this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2025
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What did Brian Thompson do/fail to do that makes this statistic his fault, and for death to be the morally justified consequence?
Edit: I'll reframe this as a statement. Celebrating the murder of Brian Thompson and especially advocating for more acts like it is abhorrent behaviour.
Yes. We are advocating for more acts. Because their acts have not changed. That's how cause and effect works.
You think none of the decisions of the CEO of UHC affected this statistic at all? I feel like there's a LOT of UNC policy that he was involved in that results in worse healthcare in the US, including but not limited to "AI" for denials.
I don't think we have a uniform moral calculus, but my personal one doesn't justify the death penalty in this case. I can imagine a moral calculus that does though: hours of excess suffering caused > expected lifespan = death penalty.
No, it is not. The owning class must be pressured into respecting us more than profits. By any means necessary. The government and police will not stop mass social murder, so we must do what we can to save lives.
The only reason to avoid advocating these acts is that this style of PotD-like adventurism generally isn't a sustainable tactic, compared to the power of building a mass movement.
Be specific. Talk about Brian Thompson, not the nebulous "owning class".
He allowed an ai to refuse up to 95% of claims leading to likely thousands of deaths.
So yeah. He should have died. As should others, for the same reason. Evil people don't deserve to live. End of story.
What a bold claim! Obviously you have a source for that, right?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/unitedhealth-lawsuit-ai-deny-claims-medicare-advantage-health-insurance-denials/
Oh wow. Literally 5 seconds of googling. You're intentionally ignorant. You're not discussing anything in good faith. You really cannot be this dumb.
They started it
Benefiting from a system that exists to hurt others so people like him can benefit from it.
I wish people like you weren't so eager to go to bat for your oppressors. Do you think Brian Thompson would ever ask about why someone did something to you that you didn't like? Or was he too busy having fun with your money?
The insurance companies control our healthcare system. He controlled an insurance company. Get it yet?
He led an enterprise with the goal and the result of making a bit more money by ending and ruining numerous lives. And he made it the most extreme case of such an enterprise.
And yes, when somebody has a life threatening or disabling condition, and their established medical provider prescribes the best standard of care, and the money guy says “nope I don’t think you need that, denied” they are actively doing harm to numerous people for a small monetary return. That is evil.
It is LAWFUL Evil, however. Yes, just like in D&D, but it is an apt description for many real people. Genuinely bad people can appeal to the “rule of law” just as easily as genuinely good people when it suits them.
It is not an accident, or an unforeseen consequence, or even negligence. It is an intentional decision to harm others in order to make a bit more money than he would otherwise.
Compare with something like a drunk driver. They are generally looked down upon, and if somebody drives into a tree at 100mph with a BAC triple the limit, not many people outside their own family will shed a tear for them. But that does not mean those people support the death penalty for DUI convictions. If the driver kills somebody else and lives, then maybe it turns into negligent homicide. They get a pretty bad punishment because their actions can directly be proven to have caused an innocent death. And it may have been predictable, but it wasn’t intentional.
Brian Thompson set policies that caused many orders of magnitude more death and suffering than any drunk driver could hope to. And more importantly, his plans were to continue doing more of the same. So it’s not a question of what punishment he deserved, but of preventing future death and suffering. You know, the #1 thing that makes homicide justifiable.
However, having “the law” on his side, there were legal and corporate structures in place to insulate his decisions from the direct 1:1 cause and effect tied to each individual death and to each individual day of suffering. That gets him off the hook legally, but in no way does it do so morally.
I used to think more like you. Surely since the rule of law is the ideal, we should choose that side of any argument like this. But I have seen too much bad shit done by people whose primary skill is arguing in bad faith to make horrible things sound palatable. The law is not divinely inspired, it is written by humans. And sure, most of us will agree that people can get it wrong. But it is even more important to recognize that laws can be created with malicious intent as well.
And I will not be blocking you, because I would like to hear some of your actual thought process and hopefully not a low effort quip or just crickets.