element of rights (though perhaps categorized separately from _civil_ rights, though that's getting quite nitpicky).
I don't think the UN is the ultimate arbiter of what is or is not a right. Not that something being a "right" really means anything unless you have a way to enforce it.
At the time of this Universal Declaration of Human Rights being published, the UN had 54 member countries[0]. Not sure what organization in human history is better positioned to author such a declaration.
Further, nitpicking around the definition of "rights", or who is worthy of declaring them has zero relevance to the point I'm making - that health care is traditionally an element of human rights policies and/or has a deep connection to the subject of human rights.
People die when they’re denied affordable healthcare. They see their loved ones be treated like shit by insurance companies. Its another form of extreme injustice to those who experience it, similar to war and civil rights.
Don't you think thats jsut so ironic? It's not a civil rights issue in the USA and that is the exact problem.
The healthcare system in America is completely dysfunctional. Countless people's lives are being ruined and lost. Corporations like UnitedHealthcare are intentionally perpetuating this. The leaders of these companies are conciously complicit in all of this.
There are reforms being proposed constantly because of these incredibly predatory and exploitative Corporations, again conciously lead by these leaders.
These Corporations and the people leading them are evil, they're exploiting innocent sick people for profit and they've managed to convince people like you that it's not a civil rights issue. That is the exact problem here.
Be careful with this horseshoe theory, as it's been around for more than a century without any real traction in academic research and in fact been very much contradicted by recent studies. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
This has to be one of the goofiest nitpicks because remove the "horseshoe theory" language from above the point and the above point is the still the same.
"Sure -- the two ends of the political spectrum do seem to admire political violence..."
The images of the most effective human rights leaders have been so whitewashed.
Many of the greats were definitely killers. Nelson Mandela famously founded a "terrorist" organization and for years refused to condemn any partisan violence.
Yes, but simple as -- Nelson Mandela is not Luigi Mangione.
This isn't apartheid. Get a hold on your horses and grow up. You live in a republic. You need to convince other people single payer health care is the right policy.
>You need to convince other people single payer health care is the right policy.
I think we've effectively already done that. What people actually want does not impact the way in which our government functions, despite popular belief.
The people in this country have absolutely no power and are tired of it. You can't vote out a parasitic system that exists only to extract as much from you as possible. The people who "represent" us only focus on culture war bullshit INTENTIONALLY, to distract from the fact that the one of two preselected candidates we have basically represent the same despicable capitalists and their same interests of stripping us of everything you have so they can have more shit they don't need, while the rest of us are fighting over their droppings.
You definitely haven't. Lots of Americans would be deeply unhappy if single payer healthcare were implemented tomorrow. Say what you will about whether they should be convinced, but they haven't been.
The majority is convinced. Nearly 70% support Medicare for All across multiple polls and that’s with the leadership of both major parties, corporate interests, and news media aligned against.
> What people actually want does not impact the way in which our government functions, despite popular belief.
The US just elected a president despite a years-long coordinated media and legal effort to make him disappear, along with multiple assassination attempts. So, yes, what the people want does actually matter. They just don't happen to want what you think they should want.
And four years before that they elected a literal corpse because they were so sick of Donald Trump. And yet, somehow, the 2024 election was borderline the same.
Did literally anyone want Trump v Biden v 2.0? No. Literally nobody wanted that.
Did anyone actually want Kamala? No. Literally nobody wanted that.
>coordinated media and legal effort to make him disappear
Donald Trump is the most reported-on person of the past 10 years. This sentence does not make sense.
>along with multiple assassination attempts
You put this in the same sentence to make it seem like his "assassins" were on the same page as the media. They were not. Both of them were highly ineffective and downright cringey with their plans.
> So, yes, what the people want does actually matter.
No, it doesn't. Unless what they want aligns with what the ruling class and interest groups want. [0] The propaganda arm of the ruling class, of course, endeavors to get the public on their side precisely because violence ensues when they push too far without public buy-in.
The ruling class used its propaganda arm to manufacture consent for "I don't like him as a person, but he's good for the economy". I imagine this also represents many of their own views on Trump: what they appear to support is not necessarily what they support. That is, they might very publicly and loudly say they don't like him, but they love to see their decreased tax payment come tax season.
None of this is ideologically binary though. The ruling class is going to support whatever it thinks will allow it to continue to be the ruling class. They're not always in 100% agreement on what that is (or, at least, they want to have that appearance). If they aren't careful (and they haven't been as of late) and continue to whittle away at the populace's material conditions, it will lead to more violence, and possibly violent revolution.
>The people in this country have absolutely no power and are tired of it. You can't vote out a parasitic system that exists only to extract as much from you as possible. The people who "represent" us only focus on culture war bullshit INTENTIONALLY, to distract from the fact that the one of two preselected candidates we have basically represent the same despicable capitalists and their same interests of stripping us of everything you have so they can have more shit they don't need, while the rest of us are fighting over their droppings.
I miss old-school conspiracy theorists like Ron Unz who actually have sophisticated arguments for what they believe.
The internet is now full of handwavey conspiratorial BS that's "not even wrong". Who is writing all of this stuff?
At least the 9/11 truthers made specific false claims.
Again, the distinction I'm drawing is: 9/11 conspiracy theorists at least tried to present factual arguments for their claims. You haven't done so, and I don't think you ever will. (Insofar as your "claims" can even be hammered down -- they're incredibly vague.)
It's not a point in your favor that your flavor of conspiratorial thinking is so widespread despite its thin evidence base.
"People on twitter will really be like "you believe in voting? that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, firebombing a Walmart" and then not firebomb a Walmart" [0]
Well, Luigi firebombed a Walmart.
Is that a valid strategy for enacting societal change? Perhaps not. But this republic accepts and engages in war. And as Clusewitz says, ""War is the continuation of policy with other means." [1]
Perhaps Luigi is also pursuing policy change through other means. I have to say that watching American politicians and law enforcement agencies treat the man who at worst committed one murder (alleged; innocent until proven guilty) with the wrath and civil rights abuses previously only reserved for terrorists associated with 9/11 makes me believe that his actions genuinely shocked the system.
>the wrath and civil rights abuses previously only reserved for terrorists associated with 9/11 makes me believe that his actions genuinely shocked the system.
When people responded positively or indifferently to the killing of Thompson, the ruling class took notice. That's REAL power, a new sensation to most Americans. I can hope only good things can come of this realization.
Regardless of whether or not you think it's valid, it's clearly very effective. No major social change for the better has EVER happened in history without such actions.
It seems to go like this:
1. One group calmly demands some sensible thing. They might do some protests.
2. The powers that be say no, because they like the status quo. They might arrest some people for peaceful protesting.
3. A different group does some violence.
4. The powers that be acquiesce to the first group because the alternative is continued violence. The second group has no basis to continue the violence once the first group is acquiesced to.
5. History paints the first group as the ones who caused change and the second group as bad people who shouldn't have done what they did.
It's got to be one of those psychological sales tricks. Door in the face technique?
Anyway, this is the ONLY way that regular people have EVER caused things to change for the better, so take that into consideration. (Whatever counter-example you're thinking of is probably not actually a counter-example)
> Perhaps Luigi is also pursuing policy change through other means.
Luigi, a person with zero history of political activism, with no record of organizing for anything, decides his only open political alternative is to kill the CEO of an insurance company, not registering new voters or organizing his workplace for better health coverage or driving old folks to the polls.
I don't know? That sounds less like rational political activism than a mentally disturbed lone gunman to me.
It sounds like someone who has analyzed the situation and decided that this is the only thing that works, and that it's better if someone without a record does it.
The average American citizen has less influence on politics in their "republic" than a citizen of a dictatorship. Only the will of the financial elite actually has influence. See Gilens and Page 2014.
It really doesn't matter if people are convinced to want single payer or not, it isn't going to happen. There are many, many systems in place to prevent the will of the people from happening if the elite don't want it.
Be careful what you wish for. I live in Canada. We have single payer health care here. The system is collapsing. Practitioners are getting burned out and extremely unhappy. Waiting lists for many common procedures just keep getting longer and longer. Many people don’t have access to a family physician and ER waiting rooms are overcrowded.
Oh, grow up. Nobody is saying "Murder is ok". They are saying that some killing, sometimes, can be worth it to further a certain political aim, which is obvious to anyone who knows any history.
Are you saying the murder of Brian Thompson is ok, or not?
If it’s ok to murder the CEO of a health insurance company, how about the CTO? How about a director? How about a manager of claims adjusters? How about an adjuster?
How about the CEO of Exxon? How about Twitter? What about a engineering manager of the team who actually implements the parts of these companies you think are evil?
Don’t tell me it can’t happen - if lots of people are on Luigi’s side, there will surely be a lot of diversity among the opinions of his followers. Somebody shot 3 people at the YouTube HQ because the company was biased against veganism.
What’s the limiting principle here? Are you sure you aren’t on the “ok to murder” list?
I mean the polls weren't really wrong re: 2024? But even if they were, wouldn't such polls, if biased re: Trump and law and order Rs, be worse for Mangione?
2024 election polls were wrong. Every single one had it either at a coin-flip odd between the two, or Kamala leading 1 point. It was 2 months ago, this isn't hard to remember.
How it came out, in fact, was Trump winning popular vote with 2 million more votes than kamala, and almost 90 more electoral votes. That's FAR from coin-flip odds, and don't even get me started on the swing state polls, with Trump winning every single one.
-----
Yeah, the biased nature of most people not wanting to publicly sympathize with an early political vigilante WOULD make polls regarding him worse, despite the fact they do. I completely agree with you.
>2024 election polls were wrong. Every single one had it either at a coin-flip odd between the two, or Kamala leading 1 point. It was 2 months ago, this isn't hard to remember.
>How it came out, in fact, was Trump winning popular vote with 2 million more votes than kamala, and almost 90 more electoral votes. That's FAR from coin-flip odds, and don't even get me started on the swing state polls, with Trump winning every single one.
It sounds like the polls were off about the popular vote by a few percentage points at most.
That meant a lot in the US election context, because the candidates were neck-and-neck.
It wouldn't change the basic picture of Mangione's support in the YouGov poll.
Why do I see so many basic reasoning errors like this on Hacker News? I thought this was supposed to be an intelligent forum with intelligent posters.
>"It wouldn't change the basic picture of Mangione's support in the YouGov poll."
My single sentence underneath the horizontal divider in a sub-thread that primarily diverted to discussing the 2024 Election polls, and their accuracy, addresses that. Why didn't you quote that anywhere in your reply?
>"Social desirability concerns can be seen as a special case of the threat of disclosure, involving a specific type of interpersonal consequence of revealing information in a survey—social disapproval. The literature on social desirability is voluminous, and it features divergent conceptualizations and operationalizations of the notion of socially desirable responding (DeMaio, 1984). One fundamental difference among the different approaches lies in whether they treat socially desirable responding as a stable personality characteristic or a temporary social strategy (DeMaio, 1984). The view that socially desirable responding is, at least in part, a personality trait underlies psychologists’ early attempts to develop various social desirability scales. Though some of these efforts (e.g., Edwards, 1957; Philips & Clancy, 1970, 1972) recognize the possibility that social desirability is a property of the items rather than (or as well as) of the respondents, many of them treat socially desirable responding as a stable personality characteristic (e.g., Crowne & Marlowe, 1964; Schuessler, Hittle, & Cardascia, 1978). By contrast, survey researchers have tended to view socially desirable responding as a response strategy reflecting the sensitivity of specific items for specific individuals; thus, Sudman and Bradburn (1974) had interviewers rate the social desirability of potential answers to specific survey questions.
>
>Paulhus’s (2002) work encompasses both viewpoints, making a distinction between socially desirable responding as a response style (a bias that is “consistent across time and questionnaires”; Paulhus, 2002, p. 49) and as a response set (a short-lived bias “attributable to some temporary distraction or motivation”; Paulhus, 2002, p. 49).
>
>A general weakness with scales designed to measure socially desirable responding is that they lack “true” scores, making it difficult or impossible to distinguish among (a) respondents who are actually highly compliant with social norms, (b) those who have a sincere but inflated view of themselves, and (c) those who are deliberately trying to make a favorable impression by falsely reporting positive things about themselves"
Why is it that so much online discussion of Mangione's actions is supportive?
Wouldn't social desirability bias predict that people would be reluctant to support Mangione's actions in any way which might be traced back to them personally?
Hypothetical evil plutocrats would be far more likely to dig up your social media history to get your take on Mangione than somehow obtain your response to a telephone poll.
The supportive online climate suggests that supporting Mangione could even be more socially desirable. There is social pressure to support him.
In any case, your Harris/Trump example suggests that social desirability effects should be on the order of perhaps 2-3 percentage points in a poll. So it wouldn't represent a drastic change to the overall picture.
My theory: Mangione cleaves society along an "extremely online" vs "touch grass" axis.
The passionate social media addicts, who see conspiracies and exploitation everywhere, support Mangione.
The "touch grass" people understand that healthcare is a systemic problem which requires systemic solutions. Political murders undermine the social contract, increase the likelihood of subsequent political murders, and contribute to the unraveling of society.
