18 Comments

Very good article. However, on the attribution of the photo of the "wanted" poster, is that the correct name of the person who took the photo? Because if so that's quite the coincidence

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Argh! Thanks! Fixed.

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Like most people, I have mixed feelings. The current system is clearly broken. UHC is not really an insurance company, it’s more like a cartel or conglomerate with doctors and pharmacies. It has monopoly pricing power, as do most of the pieces of the health care system. It’s not designed to provide care, it’s designed to squeeze every excess dollar out of the people paying the bills: our employers, Medicare and us.

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You write like PR man for the insurance industry. You must have taken a lot of time for reseach and then writing. I don' want to take the time to question all your assertians. How do you find the time and interest?

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Could you maybe question at least a couple of assertions?

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ok let us see. The writer shows part of the financial sheet prepared by the insurance company. It is a part of the financials requried by regulators. To determine a picture or how much money controlled by them you must look at the balance sheet and determine where the money is located . money is allocated to large cagtegories but does not say exactly if the money has been spent. all insurance companies pledge to have enough money to pay all claims today tommorrow and forever.Therefore they must raise rates constantly. This results in a lot of money sitting there asssigned to one category or another which is money that is invested to get more money. No one orks for 6%.

Private insurance companies are always iooking for good stewards of this capital. The guy was shot and killed was one of those good stewards with a title of CEO. Poor guy thought he had good making 10 mil a year. He is just another churned up by a dishonest system. Money does strange things to people.

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That's extremely simplistic and you don't understand insurance reserving practices and no, it isn't today tomorrow and forever. There is no "therefore" on reserving practices equaling automatic increases and of course insurance companies have to have sufficient assets to cover claims. It's a very difficult industry to calculate future costs and social inflation has been making a larger than anticipated dent over the past few years. Our private medical system, including but limited to health insurance companies, is a massive system with issues that constantly need to be worked on. A current CEO of a company is a cog in the wheel. Explain again how picking one at random, murdering them by shooting them in the back like a coward, and then running away is going to change anything for the better?

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It's amazing to me this even has to be explained to people. I saw a good line on twitter, the fact that abortion clinics get bombed means that we need to listen more to the bombers because they are a wake up call to the horrors of abortion. Noooo.

Also people who say medicare for all is the answer, I wonder if they realize medicare stops more procedures and help than private insurers, and the only way Dr.'s make it right now is by getting higher pay from private insurers. The private system is supporting medicare. If we put everyone on Medicare there will be even less money in the system to pay for everything than there is now. It won't work without enormous taxes and a way to control free riders like illegal immigrants using the system.

Another problem here is that if Medicare turns down a drug or procedure, you can't private pay it yourself like you can with a private insurer. The Dr.s won't do it because Medicare will sanction them. Even if you pay for it yourself.

Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.

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That you have to even write this is deeply worrying.

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The other aspect of such responses is that people don't realize that they wouldn't want to see such responses scaled up and used by people they very much disagree with. They fail to see that when they take such approaches, they (indirectly) are communicating tacit approval for such approaches for other people who may have all sorts of grievances/anger at various things. For example, if one condones such moral justification/condonement/cheering, one is not in a good moral position to denigrate when others, who have similar emotions/grievances, do it. We won't be aware of how others can view us as hypocrites -- because we always tend to think "well, I'm right, so my justifying/excusing/not-caring about this violence is different than other people's wrong justification/not-caring about other violence."

People really need to think more about what they communicate to others and how that looks like scaled up to all sorts of other highly emotional things.

I also think so much of this is tied to the internet and how it makes us into more emotional, less nuanced communicators (if anyone is interested, my takes on the internet and how it deranges/divides us: https://apokerplayer.medium.com/how-social-media-divides-us-abridged-version-c8fc924ba2a4).

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We agree on the celebrating of murder is bad part, but I think you're way too soft on for-profit insurers like UHC and their C suite (I don't think it's possible to get to that level in that industry without being a callous individual who can't allow themself to consider the human cost, but that's still not a justification for assassination: even if I held the view that they were all murderers, I am against the death penalty) and push a wee bit more of the blame on the patients than is fair. Or maybe not blame so much as what feels like a glib glossing over of various things.