The "touch grass" people are underrepresented in online arguments, but well-represented in a randomized poll.
>"Wouldn't social desirability bias predict that people would be reluctant to support Mangione's actions in any way which might be traced back to them personally?"
I think you inadvertently answered your question with the preceding question to this one. Because it's harder to trace back a lot (not all) of individuals from their online identities to personal identities, they're probably more willing to show support for Mangione there, than in places that trace back to them directly.
Who are "touch grass" people? What are you talking about?
Trump won the popular vote by 1.5%, which is a few percent off from the polling average. If the polling on Mangione is similarly off by a few percent (within the margin of error), it hardly affects our interpretation of the results.
Give me a break. The polls weren't based on who will get the popular vote. They were based on electoral votes, with swing states polls being that exact toss-up (you can check them again).
He ended up winning every single swing state, muuuch farther than the projections of ANY polls that was getting time-of-day.
Even if you want to die on that purposely misinterpreting hill, it still shows they were inaccurate and unreliable.
Let’s take PA since it’s the tipping point state. Polling average had Harris at a 0.2% lead. Actual result was Trump with 1.7% lead. That’s a 1.9% error.
So, “muuuch farther than the projections of ANY polls” is wrong.
Correlated error between states is expected, and not relevant (ie. if you think Mangione poll is affected by this few % correlated error, again it doesn’t change the interpretation).
Overall, election results tend to come pretty close to the polls. They are often wrong by a little bit, occasionally by a lot, which is what you’d expect based on the theory of polling and statistics. The conclusion is asking a large random sample of people what they think, using the best methodologies the polling industry has developed, is a pretty good way of finding out what most people think (within a few % margin of error), certainly more objective than a vibe check of your personal echo chamber. If your argument depends on completely dismissing polling results, you’re probably wrong.
I thought you were someone else, but now that I know you're not - I want to make something clear: I think that social desirability bias affected the answers of respondents much more [1].
To be clear, that's not the MARGIN of error in those statistics, but rather the difference between predicted and actual. In a five-tier scale, separated between groups, there is already statistical manipulation by having fewer respondents per-category, and therefore a higher margin of error between each. A margin of error even in low single-digit percentages can completely compromise the outcomes of data presented in this fashion.
How wrong do you believe this poll is? Can you use some methodology to come up with a modified margin of error that encompasses what you believe to be more realistic?
"How wrong" is something I can't quantify. It’s tough to pin down a single “modified margin of error,” but I’d say it’s bigger than what the poll shows. Multi-tier questions automatically have smaller sample sizes per option, which inflates the margin of error. Throw in social desirability bias (people not wanting to admit an unpopular opinion) and you get systematic skews on top of random error.
People under the age of 30, who have never experienced a day of their lives in a broken or failed state which includes political violence as an everyday occurrence, think political violence is a good idea. Because... they like LARPing as downwardly mobile lefties?
Seriously, ask a few asylum seekers from Honduras or El Salvador what they think about political violence. I guarantee you not a one will tell you about how romantic it all is.
Because political violence is obviously something to be scared of, not something to "revere". Like -- we can see it happen elsewhere. We can watch it on the tube every night.
It's not "edgy", Daria. Put down the hair dye and the kitchen sheers. You're too old to play act revolutionary.
Sure, if you diminish and demean absolutely everyone who disagrees with you, then you're left in a bubble where your truth is the only obvious correct one.
I know old white guys who are the same way. The craziest thing is how "open-minded" they imagine themselves to be!
the irony of this entire post ranting about the views of "children" (classified as people under...30?) when presented with evidence contrary to your beliefs.
> Seriously, ask a few asylum seekers from Honduras or El Salvador what they think about political violence.
Why not ask some US citizens ? Or does assasination attempts at a running candidate does not count as political violence ? Or assasination of a president FWIW ?
Seriously, I get that the US healthcare system is brutal and terrible, but this is not how you handle it (and I don't think insurance companies are even the root of the problem).
With dysfunctional government and people in power abusing the population, the first step response is unhinged folks doing unhinged things.
> but this is not how you handle it
The problem being that the mechanisms for handling it aren't working (judicial, executive, legislative, regulatory, stockholders, public pressure). The next steps of handling it are unhinged folks doing unhinged things. Several more steps down the road handling it means ordinary folks doing revolutionary things.
This is what long term dysfunctional government not representing the people looks like. This is a result of the politics of fear.
The end of this path looks like a bloodthirsty mob with a guillotine. After the French got disgusted with themselves having executed 30,000 to 50,000 people they overthrew the revolutionaries and were promptly taken over by Napoleon.
The structural problems that lead to this kind of popular support for an unhinged dude assassinating a CEO need to be addressed, and the fix doesn't focus on unhinged dudes or public opinion of them.
I'm going to quote it right here so it is clear what you're describing.
"Americans are twice as likely to view Luigi Mangione — who was charged with the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson — very or somewhat unfavorably (43%) than favorably (23%).
But adults under 30 are more likely to view Mangione favorably than unfavorably (39% to 30%). Those between the ages of 30 and 44 are evenly divided (28% to 29%)
Liberals are much more likely to view Mangione favorably than are conservatives"
One in four is not "extremely limited". The age group where unfavourable wins clearly is 44+.
This poll report also suffers from the US brain worm that calls everything but the far right "liberal". It's likely most of those that see Mangione's direct action favourably are actually leftists, and some fascists of the kind that follow Ben Shapiro and commented negatively about his coverage.
The US healthcare profiteers have killed many more people than Mangione, likely thousands, since he killed Thompson.
I suspect the interest in the case comes mainly from the fact that Mangione doesn’t fit the typical “nothing left to lose” profile of most killers, especially outside of the crime-of-passion genre. A man with prospects doing such things may signal a turning of the tides in a way that makes some discontents hopeful. I personally don’t think it’s a good sign, but I can understand where people are coming from.
If someone had murdered Hitler I'd support that person. Wouldn't you? Could have saved 11 million lives. But Germany would still have sent him to prison for life because he broke the rules.
If Hitler has been assassinated before he came to power then we wouldn’t have any idea of the significance of that. It’d be hard to say anyone would have supported the assassin besides the most ardent of the Nazi party’s political opponents.
It's a shame that these people don't read, because if they did they see just how often the rich and powerful were murdered during the gilded age. From Wallstreet to St. Petersburg everyone from Emperors to titans of industry was assassinated by those with nothing left to lose. It's almost like income equality is there to keep them alive and to keep another world war from breaking out.
But that _have_ learned. They are systematically making violence a taboo the way sex was in the past.
If all people think violence is wrong and immoral instead of just against the rules they have written ("laws"), then they can keep writing rules that suit them even more and more without any pressure against it.
Do you think assassinating arch-dukes was being sold as virtuous back then either? Especially by the churches which were the moral arbiters of the time?
The difference is in the past most discourse was by mouth - impossible to censor and eavesdropping was costly because you needed a person to do it.
These days more and more discourse is online
- heavily censored by platform rules which are much more strict than laws, partially because it makes the moderator's job easier to err on the side of caution, partially because it teaches people to self censor which then extends into real life
- censorship can be automated and even invisible (shadowbanning, fake degradation of QoL, ...)
- eavesdropping is also automated and omnipresent
The real danger of AI or LLMs these days is not they machines will want to kill us but that powerful people will use them to mass-profile everyone and stop any dissent from spreading.
Do you think China will have a revolution and restore democracy? How? How will people organize?
And every currently democratic state will be the same - democracy only needs to fail once and it will be almost impossible to restore.
---
EDIT: Even word of mouth is in danger, sufficiently powerful organizations are or will be able to access microphones near you. Or cameras for lip reading. Again, en-masse, automated by AI.
Sure, after the declaration of war by the state. The Church (depending on which definition you use) sponsored plenty of Crusades too. None of these actions are ‘rebel against the machine’.
Though that does sometimes happen, usually leading to/in the middle of a civil war.
It was a blessing for a defensive war. Serbians didn't "go" anywhere to attack Austrians. It was the other way around. But I guess you already know that. Why did you choose to write "to go kill" when they didn't go anywhere?
Yes but try to apply the same rules to real life and people will laugh at you.
How many times do you see the hero having to choose between killing the villain and leaving him to the legal system (not justice system) to give him a lesser punishment?
This whole story was started by the fact that countless people have begun to revere Luigi Mangione as a Robin Hood-like folk hero. Whatever taboo put in place against violence seems to have failed in this case.
Was it? the puritanical views in some western social groups is hardly how the whole world saw sex, even in those western societies sex was seen differently as long as it was within the same class.
>"even in those western societies sex was seen differently as long as it was within the same class."
Same with violence! Not too much institutional change made for gang violence between 13-21 year olds in Chicago - as long as they're in the same class.
I have a theory for a long time that "democracy" as a concept is pushed so strongly in the West not because it really favors people nor for its effectiveness but because it nulls political assassinations and delegitimates them. Thus it is an extremely good system for the rulers.
A system with fewer assassinations is a better system, if all else is equal. Unfortunately, all else is not equal.
Democracy should be an alternative to violence: Instead of murdering the next Hitler, you can just vote him out. Unfortunately, this only applies as long as it works. American democracy has not worked for a very long time.
Resorting to violence over other non-violent means to resolve disputes is often a symptom of weak institutional capacity, and one could argue that this instance of violence is such a symptom.
It's a tug of war between institutional capacity (people's inability to act) and injustice (people's willingness to act even if they will face negative consequences).
Honestly, they are just playing the rulebook of "lets not get into regulartory waters". The reality is that no one on either side really gives a shit that much, as proven by recent elections.
An aspect worth considering: everyone with a large investment in civil society is opposed to murderous vigilantism, and while that includes the economic 1%, the fellow CEOs, the Media Industrial Complex*, et al., it also includes a much more boring demographic: simple, decent folk who are opposed to violence and law-breaking.
The status quo behaviour of Stack Exchange and others is pandering, but it’s just as likely to be pandering to mom and pop as it is to Musk and Murdoch.
It's not the first time they've done this. They've consistently done it with Gaza. When they do cover it at all, it's only to paint protestors as terrorists. (Yet the France vs Israel sportsball match was played to a three quarters empty stadium because that many people hate Israe now)
True but I think it just shows that this isn't malicious on their part, like journalists and politicians aren't all uniformly intentionally creating and maintaining a broken healthcare system that murders¹ thousands of people and bankrupts an estimated 650k people a year. It's rather the very natural result of their ideology, if the same people had to rebuilt the healthcare system the end result would be identical.
There is a reason why Bernie is universally despised by all of them, this is the shared ideology, its this unspoken thing that every CNN and FOX news anchor, every nypost and nyt journalist, Obama, Bush, Biden and Trump all have in common. That's why this Luigi situation was so eye-opening to many people, it showed the cracks in the system. None of those people will ever be part of the solution, it's all of them collectively we need to overcome.
Hypothetical - is it possible for someone to set up an ethical health insurance company that just takes in premiums and pays out for care? If people despise the current companies so much why can't we just start a new company, maybe as a public benefits corporation that by charter has to act ethically?
The rule might have made things even worse, since now total costs have to go up for their profit to go up.
Contrast this with a non-profit which has no incentive to increase profits and thus no incentive to increase costs.
I agree that these conversations mainly reveal to me that many people don't understand the economics driving costs in US healthcare, since they are so willing to carry water for private insurers.
> since now total costs have to go up for their profit to go up.
And yet, they deny claims, despite that denying a claim reduces their profits.
> to carry water for private insurers.
Because insurance it utterly irrelevant to the issue. The problems in the US lie at the Dr/Hospital level, not the insurance. Procedures simply cost too much, having the government pay for them will just makes things worse because government always overpays for things.
You want to solve things? Make medical tuition free, and remove ALL caps on number of doctors (especially difficult with residency, but it can be done). Then reduce rates for services.
Someone should start a fully integrated company: They educate you, find you a residency, and hire you. In exchange for free tuition you agree to work for lower rates. (There will need to be some details to work out obviously, since you can't force people to work.)
Whatever their reasons for denying claims, capricious denials is the main complaint people have about insurance, so it doesn't really feel any better if it doesn't actually increase their profits. Out of curiosity, why do you think they deny claims of it has nothing to do with profitability? Is denying claims just fun?
It's actually comical to claim insurance is irrelevant.
Billions of dollars of middlemen creating makework inserted into the process surely adds no costs, and is completely irrelevant to how much it costs. The waste generated in hospital billing departments is free, since people famously love working for billing departments and will do it for free. Commercial real estate for healthcare company buildings is also free, and so are the salaries of all the people that work for them. Not to mention their role in creating price opacity, allowing prices to rise unchecked and having different prices for different payers, also has no effect on prices. The stress that patient dissatisfaction (or outright getting fucked) causes providers is also completely free and causes no waste.
tbh I'm surprised stackexchange still has employees. I thought all that value was already extracted by LLM scrapers and they're well on their way to becoming another quora.
Downvote doesn't always mean "I don't agree with you", it sometimes means "your argument is flawed". The CEO is not "just a cog". CEO is a PERSON who choses to do things in some way and enforces that way on the rest of organisation. CEO - chief executive officer. Chief - means here "the most important one"[0]. Executive - "someone in a high position, especially in business, who makes decisions and puts them into action"[1]. Officer - he has authority[2].
I agree that he did not deserve murder. But he was a person who was the most responsible for whole organization. If he wasn't the one who wanted to deny people their care that they paid for, he should quit. He didn't, so he agreed to take all the blame for telling others what to do.
Do you know someone personally that Brian Thompson killed or you are just jumping on a bandwagon wanting socialistic healthcare for all Americans. That may be a good thing but get ready to pay 50% to 60% of wages to the govt and Americans as a society are tax averse compared to Europeans who are used to paying high taxes. Its not an easy change for Americans to embrace and of course healthcare is expensive but so is becoming a doctor and the student loan debt that comes with it. Doctors and medical professional definitely need to be paid these high salaries. It is a very complex issue but cheering a murderer on is a break down of society.
He was a CEO of UnitedHealthcare. "Brian Thompson was the chief executive officer (CEO) of UnitedHealthcare, the insurance arm of UnitedHealth Group".[0]
> It is a very complex issue but cheering a murderer on is a break down of society.
It's a symptom of a break down of society. And cheering is because the killed one was a symbol of that breakdown.
> The guy he murdered was a cog in the wheel who was doing his job (like many of us are) within the system that has been established
The cog deemed most important by everyone and who got the most money for his cog-services, where all other cogs were following that one cog, a kind of master cog. If you had to choose which cog to break to stop a machine, which cog would you select?
> Curious how many people here believe that indeed he should have been murdered?
If you can't change a system, you at least try to stop it. Should he have been murdered? No. In properly designed systems, you have fail-safes. When those fail-safes are not enough, some cogs will break, sometimes very spectacularly. That is what we have here. A system could not handle all the accrued stress and starts breaking.
Do you personally know all the people Brian Thompson killed via denied claims? I'd love to see a list and hear from the families. Besides going on a narrative spreading on the Internet which too many people believe narratives they are sold. The narratives the left pushed on orange man got him re-elected so i dont take narratives for face value. What I do is not cheering on a murderer nor cheering on the break down of society!
Cause I am not one to believe narratives spread on the Internet. I want to know facts and have them presented to me from solid sources. No doubt they have denied claims but how many and how many were killed because of it? Where is all that data and how many did Brian Thompson approve & directly kill. Im not a sheep on the INternet I want to know more before I ever condone the break down of society and cheer on a murderer!
Yes our healthcare system needs to change for sure, but is America going to embrace paying 50 to 60% of their earnings. It's a hard road for America to embrace & overall a very complex issue we are discussing.
In this case it's nuanced to me ... it's definitely not black and white as..
- Brian Thompson was not the head CEO of United Healthcare... was he just pushing along the agenda that Andrew Witty and the board devised? Further as noted Im not a sheep to follow any Internet/social media/political narrative as we have seen time and again that narratives are made up and or blown up. I agree our healthcare system needs to be better, but are Americans ready to pay same taxes as Europeans (doubtful to me).
- The murderer is totally crazy (he had no business with United Healthcare) and an idiot (killed Thompson not Witty).
- If the murderer wasnt young and attractive but old and unattractive 2 months later society wouldnt continue to be hiding behind their keyboards cheering a murderer on or seeing headlines "P. Diddy is Mad Not Getting Same Love in Prison." All of this brings to the forefront a primal/SICK part of humanity which does not promote a civil and polite society.
I am not interested in another reeition of your big picture opinion. Obviously you don't want to answer this question because you've been asked 3 times now.
In this case it's nuanced to me ... it's definitely not black and white as..
- Brian Thompson is/was not the head CEO of United Healthcare... was he just pushing along the agenda that Andrew Witty and the board devised? Further as noted Im not a sheep to follow any Internet/social media/political narrative as we have seen time and again that narratives are made up and or blown up.
- The murderer is totally crazy (he had no business with United Healthcare) and an idiot (killed Thompson not Witty).
- If the murderer wasnt young and attractive but old and unattractive 2 months later society wouldnt continue to be hiding behind their keyboards cheering a murderer on or seeing headlines "P. Diddy is Mad Not Getting Same Love in Prison." All of this brings to the forefront a SICK part of humanity which is does not promote a civil and polite society which is what Im for above all else!
A lot of terminally online people in these comments are dramatics overestimating popular support for Mangione.
It is certainly remarkable that a murderer has such a high approval rating, but he's still not close to being broadly popular.
> "Americans are twice as likely to view Luigi Mangione — who was charged with the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson — very or somewhat unfavorably (43%) than favorably (23%)."
This actually had the opposite effect on me; I had no clue his support was this acute among young demographics.
Only 29% of those age 18-29 view a murderer unfavorably, whereas 39% view him favorably and 32% aren't sure. It's break even for 30–44.
The support is heavily skewed by older age ranges (just 5% of >65).
If those age ranges were further broken out by political ideology it seems like it would be overwhelming for young liberals, since the all age "very liberal" has 47% support to 30% disapproval.
If your poll is to be believed, it isn't an online phenomenon at all.
For me, it does beg the question of why Luigi Mangione has so much support in online communities. Is this just another facet of the oft-observed tendency for people to break taboos (in this case openly supporting murder) when they feel they are anonymous?
I really respect YouGov, but I'll play devil's advocate: maybe there is a bias in which members of society are willing to break the taboo. Perhaps older Americans are not less likely to support Mangione, but are just less likely to admit it. On the other hand, it is also consistent with younger people making up a larger proportion of social media users.
I assume it's because there is simply no need to rail against a murderer because the justice system will take care of that, so most of those against ignore the threads, and the few that put their heads up get down voted by the passionate supporters which further discourages any discussion.
Or it could be a reference to the Portuguese patrol ship Viana Do Castelo, which has that very registration number! I think there are so many numerical ID schemes in use that you'd be able to find something relevent for any large number.
You can't ask a question. And even if you could start a new account, you wouldn't have thousands of rep points to spend on bounties, so the answers won't be as good or quick.
Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.
It's well into January, meaning it's time we stop talking about Luigi and take down the tree. We can start back up again next November. I mean, he is effectively the modern Krampus for our world of badly behaving CEOs, right?
And yet the US were created by bloody revolution, preserved by bloody civil war, and made prosperous by countless bloody coups, wars, etc.
Perhaps the problem is that democracy isn't really any different than any other form of country-level government. Perhaps we lost for ever when our ancestors started founding cities a few thousand years ago.
So I'm arguing for democracy. I'm a fan of it and you see a lot of prominent people even within the US (Theil, the GOP, Curtis Yarvin, as well as burned out doomers) arguing and working against it so that is not just pointless posturing.
Democracy generally works well, and America becoming a poster child for "Why Democracy is bad" is a development that could lead to real horrors, at home and across the globe.
You don't have to condone political violence to support more democracy to avoid it. Even in nations, like the US, where political violence is celebrated every single day.
Trump being elected again arguably is a sign the system is working, that people when unhappy with the status quo were able to change their government to someone they feel will represent their interests more. Now, I have no love to lose for Trump, I think he's a asshole, braggart and charlatan - but his election is a sign we can enact change - I dont think Trump will bring much real change, but its a sign the system works.
The only reason that this doesn't happen more often is the electorate is mostly disengaged from the races that do matter, and tied down by partisanship.
It seems you contradict yourself. Yes change is Trump's platform. But you agree he won't change anything. So the system has the illusion of change, but no proof it can actually facilitate it.
No, not at all - it means that the power of the people to vote their choice is alive and well - that doesn't mean we're putting good candidates up, or that people underestimate the difficulty of wholesale systemic change - it just means we can vote for who we choose.
This is not really the point of the article. It also points out that the man has not been convicted yet. In a rule of law society, people are innocent until proven guilty, but it seems irrelevant because his unrelated contributions are preemptively stripped from him and people are being arbitrarily punished for asking about it.
Eh, check out what happened in Romania recently: we had presidential elections and an independent candidate won (by quite a big margin). The second place was also not expected. They then cancelled the elections and we're doing them again in May.
Maybe in your bubble it's stable. Outside of that, it's not. There's tipping points. Just like the Americans tipping over to vote Trump. In the future, more points will be tipped when the asymmetrica effects of economic boom and bust cycles finally trip something.
> Perhaps rightly - We have rule of law, if a person is doing something unethical, change the law - if your electeds wont change the law, vote them out and pick people who will.
I don't mean this sensationally, but I do have to say it: you're promoting violence by saying this. Maybe indirectly, but it still leads to violence.
Money, in the US, is speech. That means that the richest people in the country have the most speech. They are heard the most by politicians because they put those politicians into power through their speech. This is done through mass communication in the media among other things. But it also happens through campaign donations, PACs, and whatever other interest groups.
When a group of people tries to "vote them out and pick people who will", inevitably a person with more speech than them uses it to override the will of that group. There is a massive asymmetry of power, one that is near impossible to overcome:
As people continue to see their material conditions decline despite voting, they begin to see violence as the only solution. So when you say "just vote away the problem", you are promoting violence, because voting continues to prove ineffective.
Oh, and just to pre-empt derailing: I vote. In every primary. In every election. Local, state, and national. In every run-off election.
882 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 346 ms ] threadAfter the fourth or fifth time I just gave up. It seems like a miserable experience; I can't imagine why anyone would spend time on SE.
If you want to put men to the sword based on a vote, pray you don’t get into the minority! Trump won the popular vote after all
The fact that he wasn't punished for a laundry list of offenses that would have put a normal person in prison for life has been a pretty clear indication that the rule of law is, in fact, dead, and that it is a popularity contest.
Plenty of problems with tyrants, dictators and flat out murderers themselves have been resolved by murder.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
No excuse, all the same.
Yes.
Loud social media trolls should not be considered as representative of the majority of people. Even if they were we do not live under mob rule so it wouldn’t matter if they were representative.
That said, Ulbricht has publicly apologized for his actions and confirmed that the chat logs weren't fabricated. He made the fatal mistake of Doing Two Illegal Things at Once, which ultimately tarnished his status as a folk hero.
I would bet Ross Ulbricht would be wiped clean if he became anywhere near as notorious by name/username.
I don’t know what SO should have done (well, probably not ban someone for asking questions, assuming we have the full story). But it’s so fascinating to see how companies have no playbook to work off of.
What are you talking about? What "vigilante justice"? The innocent victim, Brian Thompson, was murdered by a lunatic. He was not an offender. It was no justice.
I think that Brian Thompson was a mass murderer. His actions as CEO put profit before people and caused many people’s lives to be lost.
Buck stop with him; between 2021 and 2022 he did that. Being the CEO and all.
Here, for example, the parent poster brings up some statistic that some very specific category of insurance claim denial went up in some period. The allusion is that this is nefarious, and is a result of some specific action by the murder victim. The reader is supposed to interpret it this way. Of course, there's absolutely zero evidence for any of these claims, and when you lay it down like that, it sounds pretty stupid without anything backing this up.
Perhaps you're not well equipped to evaluate moral errors in the first place.
Your comment is pretty clear example of the attitude around the case. People hate CEOs of companies that must make difficult decision, and so when they are murdered, they will twist themselves into pretzels to somehow justify that they had it coming.
That something harmful is legal or effectively legal is a necessary requirement for a vigilante action to morally acceptable.
And if people in their majority, in their stupidity or cleverness, reject your argument, isn't then vigilante action deeply anti-democratic?
I have a very old-style view, where courts provide systems that substitute for private vengeance and thus become legitimate by being willing to hear complaints of harm, so from my point of view, if a court hear the matter, the affected person can take whatever measures they wish, which of course has important consequences in cases of legal immunity-- when my view is taken, legal immunity is something one desperately wants to avoid having, because whoever has it must contend with private vengeance.
No, People hate CEO's making greedy, selfish, unnecessary decisions that cost lives and cause suffering.
Be honest.
That's fine. I think you exemplify the attitude that lead to Thompson's murder and will lead to many more similar incidents.
> Can you point to any single decision that Thompson made that cost live and causes suffering? You can’t, but you assume there must have been some,
If denials tripled under his watch, as CEO you don't think he necessarily was involved in that? He clearly approved of profiting off of literal unnecessary deaths.
> because you start with assumption that the victim here is guilty
The most basic of reasoning shows he has some moral guilt, just not legal guilt.
P1 - He was the head decision maker
P2 - Decision was made to actively increase unnecessary deaths for monetary gain
C - He ultimately approved of that decision
You have yet to show that tripling denials of a particular category of claims is even wrong in the first place. Let me repeat: any system will deny some claims, so denied claims are not prima facie evidence of anything wrong.
Decision was made to actively increase unnecessary deaths for monetary gain
Nobody had shown any evidence whatsoever that anything like that happened. Not only are denied claims not automatically wrong, but also changes in denial rate do not even need to correspond to any decision or change in policy, but may instead result from changes of external factors.
He ultimately approved of that decision
What decision? You just assume that there had been some decision, that Bryan Thompson approved, and that it was nefarious. There is as of now zero evidence for this, this is just your speculation. Murdering people based on speculations like that is profoundly evil, and so is excusing it.