"We sign contracts with for-profit health insurance companies, knowing they will pay out less than we put in." Not really: my employer signs it, charges me more each year for less coverage (note to self: find an in-network ophthalmologist soon), and, without another option, I get to suck it up and hope the extra coverage I opt into every November keeps me going if something bad happens. I am very familiar with the mixed bag of the Canadian system, as all my extended family is covered by it, and my US for-profit coverage in a major urban area has all of the wait times my cousins in rural Canada get but with a bigger hit to my budget. It also keeps me tied to my job, which is fine now, but has made me borderline suicidal at other jobs. (I know, or knew, multiple people who died young from treatable conditions because they lacked insurance back when you could be denied for having a preexisting condition. That's been mostly rectified, at least, at least for now, but none of my cousins ever had to worry about that.) I am far from the only one who has been there, and it leaves a person feeling like a trapped animal.

Which, again, doesn't justify murder, but as disgusted as I am by the celebrating, which is very, I get it. I don't approve, but I understand why otherwise generally compassionate people I know are being ghoulish right now, and it's not because they're ignorant of how the system works.

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if it smells like rat it is a rat

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Gotta say, I'm generally a fan of yours, but not this one. It reads like a defense of the insurance industry. I agree with you that despite the anger one feels at such a system, murder isn't justified. And I wouldn't call Thompson a murderer- though it is fair to point out that many people do die because of the health industry's policy of deny, delay, defend. It's a classic example of the Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." The fact that so many in this country can relate to the anger that propelled this to happen should give anyone pause in defending such a system. The other countries you describe the people generally have a favorable view of their healthcare systems despite their flaws; there is very little anger towards them unlike here. Were a murder like what we saw here happen, it is doubtful many would be supportive. You point out that in all systems there are gatekeepers. Fair enough. But in other systems the gatekeepers aren't skimming 20% off the top to fund their own bureaucratic existence and reward their shareholders, all of which adds another roughly 20% to our healthcare costs- the most expensive on the planet with middling at best results.

I'll leave you with my own personal story, one which drove me to rage. Not enough to kill mind you. But enough that had these people been in the room with me there would have been violence. My daughter died 35 minutes after birth, despite the best efforts of the neonatal care unit; my wife went into labor at 40 weeks but a Group B Strep infection entered her womb unknown to us. Fast forward a year and we receive a bill for $10,000 from the neonatal doctors. Our insurance refused to cover their bill. Why? Because our daughter wasn't enrolled our insurance plan. The debt collectors were callous and unsympathetic. Our insurance company refused to budget. Only after a lengthy appeals process that took months were we finally able to get them to pay. Fortunately we had the time and finances to fight. Many-most- people don't.

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Sober and refreshing. One thing I think about is there is a script I get where I have to get a blood test every 3 months. Now, I can't have a normal life without this drug (I won't get into details, it isn't a life or death situation, but without this drug life gets more annoying). This never used to be the case, but someone passed a law that covers lots of drugs like this. My current insurance is GHI, so often they prefer to pay for generics over the brand name drug. Most drugs have generics and I grew up in the pharmacy industry; I am aware generics are often the same just cheaper.

But everytime I see this doctor, I pay a co-pay. Then I get a bill for these tests. Granted, I paid them like $10.00 but I see at what was billed and it is like $400 or something. So I imagine if I did not have health insurance, this is what I would be paying. It is ridiculous, but it is the system we have. I don't know what these machines cost. Or what doctors are billing plus secretaries etc.

I do know if I need to see a doctor, I can see one pretty quick. Sure, it may take some time for them to see me, but most of the time they can figure out the problem and get me in a direction where we can address the issue. For that I am lucky. Terrible to hear about the follower. Often when something is put forward as "the best thing ever" it often, unfortunately "is not."

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Arguably, Uncle Ted's targets weren't primarily responsible for the degrading state of technological civilization. TK argued that they had to die to bring his manifesto to mass attention. Thompson was not the architect of the current predatory system. He was a beneficiary of it and remains a representative of it. His death brought the topic into the constellation of concerns that the corporate media is allowed to acknowledge.

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I will praise him, and I do praise him

See these arguments you overlook:

https://davidgottfried.substack.com/p/is-luigi-mangione-morally-superior

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Why do they stay business? Just dump the book, take the money and go to the Philipines. Why fight ignorant regulators?

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Yes a cog in the wheel making more money then he ever dreamed

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