Honestly this is a pretty bad faith argument. They are denying at a significantly higher rate than their competitors, their internal policy focused around denying, and enough people are getting screwed over that a murder was committed.
But yeah, sure, assume this is all business as normal and not at all morally wrong to make your argument if you must.
> Nobody had shown any evidence whatsoever that anything like that happened.
Basic. Reasoning.
If claim denials triple during a time when a particular CEO is in place, that CEO would have had to have something to do with that.
> Not only are denied claims not automatically wrong,
They are on this scale and when the denials are bad faith. I can't prove that to you unless their documents get leaked, but that's for legal matters. For moral matters, the evidence supports that the difference from the drastic increase were indeed bad faith denials.
> What decision? You just assume that there had been some decision, that Bryan Thompson approved, and that it was nefarious.
Exactly, because he was CEO.
> There is as of now zero evidence for this, this is just your speculation.
He was CEO.
> Murdering people based on speculations like that is profoundly evil, and so is excusing it.
He was CEO. He oversaw a company going out of their way to deny claims even if you want to play devils advocate and pretend to be ignorant and deny that.
What he did was far more evil than a single murder, and what you are doing in defending the system that caused someone to feel that they had to murder it also more evil, the system that allows for shitty health insurance companies to cause so much pain and suffering. THAT, is evil.
Detective Chief Inspector Karin Parke and Trainee Detective Constable Blue Coulson unravel a deadly conspiracy involving autonomous drone insects (ADIs). After the controversial journalist Jo Powers dies in an apparent suicide, forensic evidence reveals an ADI embedded in her brain. The investigation escalates as similar ADI-related murders occur, including that of rapper Tusk, targeted after social media backlash.
The detectives uncover a sinister "Game of Consequences" launched by hacked ADIs, where the most-mentioned person under the hashtag #DeathTo is killed daily. The situation spirals out of control when the ADIs are used to surveil citizens, and public engagement with the hashtag results in mass casualties. A manifesto from Garrett Scholes, a former Granular employee and hacker, reveals his motive: to expose societal cruelty and complacency.
Efforts to neutralize the hacked ADIs fail, resulting in the death of 387,036 people who used the hashtag, including a member of Parke's team. The fallout leaves Coulson presumed dead by suicide, though Parke later receives evidence that Coulson is alive and pursuing Scholes abroad, leaving the case ominously unresolved.
But since you've invited me to name the moral error, sure. Accepting a fiduciary responsibility to chase after profits in a context where that very clearly means finding ways to deny people access to healthcare is a moral error. If you can't ethically do a job you shouldn't take that job. At best you're lying to shareholders, at worst you're killing people. The only ethical path is to go find a different job.
It seems pretty obvious that opting into a position where you'll have to do that might make you unpopular with the humans.
I strongly encourage you to think very carefully about this. Once you do, you'll find that there are no simple answers: you'll always have limited resources, and you'll always have to deny care to some people, and in fact it will always include some people personally making the call to deny care to some people. Any system that actually exists, public or private, does this.
You would generally count them. Like, if you have three people in need of a ventilator and you only have two ventilators, then one person is getting denied a ventilator today.
> Any system that actually exists, public or private, does this.
That's true, and I don't have a problem with it. Tradeoffs have to happen. What I have a problem with is incentive structures that attribute greater success for the people at the top when they create outcomes that involve more death for the people at the bottom.
Plenty of systems which actually exist don't congratulate leadership for reducing quality of care.
There's no fundamental reason why they have to be in a position where screwing the people who receive the care would ever be considered the ideal option. But that's how it is when you have a group of shareholders who have no stake in the quality of care. Thompson opted into a conflict of interest which need not exist in order to provide insurance.
Government-organized resource allocation is, more likely than not, bad to very bad.
The same problem does not apply to our social services (including health insurance) as they dont have to make profits at all costs.
In most insurance fields, it would be possible to only deny false claims. Take insurance of your house. The rates could be calculated that they can pay out all real damages to the full amount. Because the maximum damage amount is limited.
That's not true for health insurance, because the total possible damage (cost of treatments) is almost arbitrarily high, so that you cannot pay everything for everyone.
I don't want to defend the US system here. But it's not a problem that any country really solved, and one could argue about advantages and disadvantages of the different systems all day long.
The moral error is by refining and endorsing a company policy that went out of it's way to cheat people out of their due insurance, killing significant amounts of people as a result and ensuring suffering for even more.
Our legal system can't really address this, not until the electoral college gets disbarred or red state voters realize rejecting socialized health care hurts more than it helps.
Until that happens. things are going to get worse and people are going to get frustrated and start acting out. It's what happens when you have such a broken system.
Talking about "we don't do that in society" is ignoring the problem at it's core. You can't expect people to just obey the rules and respect law and order when it clearly isn't working for them or people they care about.
is it non-violent when they wield the system in a way to cause immense harm to the point where they are prolific killers indirectly and maybe even straight up directly? 90+ percent error rates in the AI that united used to deny claims is a violence. they denied 30+ percent of all claims.
It doesn't matter if he's right or wrong or justified or evil or a saint. This happened because tensions among non-filthy-rich and filthy-rich people are increasing to a point of non return.
It's a consequence. An effect.
It's obvious that there are plenty of situations where murder in the streets is justified. Just that we rarely know of them in the moment.
If a terrorist is running down fifth avenue with a bomb, would it be justified to shoot and kill them? What if the shooter isn't a police officer, but a member of the public?
Hitler was well on his rise to power by 1930. None of us can know who the next Hitler is. We are all familiar with Ray Bradbury and Back to the Future, which told us about how you cannot really know the future or bend it to your will. Furthermore, vigilantism is against the law, and the justice system of the government also has the job of preventing violent uprisings for various and good reasons.
The collective feeling that everybody, and I mean everybody displays, and is clearly being censored on media, is that there is a weighing of the collective morality of the situation which does not add up. This young man has been charged with a multitude of crimes. He has been charged with terrorism. Like, I went to school for international law, and I am going back to my resources, looking at the definitions, and trying to figure out how that fits. To me, a terrorist is somebody who plotted or crashed the planes into the towers. The idea that Mangione's victim, through the decisions of the company, might have caused millions of unnecessary deaths, when there could have been different paths taken, it is an leap, but it is not abstraction that is out of the grasp of many persons who have faced the medical system, specifically with treatment denial letters, on an individual level. By the way, that school that I attended was in another country which gave me free public healthcare during the length of my studies.
New York Penal Law Section 490.25 "Crime of terrorism", which is one of the statues of the second count under which Luigi has been charged, reads: A person is guilty of a crime of terrorism when, with intent to intimidate or coerce a civilian population, influence the policy of a unit of government by intimidation or coercion, or affect the conduct of a unit of government by murder, assassination or kidnapping, he or she commits a specified offense.
I do not believe that the Luigi has intimated the civilian population. A shop in his hometown has a portrait of him depicted as Jesus. Luigi did not attempt to target a unit of government; he wrote an explanatory note to "The Feds".
I think that many what many people are saying is that universal, single-payer health care is expected to be a function of government, and in fact something like the opposite is being protected.
I really hope that the District Attorney has the argument for the second count pinned down, or that it is dropped. I think that is where the ethical test for this crime lays.
Bravo!
Basically, it is your moral obligation to donate everything you have, except for what little you need to survive. If we put that essay into this context, then not donating would indeed be violence, such as not saving a drowning child just because you don't want to.
Exactly this. That was a watershed moment, I think.
In a just world, hundreds would have been executed for the financial crimes of 2008.
"Justice" only exists when there's threat of punishment. It isn't enough to have the moral high ground; you have to have the might and the will to enforce the moral ground on others.
Humanity will always live under systems of "oppression", but it's what that oppression looks like that matters, because there'll always be someone who takes advantage of a system's goodwill, and that must be punished swiftly and brutally, to deter anyone from abusing the system's goodwill.
Following the murder, I was thinking about how much non physical violence there is, that isn’t usually seen and judged as violence. Things like denying healthcare, shutting down companies and laying off people to benefit private equity investors, forcing people into bankruptcy, losing their homes, charging overdraft fees, etc.
The people behind that kind of violence can hide behind the layers of indirection.
In any economic system, units of economic organizations must sometimes dissolve, and people must be laid off. This is unavoidable. Laying people off is not violence.
In any society, debts are expected to be paid off. If people could just stop paying their debts, nobody would make any loans anymore. Forcing people into bankruptcy is not violence.
Frankly, your comment strikes me as exceedingly naive. "I only want ever nice things to happen, and bad things happening to people are violence". I suggest thinking about why these things happen, what would be alternative, and so we put up with these.
> Consider, for example, a public health insurance system like Germany. Do you think that Gesetzliche Krankenversicherung never denies claims? That it never denies care? Is it also violence when it does so?
Denying claims can be violence, it can also not be violence. There are other factors which you keep ignoring. Stop doing that.
> I'm basically Hitler.
If you say so. No one else is.
I am ignoring that? This thread is literally full of people who take any insurance denial as automatically wrong. It is me who's asking people to think carefully about this!
If you say so. No one else is.
Did you miss the "gas chambers" part in the comment I replied to?
Yes.
> It is me who's asking people to think carefully about this!
You should take your own advice, and actually think carefully about this.
> Did you miss the "gas chambers" part in the comment I replied to?
Hitler never switched on a gas chamber.
Then go and reply to those people (if they are really in the room with us). In _this_ subthread nobody has said or implied that ANY insurance denials is automatically wrong.
"Literally hitler" wasn't directed at you personally, obviously, but you couldn't help but pick it up that way.
The analogy was clearly with those denying healthcare. Have you personally denied people healthcare?
No. They're saying you're the person justifying the guy who opened the gas valve.
Or perhaps that you're justifying Hitler because he didn't open the gas valve so he himself didn't commit any physical violence.
(Not saying that's right or wrong, just that you're strawmanning hard on this one.)
You're probably purposefully derailing the conversation, but for the sake of others let me bite: pointing out the resemblance of following orders of a killing system and excusing the individuals working in this system as "order followers", has nothing to do with calling anybody "literally Hitler".
> Do you think that Gesetzliche Krankenversicherung never denies claims? That it never denies care? Is it also violence when it does so?
IIUC, those are also private companies or at least to a degree. So probably similar to american healthcare, just more regulated.
Let's take a look at a 100% pure public healthcare instead, for example La Seguridad Social in Spain.
It denies some claims, care, and can cause some suffering and death. The institution is administered directly by some leadership individuals, and to some degree even by the elected government. Those individuals are not driven directly by the "financial obligation to make the maximum profit" out of healthcare. However they indirectly are, there are decisions to be made on spending, and budget is not magically infinite. These decisions are hard: you can't make everyone happy and healthy, whatever the result, some people suffer and die. See the trolley problem.
So if a public healthcare system works badly, and causes too much pain and suffering, then some of these individuals can also be held responsible. It's just that in practice, in general any public system works more towards the benefit of society than for some shareholders.
To be blunt: if the government individuals take decisions that degrade the public healthcare system, for their own benefit, whatever that is, then those individuals should maybe be shot in public too. This kind of violence, terrorism, works historically well, especially if it isn't targeted at random civilians. Democracy is not simply the rule of the majority.
It's not a matter of awareness, the public knows how perverse the incentives of private health insurance are, and how a public system can do much better. But the private system will never be replaced in the current american political landscape - without violence.
> It's just that in practice, in general any public system works more towards the benefit of society than for some shareholders.
I think that this is simply empirically false. You cannot just assert something like this, you need to provide evidence for it.
> To be blunt: if the government individuals take decisions that degrade the public healthcare system, for their own benefit, whatever that is, then those individuals should maybe be shot in public too.
And here is the critical question: is there any evidence whatsoever that Bryan Thompson made any decision like that? As far as I can tell, there is absolutely zero. Many just decided he must be guilty of something, but nobody actually points to anything in particular.
> It's not a matter of awareness, the public knows how perverse the incentives of private health insurance are, and how a public system can do much better.
Again, you are asserting something that’s far from being universally agreed on. Public healthcare systems have their troubles too, and if you ask anyone with experience with both, you will not find people universally preferring their public experience. Ask Canadians or Brits how long it takes to get a visit at a specialist, for example.
> Denying healthcare is not violence.
Now you say:
> That’s my point: this is necessarily the case, so it cannot be automatically “violence” when that happens.
You're going in circles around an argument that you made up yourself. Do you want a pat on the back?
> I think that this is simply empirically false. You cannot just assert something like this, you need to provide evidence for it.
Now read that out back again loud.
> Again, you are asserting something that’s far from being universally agreed on.
I said: "It's not a matter of awareness, the public knows". That cannot be read as "universally agreed on" in good faith.
> Public healthcare systems have their troubles too, and if you ask anyone with experience with both, you will not find people universally preferring their public experience.
I never claimed public healthcare is perfect, on the contrary.
You will find rich people preferring private healthcare, which are a vocal minority.
> Ask Canadians or Brits how long it takes to get a visit at a specialist, for example.
I don't have to ask nobody because I live in a country with fully public healthcare. I am glad that poor people have the same access as rich people, and that triage by urgency, not money, works well (again not claiming that it's perfect, since you give everything your own meaning).
The USA on the other hand are infamous for the healthcare bankruptcy and literal horror stories. I think you don't realize how non-existant your safety net is. It only works well for you when you don't have a major health problem, and while you have a relatively very good paying job.
It is when the care is necessary; when the denial is part of a strategy to goose profits.
There are similar issues with the other statements you made.
> Frankly, your comment strikes me as exceedingly naive.
Frankly, your comment strikes me as willfully blind.
So when the insurance denies coverage, and so the doctors don't work for free on the case, and the patient dies, are the doctors perpetrating violence too?
I suggest you read up on this. IIRC, it was UHG's practice to deny claims indiscriminately to increase the personal burden of accessing medical care. Because, you know, if people pay their premiums to the company but it doesn't pay out, it makes lots more money for the shareholders.
It's weird how you seem to consistently elide motivations even when extremely relevant.
The ACA's public option was killed by a Senator who had a lot Health Insurance industry backing and support.
No, the politicians who insist on keeping this medieval practice in place are.
Denying claims does NOT increases profits, in the US it actually decreases them. Read more here if you like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42642405
Nobody argues against that, but United Healthcare had a denial rate of more than 30%, which is the highest among the major health insurance companies in the US. Coupled with the fact that they make profits off of those denials, it's hard not to call this non physical violence with the aim to generate more capital for share holders and executives.
> In any economic system, units of economic organizations must sometimes dissolve, and people must be laid off. This is unavoidable. Laying people off is not violence.
Again, absolutely agree. But it can be argued that doing so without any regard for individuals, their history with the economic unit and personal circumstances, is non-physical violence. Look at e.g. European employment laws for how this can be mitigated (not without some drawbacks ofc).
> In any society, debts are expected to be paid off. If people could just stop paying their debts, nobody would make any loans anymore. Forcing people into bankruptcy is not violence.
In every just society, the debtor has a responsibility as well to not lend money to people who cannot afford it. Giving somebody a loan they cannot afford and then bankrupting them is definitely non-physical violence.
> I suggest thinking about why these things happen, what would be alternative, and so we put up with these.
You put up with these because the US is a violent society with little regards for individual lives. Great for entrepreneurs and people with access to capital, not so great for much of the rest.
The alternatives have of course their own share of problems, but don't act as if the system is the only reasonable one.
As it happens, there will always exist a health insurance company with highest denial rate among all companies. That's a simple mathematical fact: a finite set of numbers has a maximum number. You need to do more legwork to show any actual wrongdoing on anyone's part here.
> In every just society, the debtor has a responsibility as well to not lend money to people who cannot afford it. Giving somebody a loan they cannot afford and then bankrupting them is definitely non-physical violence.
This is absurd. When your debtors go bankrupt, you lose money. Nobody wants to lend money to people who cannot afford it.
This isn't correct. Mathematically (as you say), you can have all health companies have a denial rate of 0%.
Realistically it's impossible, but you did say mathematically.
> As it happens, there will always exist a health insurance company with highest denial rate among all companies
If OP was going to start leaning onto "mathematical fact[s]" to support their argument, they should probably be accurate as well. Specifically there will be "multiple" health insurance companies with the highest denial rate (0), not "a" company.
Weren't you just calling someone's comment "exceedingly naive"?
The poor and financially vulnerable (ie, most Americans) are at a systemic disadvantage when dealing with debt, bankruptcy laws, and the justice system. They are preyed upon by all sorts of people offering debt, at a higher rate than ever before, anywhere.
Not to mention government bailouts, which really changed the game with regard to balancing risk.
That depends, amongst other things, on how much interest you charge in the interim. Payday lenders makes lots of money off of people who a) cannot afford their loans by any reasonable metric and b) default on those loans.
And a healthcare system enabled by UHC will deny healthcare at a rate 3 times that of the rest of the industry.
So is every other insurer "under-denying" healthcare?
Or is UHC choosing to deny healthcare more than it needs to?
> In any society, debts are expected to be paid off. If people could just stop paying their debts, nobody would make any loans anymore. Forcing people into bankruptcy is not violence.
Insurance is the reason that these debts are so exorbitant in the first place.
Do you really think the ER trip and a few tests cost the hospital eighty thousand dollars, and UHC, magician negotiators that they are, managed to talk the bill down to $4,000?
And yet the hospital will charge you, the uninsured, $80K. Yeah, you might be able to negotiate it down some, but not like that.
The US is the only country in the world where deathbed divorce is a thing, so families won't be burdened with medical bills[1].
But I feel like you'd find that immoral, too.
[1] Lack of legal obligation to the debt (even beyond this, to family members in general) won't stop the hospital calling your family and heavily beating on you to pay the bill of your recently departed, even if you had no financial responsibility, using everything from appealing to a sense of pride, to outright deception and claims that they can sue for the unpaid bill.
We allow this because we let them scare us into voting for strict education.
But the reality is education could be fixed to cut the price by probably 80% - making the much smaller insurance amount negligible.
I hate to say it but pinning it on a ceo doesn’t seem right. His job was to ration a scarce resource. But why is it scare? Because the authorities thru the police force puts an end to unlicensed people regardless of their skills.
I was talking to a friend/acquaintance. Her dad was a doctor did all kinds of innovative surgeries on animals. But wasn’t licensed. She said he’d be called in by doctors to do surgeries all the time because he was the best.
But he wasn’t licensed. So California shut it all down.
The price of healthcare is 5x because we let people go to jail without a crime. If they went to jail for reckless I e untrained practice of medicine i understand. But seriously right now the problem is lack of supply that has to be rationed.
Dude, plenty of people understand that. However, it's no good playing the circular pass-the-buck game, where the insurance apologists blame the doctors for everything, then the doctor-apologists blame the insurers for everything, everyone blaming someone else for everything, ad nauseam; with the end-result of the status-quo being defended by mentally exhausting everyone.
Insurance makes 20%. Doctors and suppliers make 5x what normal people make.
So the problem is with the laws preventing folks from becoming doctors.
I’m gonna fix this, it’s actually so easy, just need people to trust me.
I’m really good at this kind of stuff I just hate dealing with people because the average person is so certain the world can’t get better.
btw is that doctors or hospital administrators?
It’s facetious to compare those to a system where 30 million have zero coverage and the rest are systematically denied life saving care as a profit making mechanism.
And yeah letting someone die when you could help them live is violence. When it’s baked into the rules it’s called systemic violence.
Again, my point is that denying healthcare is not automatically something wrong or evil. This is something that must necessarily happen, and so the details as to why some healthcare was denied are very important. You can’t just say that someone being denied care is basically murder, like some people here, or point to some percentage of denied claims and pretend that this is prima facie evidence of wrongdoing. No, you need to actually do some legwork, and the haters of murder victim are not interested in that, they just want some release by dunking on a literal scapegoat.
I live in a European country with public free healthcare. Sure, you pay a portion of your income towards healthcare, so it's not really free etc. etc. If you don't have income, the state pays it for you.
There isn't any denial of healthcare. I never heard about anything like that. Sure, there are limits on availability of healthcare, particularly if it's some advanced or expensive procedure. For example, there is a place where they do radio surgery on the brain. There may only be one such place in the country (it's a small country). If you need that kind of procedure done, obviously there is a waiting list. And certainly some of those on a waiting list must have died.
But there is no denial of healthcare per se with someone making a decision to deny healthcare.
Accepted but didn't happen in time doesn't equal denial.
Whether they denied that care by not paying for it (which means people could have gotten that care if they would have had the means), or by limiting the amount of care in a period of time, doesn't really matters for the person who didn't get it.
Why do you think the healthcare resources (number of beds, hospitals etc) are limited? Why isn't there a second hospital?
By the way, would they have paid for an operation in a different country if space would be available there? No? So they denied that healthcare.
I'm sure there's plenty of cases where United health approved the claim and the patient also didn't get treated in time, it doesn't count as a denied claim.
in germany (and probably most other european countries) you can be denied treatment if it is deemed unimportant and it is known that insurance does not cover it. you will never be put in a situation where treatment is applied but then the insurance doesn't pay leaving you with the bill unless you were made aware that the treatment is optional or you specifically chose a treatment that you could not be sure would be paid. payment for any treatment that is not optional can not be denied. if there is uncertainty you can also ask your insurer in advance, and they must give you a binding response whether the proposed treatment will be paid or not.
most importantly the doctors must inform the patient in advance if the treatment is insured or not. if they don't tell them that something is not insured then they can't demand payment from the patient.
you will never face a surprise bill.
My partner suffered a medical episode while we were traveling in Germany. Bystanders called an ambulance which turned up and checked her out and asked her to be taken to hospital for more tests.
She/we elected to not go with them.
To our surprise, about 6 months later after we returned home (to Australia), we received a letter in the mail (in German) that said we owed something like $500 for the ambulance, I forget the exact number.
How does that line up with "you will never face a surprise bill" in Germany? Or is it because we are foreigners?
We never paid but I sometimes wonder if something would happen should we return to Germany.
if you don't have insurance you have to pay for everything of course. the surprise in your case comes from the unusual situation that the people who called the ambulance didn't know that you had no insurance, or more likely and you weren't even aware of how your situation is going to be handled.
it's unlikely that anything will happen if you return since the ones issuing the bill would not be notified in any way that you entered the country.
it is also possible that you could have disputed the payment since you didn't call the ambulance yourself (and i assume didn't ask anyone to call them). on the other hand if you had insurance you should have gone to the hospital because apparently insurance doesn't pay if an ambulance is called but not used. so actually, you didn't receive a surprise medical bill, but a bill for calling a service that was not needed (and potentially inconveniencing someone else who might have needed the ambulance, but now had to wait).
however, if you didn't ask anyone to call the ambulance then the bill is inappropriate because the law here is that if you call an ambulance but you don't need it, you pay, but if someone else calls the ambulance without you asking them, and it turns out to be unnecessary, then nobody pays.
since i lived in china i also don't have insurance in europe, so when we were visiting and needed treatment for a burn we had to shop around different hospitals to find out which one charged the least. costs for an ER visit ranged from 80€ to 250€ if i remember, and later we found a special hospital that was funded by a charity for the uninsured were we could go for after care for free. that works because the number of people without insurance is extremely small. mostly foreigners who somehow fell through the gap.
We didn't ask for anyone to call the ambulance, although personally I am happy that it was called and she was checked out.
No idea how useful it'd be for non-covid calls though. Probably not very.
Denying healthcare doesn't necessarily mean "leaving someone bleeding to death on the street" but rather refusing to provide certain treatments or medications. This issue isn't unique to the US. Granted, the healthcare system in the US is, in my opinion, significantly worse but claiming that healthcare denial doesn't happen elsewhere is simply incorrect.
You know, it just hit me: the issue here might just be a semantic one, where people feel the need to lump very unacceptable and wrong actions into the category of "violence," because of the consensus belief that violence is almost always wrong.
There are things that are as unacceptable and wrong as violence but are not violence.
For example, if a slumlord wants to evict me, even though I'm still paying the rent, the eviction is violence. It can either go two ways: either armed thugs will come to the building and physically grab me, rough me up and throw me on the street (at best) or in jail (at worst). Or I'll anticipate that happening, and lock myself out of the building in advance. In the latter case, is it still violence? Many people say yes, a shortcut around violence, coerced by the certainty that violence will happen otherwise, is still violence.
Or consider an abusive relationship: she knows he will beat her if she doesn't obey, so she obeys. No beating actually happens. A lot of people consider this violence too.
And consider a siege on a city (there's at least one happening right now). The people try to grow their own food in city parks, but whenever they do they, the parks are hit with big bombs dropped from planes. So they call on their allies to deliver food in. The first food trucks are also bombed. The second food trucks don't go in, they try to negotiate safe passage first. Is it violence against the people in the city (who have never been hit by a bomb)? Many people say yes.
In the narrow definition, violence is only when my fist hits your face, but in the broader definition, violence is whenever I use the laws of physics to force something to happen to you - whenever I take away your agency.
These things are objectively not violence. Violence isn't a word for "things that harm people", it very specifically means direct, purposeful physical harm. Don't distort the meaning of words for rhetorical flair.
The WHO defines four types of violence: a) physical, b) sexual, c) psychological, and d) deprivation. Denying healthcare feels incredibly close to d) and — semi-indirectly — involves a bit of c) and a) too.
> These things are objectively not violence.
Semantics cannot possibly be 'objective'.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_violence
By your strict definition of violence (direct harm) Hitler would walk free because he didn't personally gass the jews. Luckily we had trials[2] to determine that we still hold indirect perpetrators responsible.
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trials
>[B]ureaucrats can be expected to embrace a technology that helps to create the illusion that decisions are not under their control. Because of its seeming intelligence and impartiality, a computer has an almost magical tendency to direct attention away from the people in charge of bureaucratic functions and toward itself, as if the computer were the true source of authority. A bureaucrat armed with a computer is the unacknowledged legislator of our age, and a terrible burden to bear. *We cannot dismiss the possibility that, if Adolf Eichmann had been able to say that it was not he but a battery of computers that directed the Jews to the appropriate crematoria, he might never have been asked to answer for his actions.*
Neil Postman, Technopoly (Emphasis mine)
In our society we don’t objectively consider it wrong, otherwise Batman (Superman, Spider-Man) wouldn’t be so popular.
Batman is the absolute opposite because he goes out of his way to avoid killing villains, even incredibly evil ones like the Joker.
Let's be real: the original super heroes avoided killing because children were their target market, and unlike with cowboys and outlaws or indians, it would have been unseemly by the standards of the time. Not because of some kind of big point about "just vigilantism."
"Law" is just another way of saying, "The bare minimum standard that we as a society will accept."
So when we have a society that sends a drunk driver to prison for 70 years for killing a family of four in a head-on collision, but we don't send people to prison for their lives for gambling with the pensions of teachers, firefighters, etc., for polluting the waterways and the earth itself, of course this is the ultimate, eventual outcome.
The only shocking thing to me about Luigi's case is that it didn't happen sooner.
Yeah I listed all of those because it’s funnier when people mistake the vigilante justice’ thing for a ‘not killing people’ thing and then I can trot out Clint Eastwood and Dirty Harry, which was so popular it gets quoted regularly and had four sequels.
So yes, batman in particular would be considered bad by most people. He is just another gangster cause quite a lot of damage to the city on the regular. We do not care, because it is made up movie city.
Superman and Spider man afaik do not go around randomly assassinating people, but it is a long time since I watched that.
Sorry about the rather extreme example and inviting Godwin. But consider for example Krupp (CEO) and Ribbentrop (Diplomat) who were both entirely ”non-violent” people, they personally did not draw a single drop of blod as far as I know. And the holocaust were perfectly legal according to the law at the time.
Violence with the stroke of a pen, killing via a rubber stamp, violence through withholding safety.
It’s actually really interesting to see when people think his support isn’t even a debated topic, when the numbers show most people, especially adults, don’t support his actions.
I’m unsure how that shows with polling, tbh, but it certainly shows up in the discourse.
...then it follows HN isn't. I happen to know they are both real for the purposes of existing and as a meta commentary on topics, since I participate in both. I also don't know anyone who wouldn't give Luigi a pass on a Jury, and these people don't vote the same.
Disregarding the existence of the sentiment, is the kneejerk noise of people thinking they are uber-rational thinkers or arbiters of reality.
I'll assume, in good faith, what your wrote was simply not what you meant.
It's worth noting that in our society lots of other things are also considered to be wrong, things which are done openly every day by some of the richest and most powerful people and organizations in the country.
That's why he has "insane support": the system is broken and has proven itself incapable of policing that other bad behavior.
That said, we consider vigilante justice wrong because we believe there is supposed to be actual justice from a functional system. When the system does not function, extrajudicial attempts at justice will become more common. Just like people will poach more in a famine.
If the justice system won't take care of it, there has to come a tipping point, IMO.
Well, nothing.
Unless they have a general policy of scrubbing records of everybody indicted for (but not yet proven guilty of) violent crimes, why do anything at all?
I guess hiding behind the veil of legality and murdering thousands if not hundreds of thousands if considered worse. Rightfully IMO.
"Fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself." -Hermione Granger
I'll add that it has happened more than a few times.
Past response was to shut down inappropriate behavior in the now (folks rambling on about the person in comments under some programming question, etc.) and let the temporary interest die out on its own.
This time... The response seems to be inviting the Streisand Effect.
boldmovecotton.gif
So what. He gets a few upvotes. What's the harm for the users, or the platform?
If you're gonna expunge someone, don't half-ass it.
Albums Dumbledore says this in the books. Hermione only has this quote in the movie adaptations.
https://deadline.com/2023/08/jk-rowling-airbrushed-from-pop-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae
>The term is used in modern scholarship to cover a wide array of official and unofficial sanctions through which the physical remnants and memories of a deceased individual are destroyed.
Certainly not exclusively from official accounts. Not sure what your point here is?
Guess it just shows retention of books overrides movies, given that I've consumed both.
We've been living with that now for a few decades. It's still a problem.
(DNA Pizza was one of my favorite things about living in SOMA in the before days)
>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]
[0] https://www.wha.org/vv-08-01-2024/4 [1] https://www.valuepenguin.com/health-insurance-claim-denials-...
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.
United Healthcare was notorious for having the highest refusal rate, about one third of all claims: https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2024/12/05/unitedhea...
That's insane.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I know what you’re trying to do, but mixing phrases only works when the combination makes sense, this one doesn’t.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’m laughing from the back of the bus on this one. I mean if I sat in the front that might not be allowed, it might be breaking the law. OMG.
- 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.
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.
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?
Like consider: if this was as popular as people think, then it should be straightforward to run a political campaign on this basis.
Instead it's barely not a vote loser.
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.
See this full thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42642405 if you want to try to understand more.
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've never understood people who say this, insurance companies' profit margin is set by law and they can't change it.
And reduction in claims paid just goes into lower premiums. And more claims paid equals higher premiums. In no case does their profit change.
Those expenses are internal and increasing them doesn't change the above at all, those expenses affect profit and that it.
Insurance companies profits come from reducing expenses. Reducing claims doesn't change the profits in any way.
Reducing claims means lower premiums, and that's it.
Cigna executive-turned-whistleblower says Wall Street drives up health care costs https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2024/12/18/cigna-whistleblow...
> 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.
I used to do health insurance company PR. Here’s what I think the backlash is missing https://www.statnews.com/2024/12/11/wall-street-unitedhealth...
> 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.
Also a fixed profit margin can as well translate to higher salaries and other costs that the company controls, not necessarily lower premiums?
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.
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.
It's not trendy to hate those though.
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.
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 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 worth noting that being law-abiding is doing the bare minimum. You can be a horrendous person doing evil things and still be law-abiding.
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.
Gangsters kill each other all the time — boohoo, so sad.
I support the government indicting criminals to prevent further street violence though.
This is not pro-murder content. This is pro-access to life-saving healthcare content, whose absence causes death and extreme despair.
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.
Polling numbers (actual gauge of public sentiment) show a net disapproval for Mangione: https://stratpolitics.org/2024/12/unitedhealthcare-poll/
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.
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.
Do you trust those polls?
https://youtu.be/ahgjEjJkZks?si=VtYSzCoD_7-kyvhs
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?
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".
It's been widely discredited as the company that released it seems to have come out of thin air with no history and has a patron account:
https://www.patreon.com/StratPolitics
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.
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.
Eyeballing https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2024-election-forecast/ it looks to be in 1-sigma territory or maybe just venturing in to 2-sigmas.
Leaks of the Biden polling had trump getting 400 EC votes. Public polling is a PR exercise to convince you how to vote, the intention is to deceive.
One notable exception was The Des Moines Register poll the day before the election.
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.
Not the case. The "neutrals" were only a few %, while 68% said "somewhat unacceptable" or "unacceptable".
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.
[1] - https://emersoncollegepolling.com/december-2024-national-pol...
[2] - https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/51189-presidentia...
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.
"Somewhat unacceptable" is logically equivalent to saying "Somewhat acceptable".
Consider these facts:
• 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.
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.
That's a bit hard to prove, no? How often does anyone look at the names of who posts what?
And you missed my main point. There will always be trolls. Now think about how many people just stumble on SO, find a good answer, and up vote it without realizing that person is a murderer. They may not even recall a name of whom they upvoted.
Don't miss the forest of the trees if you don't wanna normalize social media taking action the law should (and is) doing.
Reading before commenting saves everyone time, not only mine and yours, but everyone else’s that might stumble upon this thread.
All of StackOverflow is already scraped and archived, so this is not a good argument, as you are actually just hurting StackOverflow while helping AI companies
Just like those who edited every Reddit comment to a blank string before deleting them all.
Look no further than what Christians did to Jesus' image to see the effect in reverse. Now we're allowing the murder of babies and children in Jesus' hometown, because they don't look like the common Western perception of beauty, an effeminate white guy.
Let's leave physical appearance or other trite observations out of it and have a real conversation about the issue at hand.
Isn't this basically the same thing I wrote?
My claim is that him being handsome only prevents Corpgov from successfully employing their typical associative propaganda. It's still up to the public to judge him as they see fit.
Example: Without googling, do you know who was Thomas Matthew? Why nobody remembers him?
But yeah, this is cheap talk, I don't have any proof obviously.
There may be several good reasons (eg to avoid spending time on cleaning up unrelated to SO issues due to the notoriety of the account) but none was communicated to the community.
Edit: I mean on purpose, obviously. Drunk driving hardly counts. (Nobody gets in a car drunk with the intention of hurting anyone, they are usually just trying to get from A to B.) Accidents don't count. We're talking about a comparable action here, something that meets the legal definition of murder and which was also not prosecuted. Deeds from war probably don't count because it doesn't meet the definition of murder under law (although, many war crimes and misdeeds abroad are punished) and soldiers are peons. Cops killing people on duty don't count because they aren't doing it unprovoked (when they do, it is usually prosecuted as murder), and they too are peons.
Also, to the people complaining about the edits, sorry I can't reply to 50 comments all saying about the same kind of stuff. I keep hitting the rate limit.
But yeah, people in these positions rarely need or want to directly kill someone, they have other means to achieve their goals.
Yet many financial or other white collar crimes are usually never prosecuted or result in a slap on the wrist.
Obviously they are not the same as murder but still the impact ads up. Defrauding or ruining thousands of people or crashing the global economy is not that far off.
Then you have police officers regularly getting away with outright murder and facing no consequences (of course that’s a different class)
...Doesn't mean they meant to kill someone! Completely different crimes.
Not a conspiracy-theory fan or anything but this basic power distribution is obviously skewed for people who are rich(er) and that's a fact.
What?!
Does this count? Or is the government allowed to indiscriminately kill civilians whenever and wherever they feel like it?
denying healthcare that they already paid for.
This is the reason why Kamala was predicted to win. In reality, the "I don't care which candidate is in the office" was the top choice this recent election.
> More than 155 million Americans voted in 2024: 156,302,318 to be exact. That’s the second largest total voter turnout in U.S. history in absolute terms. It is also just the second time that more than 140 million people voted in a presidential election.
https://www.cfr.org/article/2024-election-numbers
> In relative terms, voter turnout nationally in 2024 was 63.9 percent. That is below the 66.6 percent voter turnout recorded in 2020, which was the highest voter turnout rate in a U.S. presidential election since 1900. Nonetheless, turnout in 2024 was still high by modern standards. The 1960 election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon (63.8 percent) is the only other election in the last 112 years to exceed 63 percent voter turnout. If you are wondering, the election of 1876 holds the record for the highest percentage voter turnout: 82.6 percent. That was one of America’s most controversial and consequential elections—and not in a good way. It was also an election in which more than half the adult-age population was ineligible to vote.
The correct metric would be relative turnout and that doesn't support your claim:
> In relative terms, voter turnout nationally in 2024 was 63.9 percent. That is below the 66.6 percent voter turnout recorded in 2020, which was the highest voter turnout rate in a U.S. presidential election since 1900
This is especially telling in the light of the numbers you just gave on voter turnout.
> Trump won 77,284,118 votes, or 49.8 percent of the votes cast for president. That is the second highest vote total in U.S. history, trailing only the 81,284,666 votes that Joe Biden won in 2020. Trump won 3,059,799 more popular votes in 2024 than he won in 2020 and 14,299,293 more than he won in 2016. He now holds the record for the most cumulative popular votes won by any presidential candidate in U.S. history, surpassing Barack Obama. Running three times for the White House obviously helps.
https://www.cfr.org/article/2024-election-numbers
They may also live in an area where their preferred candidate has no chance of winning, making their vote a waste of time.
This is all worthless anyway. We don't use the popular vote to determine presidency. Reports show That turnout among youth was lower than 2020, but still really high in battleground states. That tells me the youth already lost faith of their vote counting.
31% positive for those under 45, 8% positive for those above 45.
41% negative for those under 45, 77% negative for those above 45.
Not the majority, even for younger people. And remember, this is just U.S. opinion; people in other countries might view this differently (likely even more negatively).
Edit: look at the photos of the people… AI generated perhaps?
I get your point. But the key difference is that "giving support" is a lot different than getting out to vote (which pains me to say). Statistically, 58% of those young people voting for Kamala didn't even bother going to the polls.
The worst spreader of this was the justice system though. You escalate crimes so high in a hug profile case, of course it will spread like wildfire.
They seem to have a high desire to place any disrespect they can on what seems to be an otherwise revered political activist in recent times; and it's only further fueling the discussion, and in all likelihood - probability for successors.
They would have been smart to play a leveling field, to treat Luigi's act with an element of absurdity, which would cause everyday people to question if their relatability towards Luigi was warranted or even made sense. Instead, they played a hand that the fearful would - because they are, and only validated the vigilante's narrative - because it is.
An obvious worldwide trend of complete speech control, right in the open for all of us to follow and see. Instead of just waiting a bit longer... until there was no way to stop it (maybe its already too late?) But i feel like this is too soon to pull this trigger, we still have time to stop using all these large platforms that aren't even vital to our lives, to make open and peer to peer alternatives
And to think what will rise from the ashes of lefty political violence will be a lefty utopia? Of course it will be fascism. Of course.
Health care policy isn't war, isn't apartheid, isn't civil rights.
"Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control."
- https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
> "Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family ...
This is only valid for Rusia, China and North Korea. Not for US. /s
My point is that health care is absolutely an element of rights (though perhaps categorized separately from _civil_ rights, though that's getting quite nitpicky).
Further, nitpicking around the definition of "rights", or who is worthy of declaring them has zero relevance to the point I'm making - that health care is traditionally an element of human rights policies and/or has a deep connection to the subject of human rights.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_states_of_the_United_Na...
Don't you think thats jsut so ironic? It's not a civil rights issue in the USA and that is the exact problem.
The healthcare system in America is completely dysfunctional. Countless people's lives are being ruined and lost. Corporations like UnitedHealthcare are intentionally perpetuating this. The leaders of these companies are conciously complicit in all of this.
There are reforms being proposed constantly because of these incredibly predatory and exploitative Corporations, again conciously lead by these leaders.
These Corporations and the people leading them are evil, they're exploiting innocent sick people for profit and they've managed to convince people like you that it's not a civil rights issue. That is the exact problem here.
"Sure -- the two ends of the political spectrum do seem to admire political violence..."
Many of the greats were definitely killers. Nelson Mandela famously founded a "terrorist" organization and for years refused to condemn any partisan violence.
This isn't apartheid. Get a hold on your horses and grow up. You live in a republic. You need to convince other people single payer health care is the right policy.
I think we've effectively already done that. What people actually want does not impact the way in which our government functions, despite popular belief.
The people in this country have absolutely no power and are tired of it. You can't vote out a parasitic system that exists only to extract as much from you as possible. The people who "represent" us only focus on culture war bullshit INTENTIONALLY, to distract from the fact that the one of two preselected candidates we have basically represent the same despicable capitalists and their same interests of stripping us of everything you have so they can have more shit they don't need, while the rest of us are fighting over their droppings.
You definitely haven't. Lots of Americans would be deeply unhappy if single payer healthcare were implemented tomorrow. Say what you will about whether they should be convinced, but they haven't been.
https://thehill.com/hilltv/what-americas-thinking/494602-pol...
The US just elected a president despite a years-long coordinated media and legal effort to make him disappear, along with multiple assassination attempts. So, yes, what the people want does actually matter. They just don't happen to want what you think they should want.
Did literally anyone want Trump v Biden v 2.0? No. Literally nobody wanted that.
Did anyone actually want Kamala? No. Literally nobody wanted that.
>coordinated media and legal effort to make him disappear
Donald Trump is the most reported-on person of the past 10 years. This sentence does not make sense.
>along with multiple assassination attempts
You put this in the same sentence to make it seem like his "assassins" were on the same page as the media. They were not. Both of them were highly ineffective and downright cringey with their plans.
No, it doesn't. Unless what they want aligns with what the ruling class and interest groups want. [0] The propaganda arm of the ruling class, of course, endeavors to get the public on their side precisely because violence ensues when they push too far without public buy-in.
[0]: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...
https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/biggest-donor...
https://americansfortaxfairness.org/billionaire-clans-spend-...
The ruling class used its propaganda arm to manufacture consent for "I don't like him as a person, but he's good for the economy". I imagine this also represents many of their own views on Trump: what they appear to support is not necessarily what they support. That is, they might very publicly and loudly say they don't like him, but they love to see their decreased tax payment come tax season.
None of this is ideologically binary though. The ruling class is going to support whatever it thinks will allow it to continue to be the ruling class. They're not always in 100% agreement on what that is (or, at least, they want to have that appearance). If they aren't careful (and they haven't been as of late) and continue to whittle away at the populace's material conditions, it will lead to more violence, and possibly violent revolution.
It's why academics have been referring to the US as an oligarchy for a while now.
I miss old-school conspiracy theorists like Ron Unz who actually have sophisticated arguments for what they believe.
The internet is now full of handwavey conspiratorial BS that's "not even wrong". Who is writing all of this stuff?
At least the 9/11 truthers made specific false claims.
this guy: "You're literally a 9/11 level conspiracy theorist!!!!!"
It's not a point in your favor that your flavor of conspiratorial thinking is so widespread despite its thin evidence base.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/america-doesnt-really-have-a-w...
> This isn't apartheid
You're right. It is just segregation, a thing at which US (still) excels.
"People on twitter will really be like "you believe in voting? that pales in effectiveness to my strategy, firebombing a Walmart" and then not firebomb a Walmart" [0]
Well, Luigi firebombed a Walmart.
Is that a valid strategy for enacting societal change? Perhaps not. But this republic accepts and engages in war. And as Clusewitz says, ""War is the continuation of policy with other means." [1]
Perhaps Luigi is also pursuing policy change through other means. I have to say that watching American politicians and law enforcement agencies treat the man who at worst committed one murder (alleged; innocent until proven guilty) with the wrath and civil rights abuses previously only reserved for terrorists associated with 9/11 makes me believe that his actions genuinely shocked the system.
I'll be shocked if he makes it to trial alive.
[0] https://x.com/LinkofSunshine/status/1720538218628558969?lang...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_von_Clausewitz
When people responded positively or indifferently to the killing of Thompson, the ruling class took notice. That's REAL power, a new sensation to most Americans. I can hope only good things can come of this realization.
It seems to go like this:
1. One group calmly demands some sensible thing. They might do some protests.
2. The powers that be say no, because they like the status quo. They might arrest some people for peaceful protesting.
3. A different group does some violence.
4. The powers that be acquiesce to the first group because the alternative is continued violence. The second group has no basis to continue the violence once the first group is acquiesced to.
5. History paints the first group as the ones who caused change and the second group as bad people who shouldn't have done what they did.
It's got to be one of those psychological sales tricks. Door in the face technique?
Anyway, this is the ONLY way that regular people have EVER caused things to change for the better, so take that into consideration. (Whatever counter-example you're thinking of is probably not actually a counter-example)
Luigi, a person with zero history of political activism, with no record of organizing for anything, decides his only open political alternative is to kill the CEO of an insurance company, not registering new voters or organizing his workplace for better health coverage or driving old folks to the polls.
I don't know? That sounds less like rational political activism than a mentally disturbed lone gunman to me.
It really doesn't matter if people are convinced to want single payer or not, it isn't going to happen. There are many, many systems in place to prevent the will of the people from happening if the elite don't want it.
You can't be serious.
Works how?
What if the right began killing or indefinitely detaining left wing figures in retribution? How would that work?
Just let this play out in your mind, and ask how much of this sounds like some right wing militia fantasia set in 1995.
BTW I was in OKC in 1995. Thank God it didn't and doesn't work.
"It's not Halloween. Grow up, Peter Pan. Count Chocula."
If it’s ok to murder the CEO of a health insurance company, how about the CTO? How about a director? How about a manager of claims adjusters? How about an adjuster?
How about the CEO of Exxon? How about Twitter? What about a engineering manager of the team who actually implements the parts of these companies you think are evil?
Don’t tell me it can’t happen - if lots of people are on Luigi’s side, there will surely be a lot of diversity among the opinions of his followers. Somebody shot 3 people at the YouTube HQ because the company was biased against veganism.
What’s the limiting principle here? Are you sure you aren’t on the “ok to murder” list?
Assassin, might be the more correct term, not that it isn't inclusive of the other.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassinations#:~:text...
> Magione's support is extremely limited, to a very liberal, very online few.
I would imagine asking people if they support an assassin is subject to extreme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social-desirability_bias
I think this is especially likely, given that YouGov pays its panelists.
How it came out, in fact, was Trump winning popular vote with 2 million more votes than kamala, and almost 90 more electoral votes. That's FAR from coin-flip odds, and don't even get me started on the swing state polls, with Trump winning every single one.
-----
Yeah, the biased nature of most people not wanting to publicly sympathize with an early political vigilante WOULD make polls regarding him worse, despite the fact they do. I completely agree with you.
>How it came out, in fact, was Trump winning popular vote with 2 million more votes than kamala, and almost 90 more electoral votes. That's FAR from coin-flip odds, and don't even get me started on the swing state polls, with Trump winning every single one.
It sounds like the polls were off about the popular vote by a few percentage points at most.
That meant a lot in the US election context, because the candidates were neck-and-neck.
It wouldn't change the basic picture of Mangione's support in the YouGov poll.
Why do I see so many basic reasoning errors like this on Hacker News? I thought this was supposed to be an intelligent forum with intelligent posters.
My single sentence underneath the horizontal divider in a sub-thread that primarily diverted to discussing the 2024 Election polls, and their accuracy, addresses that. Why didn't you quote that anywhere in your reply?
>"Social desirability concerns can be seen as a special case of the threat of disclosure, involving a specific type of interpersonal consequence of revealing information in a survey—social disapproval. The literature on social desirability is voluminous, and it features divergent conceptualizations and operationalizations of the notion of socially desirable responding (DeMaio, 1984). One fundamental difference among the different approaches lies in whether they treat socially desirable responding as a stable personality characteristic or a temporary social strategy (DeMaio, 1984). The view that socially desirable responding is, at least in part, a personality trait underlies psychologists’ early attempts to develop various social desirability scales. Though some of these efforts (e.g., Edwards, 1957; Philips & Clancy, 1970, 1972) recognize the possibility that social desirability is a property of the items rather than (or as well as) of the respondents, many of them treat socially desirable responding as a stable personality characteristic (e.g., Crowne & Marlowe, 1964; Schuessler, Hittle, & Cardascia, 1978). By contrast, survey researchers have tended to view socially desirable responding as a response strategy reflecting the sensitivity of specific items for specific individuals; thus, Sudman and Bradburn (1974) had interviewers rate the social desirability of potential answers to specific survey questions. > >Paulhus’s (2002) work encompasses both viewpoints, making a distinction between socially desirable responding as a response style (a bias that is “consistent across time and questionnaires”; Paulhus, 2002, p. 49) and as a response set (a short-lived bias “attributable to some temporary distraction or motivation”; Paulhus, 2002, p. 49). > >A general weakness with scales designed to measure socially desirable responding is that they lack “true” scores, making it difficult or impossible to distinguish among (a) respondents who are actually highly compliant with social norms, (b) those who have a sincere but inflated view of themselves, and (c) those who are deliberately trying to make a favorable impression by falsely reporting positive things about themselves"
Looking forward to your response.
Wouldn't social desirability bias predict that people would be reluctant to support Mangione's actions in any way which might be traced back to them personally?
Hypothetical evil plutocrats would be far more likely to dig up your social media history to get your take on Mangione than somehow obtain your response to a telephone poll.
The supportive online climate suggests that supporting Mangione could even be more socially desirable. There is social pressure to support him.
In any case, your Harris/Trump example suggests that social desirability effects should be on the order of perhaps 2-3 percentage points in a poll. So it wouldn't represent a drastic change to the overall picture.
My theory: Mangione cleaves society along an "extremely online" vs "touch grass" axis.
The passionate social media addicts, who see conspiracies and exploitation everywhere, support Mangione.
The "touch grass" people understand that healthcare is a systemic problem which requires systemic solutions. Political murders undermine the social contract, increase the likelihood of subsequent political murders, and contribute to the unraveling of society.
The "touch grass" people are underrepresented in online arguments, but well-represented in a randomized poll.
I think you inadvertently answered your question with the preceding question to this one. Because it's harder to trace back a lot (not all) of individuals from their online identities to personal identities, they're probably more willing to show support for Mangione there, than in places that trace back to them directly.
Who are "touch grass" people? What are you talking about?
He ended up winning every single swing state, muuuch farther than the projections of ANY polls that was getting time-of-day.
Even if you want to die on that purposely misinterpreting hill, it still shows they were inaccurate and unreliable.
AtlasIntel released a poll which predicted the actual lead: https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/20241102_SwingSta...
So, “muuuch farther than the projections of ANY polls” is wrong.
Correlated error between states is expected, and not relevant (ie. if you think Mangione poll is affected by this few % correlated error, again it doesn’t change the interpretation).
Overall, election results tend to come pretty close to the polls. They are often wrong by a little bit, occasionally by a lot, which is what you’d expect based on the theory of polling and statistics. The conclusion is asking a large random sample of people what they think, using the best methodologies the polling industry has developed, is a pretty good way of finding out what most people think (within a few % margin of error), certainly more objective than a vibe check of your personal echo chamber. If your argument depends on completely dismissing polling results, you’re probably wrong.
To be clear, that's not the MARGIN of error in those statistics, but rather the difference between predicted and actual. In a five-tier scale, separated between groups, there is already statistical manipulation by having fewer respondents per-category, and therefore a higher margin of error between each. A margin of error even in low single-digit percentages can completely compromise the outcomes of data presented in this fashion.
1 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42643027
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5044269-poll-finds-41-...
Seriously, ask a few asylum seekers from Honduras or El Salvador what they think about political violence. I guarantee you not a one will tell you about how romantic it all is.
Because political violence is obviously something to be scared of, not something to "revere". Like -- we can see it happen elsewhere. We can watch it on the tube every night.
It's not "edgy", Daria. Put down the hair dye and the kitchen sheers. You're too old to play act revolutionary.
Have you ever heard of these things?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duel
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War
Seems like the victor in the later gets a lot of people to listen to them.
> It's not "edgy", Daria.
Clearly they should rely on the very mature practice of name calling instead.
Claiming someone has support is the ad populum falacy, you can argue that. But don't dismiss data because it doesn't support you.
I know old white guys who are the same way. The craziest thing is how "open-minded" they imagine themselves to be!
Why not ask some US citizens ? Or does assasination attempts at a running candidate does not count as political violence ? Or assasination of a president FWIW ?
Correct, it's just how one person handled it.
If it gets worse it'll likely be more than one.
Edit: not my downvote, corrective upvote actually.
> but this is not how you handle it
The problem being that the mechanisms for handling it aren't working (judicial, executive, legislative, regulatory, stockholders, public pressure). The next steps of handling it are unhinged folks doing unhinged things. Several more steps down the road handling it means ordinary folks doing revolutionary things.
This is what long term dysfunctional government not representing the people looks like. This is a result of the politics of fear.
The end of this path looks like a bloodthirsty mob with a guillotine. After the French got disgusted with themselves having executed 30,000 to 50,000 people they overthrew the revolutionaries and were promptly taken over by Napoleon.
The structural problems that lead to this kind of popular support for an unhinged dude assassinating a CEO need to be addressed, and the fix doesn't focus on unhinged dudes or public opinion of them.
"Americans are twice as likely to view Luigi Mangione — who was charged with the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson — very or somewhat unfavorably (43%) than favorably (23%).
One in four is not "extremely limited". The age group where unfavourable wins clearly is 44+.This poll report also suffers from the US brain worm that calls everything but the far right "liberal". It's likely most of those that see Mangione's direct action favourably are actually leftists, and some fascists of the kind that follow Ben Shapiro and commented negatively about his coverage.
The US healthcare profiteers have killed many more people than Mangione, likely thousands, since he killed Thompson.
Some age groups, which on the whole don't vote, view Mangione more favorably than others, but still view him unfavourably.
Okay.
I guess he hasn't killed enough people yet? If so, what's the threshold number of people?
If all people think violence is wrong and immoral instead of just against the rules they have written ("laws"), then they can keep writing rules that suit them even more and more without any pressure against it.
Plenty of people were still in favor, clearly.
These days more and more discourse is online
- heavily censored by platform rules which are much more strict than laws, partially because it makes the moderator's job easier to err on the side of caution, partially because it teaches people to self censor which then extends into real life
- censorship can be automated and even invisible (shadowbanning, fake degradation of QoL, ...)
- eavesdropping is also automated and omnipresent
The real danger of AI or LLMs these days is not they machines will want to kill us but that powerful people will use them to mass-profile everyone and stop any dissent from spreading.
Do you think China will have a revolution and restore democracy? How? How will people organize?
And every currently democratic state will be the same - democracy only needs to fail once and it will be almost impossible to restore.
---
EDIT: Even word of mouth is in danger, sufficiently powerful organizations are or will be able to access microphones near you. Or cameras for lip reading. Again, en-masse, automated by AI.
https://images.app.goo.gl/dqHBEnQvy2hc6RHD8
This is them blessing the troops to go kill the Austrians a month later.
Though that does sometimes happen, usually leading to/in the middle of a civil war.
How many times do you see the hero having to choose between killing the villain and leaving him to the legal system (not justice system) to give him a lesser punishment?
Was it? the puritanical views in some western social groups is hardly how the whole world saw sex, even in those western societies sex was seen differently as long as it was within the same class.
Same with violence! Not too much institutional change made for gang violence between 13-21 year olds in Chicago - as long as they're in the same class.
Democracy should be an alternative to violence: Instead of murdering the next Hitler, you can just vote him out. Unfortunately, this only applies as long as it works. American democracy has not worked for a very long time.
The west is in terminal decline and will be replaced by a cult from the middle east. This is the third time this has happened.
The only annoying thing is that I'll need to learn Arabic. English was bad enough.
The status quo behaviour of Stack Exchange and others is pandering, but it’s just as likely to be pandering to mom and pop as it is to Musk and Murdoch.
* tongue-in-cheek
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42566862
There is a reason why Bernie is universally despised by all of them, this is the shared ideology, its this unspoken thing that every CNN and FOX news anchor, every nypost and nyt journalist, Obama, Bush, Biden and Trump all have in common. That's why this Luigi situation was so eye-opening to many people, it showed the cracks in the system. None of those people will ever be part of the solution, it's all of them collectively we need to overcome.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_murder
I've come to discover that most people really do not understand healthcare insurance at all.
The true driver of increased costs is Dr's and Hospitals. Not insurance.
Contrast this with a non-profit which has no incentive to increase profits and thus no incentive to increase costs.
I agree that these conversations mainly reveal to me that many people don't understand the economics driving costs in US healthcare, since they are so willing to carry water for private insurers.
And yet, they deny claims, despite that denying a claim reduces their profits.
> to carry water for private insurers.
Because insurance it utterly irrelevant to the issue. The problems in the US lie at the Dr/Hospital level, not the insurance. Procedures simply cost too much, having the government pay for them will just makes things worse because government always overpays for things.
You want to solve things? Make medical tuition free, and remove ALL caps on number of doctors (especially difficult with residency, but it can be done). Then reduce rates for services.
Someone should start a fully integrated company: They educate you, find you a residency, and hire you. In exchange for free tuition you agree to work for lower rates. (There will need to be some details to work out obviously, since you can't force people to work.)
It's actually comical to claim insurance is irrelevant.
Billions of dollars of middlemen creating makework inserted into the process surely adds no costs, and is completely irrelevant to how much it costs. The waste generated in hospital billing departments is free, since people famously love working for billing departments and will do it for free. Commercial real estate for healthcare company buildings is also free, and so are the salaries of all the people that work for them. Not to mention their role in creating price opacity, allowing prices to rise unchecked and having different prices for different payers, also has no effect on prices. The stress that patient dissatisfaction (or outright getting fucked) causes providers is also completely free and causes no waste.
I agree that he did not deserve murder. But he was a person who was the most responsible for whole organization. If he wasn't the one who wanted to deny people their care that they paid for, he should quit. He didn't, so he agreed to take all the blame for telling others what to do.
[0] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/chief [1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/executiv... [2] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/officer
Do you know someone personally that Brian Thompson killed or you are just jumping on a bandwagon wanting socialistic healthcare for all Americans. That may be a good thing but get ready to pay 50% to 60% of wages to the govt and Americans as a society are tax averse compared to Europeans who are used to paying high taxes. Its not an easy change for Americans to embrace and of course healthcare is expensive but so is becoming a doctor and the student loan debt that comes with it. Doctors and medical professional definitely need to be paid these high salaries. It is a very complex issue but cheering a murderer on is a break down of society.
He was a CEO of UnitedHealthcare. "Brian Thompson was the chief executive officer (CEO) of UnitedHealthcare, the insurance arm of UnitedHealth Group".[0]
> It is a very complex issue but cheering a murderer on is a break down of society.
It's a symptom of a break down of society. And cheering is because the killed one was a symbol of that breakdown.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Brian_Thompson#Thom...
The cog deemed most important by everyone and who got the most money for his cog-services, where all other cogs were following that one cog, a kind of master cog. If you had to choose which cog to break to stop a machine, which cog would you select?
> Curious how many people here believe that indeed he should have been murdered?
If you can't change a system, you at least try to stop it. Should he have been murdered? No. In properly designed systems, you have fail-safes. When those fail-safes are not enough, some cogs will break, sometimes very spectacularly. That is what we have here. A system could not handle all the accrued stress and starts breaking.
I’d like to hear your thoughts on why he isn’t!
Yes our healthcare system needs to change for sure, but is America going to embrace paying 50 to 60% of their earnings. It's a hard road for America to embrace & overall a very complex issue we are discussing.
- Brian Thompson was not the head CEO of United Healthcare... was he just pushing along the agenda that Andrew Witty and the board devised? Further as noted Im not a sheep to follow any Internet/social media/political narrative as we have seen time and again that narratives are made up and or blown up. I agree our healthcare system needs to be better, but are Americans ready to pay same taxes as Europeans (doubtful to me).
- The murderer is totally crazy (he had no business with United Healthcare) and an idiot (killed Thompson not Witty).
- If the murderer wasnt young and attractive but old and unattractive 2 months later society wouldnt continue to be hiding behind their keyboards cheering a murderer on or seeing headlines "P. Diddy is Mad Not Getting Same Love in Prison." All of this brings to the forefront a primal/SICK part of humanity which does not promote a civil and polite society.
My question: What is your reasoning on why a CEO, the Chief Executive Officer is just another cog in the wheel?
- Brian Thompson is/was not the head CEO of United Healthcare... was he just pushing along the agenda that Andrew Witty and the board devised? Further as noted Im not a sheep to follow any Internet/social media/political narrative as we have seen time and again that narratives are made up and or blown up.
- The murderer is totally crazy (he had no business with United Healthcare) and an idiot (killed Thompson not Witty).
- If the murderer wasnt young and attractive but old and unattractive 2 months later society wouldnt continue to be hiding behind their keyboards cheering a murderer on or seeing headlines "P. Diddy is Mad Not Getting Same Love in Prison." All of this brings to the forefront a SICK part of humanity which is does not promote a civil and polite society which is what Im for above all else!
We’re done here
I did mention Andrew Witty and I'd like to know more facts before I follow the keyboard mob and or any other CEO to make the correct judgement.
I know we're done here but do ponder...Do you follow everything the keyboard mob says?
A little Eichmann is still an Eichmann
It is certainly remarkable that a murderer has such a high approval rating, but he's still not close to being broadly popular.
> "Americans are twice as likely to view Luigi Mangione — who was charged with the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson — very or somewhat unfavorably (43%) than favorably (23%)."
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/51189-presidentia...
You know in the legends of Robin Hood, Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham also downplay the threat Robin poses to their status quo.
37% – Don't Know
43% – Unfavorable/Somewhat Unfavorable
That might as well be broad popularity for murder of all things. That don't know number is wild.
Only 29% of those age 18-29 view a murderer unfavorably, whereas 39% view him favorably and 32% aren't sure. It's break even for 30–44.
The support is heavily skewed by older age ranges (just 5% of >65).
If those age ranges were further broken out by political ideology it seems like it would be overwhelming for young liberals, since the all age "very liberal" has 47% support to 30% disapproval.
If your poll is to be believed, it isn't an online phenomenon at all.
Based on reddit, for example, you'd assume Mangione has more than 50% support when in reality he's not even close.
I really respect YouGov, but I'll play devil's advocate: maybe there is a bias in which members of society are willing to break the taboo. Perhaps older Americans are not less likely to support Mangione, but are just less likely to admit it. On the other hand, it is also consistent with younger people making up a larger proportion of social media users.
I doubt they're influencing this thread though.
The new username: "user4616250" is ringing a bell... Didn't 4chan used to give everyone names like anon4616250? It's got real V-for-vendetta vibes.
Why? You can still get information from there, they're stopping you from working for free for them for some time.
Can this be substantiated?
Your argument has the presupposition that the political system is a working democracy. Stability, and security are not a given for all.
What are we supposed to do, switch from democracy to vigilante murder as a system of government?
Perhaps the problem is that democracy isn't really any different than any other form of country-level government. Perhaps we lost for ever when our ancestors started founding cities a few thousand years ago.
Plenty of sensible policies have popular support in America and have done for a while. Americans are not as dumb as their politics would suggest.
The path to improving it does not go via vigilante murder.
Some form of immigration control now has majority support. Should people go round executing immigrants because that would be more directly democratic?
Democracy generally works well, and America becoming a poster child for "Why Democracy is bad" is a development that could lead to real horrors, at home and across the globe.
You don't have to condone political violence to support more democracy to avoid it. Even in nations, like the US, where political violence is celebrated every single day.
The only reason that this doesn't happen more often is the electorate is mostly disengaged from the races that do matter, and tied down by partisanship.
Next time, in order to not repeat the same mistake, they shall have _expected_ candidates. That's what democracy is all about. /s
This only works in a proper democracy. The US is currently an oligarchy.
Im the US you see an inverse correlation.
Yuval Noahs nexus does a good job of nuancing what a democracy is. I can recommend reading that book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy
Could it be that you're part of the privileged and hence why you prefer the statu quo not to change?
I don't mean this sensationally, but I do have to say it: you're promoting violence by saying this. Maybe indirectly, but it still leads to violence.
Money, in the US, is speech. That means that the richest people in the country have the most speech. They are heard the most by politicians because they put those politicians into power through their speech. This is done through mass communication in the media among other things. But it also happens through campaign donations, PACs, and whatever other interest groups.
When a group of people tries to "vote them out and pick people who will", inevitably a person with more speech than them uses it to override the will of that group. There is a massive asymmetry of power, one that is near impossible to overcome:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...
As people continue to see their material conditions decline despite voting, they begin to see violence as the only solution. So when you say "just vote away the problem", you are promoting violence, because voting continues to prove ineffective.
Oh, and just to pre-empt derailing: I vote. In every primary. In every election. Local, state, and national. In every run-off election.