It appears that in every thread about this event there is someone calling everyone else in the thread sick and twisted for not proclaiming that all lives are sacred and being for the death of one individual.
It really is a real life trolley problem because those individuals are not seeing the deaths caused by the insurance industry and not realizing that sitting back and doing nothing (i.e. not pulling the lever on the train track switch) doesn’t save lives…people are going to continue to die if nothing is done.
Taking a moral high ground and stating that all lives matter is still going to costs lives and instead of it being a few CEOs it will be thousands.
tldr: one idea would be challenging their ability to hide behind licensed MDs who are paid to shoulder liability
This is actually my field, and I’ve spent countless hours of my life arguing with these insurance companies on behalf of patients they’ve denied, (losing more often than I’ve won, but you have to try). They suck.
When they’re being exceptionally unreasonable, the bridge-burning hail mary I would throw would be threatening the license of the provider that denied the appealed claim. It has worked a surprising number of times.
Most people don’t realize that it’s not just paper-pushers at insurance companies who are denying claims. Those folks can routinely deny things that policy excludes, but if it’s a judgement call or a challenge that their policy isn’t meeting medical necessity, they hide behind doctors on their payroll who are putting their license on the line when they have to say that the insurance company is justified. Those individuals can be reported to their licensing board or even sued. Short of voting in universal healthcare one day, I think this is the most direct route to challenge this nonsense.
I appreciate your measured takes and inside point of view, more of both are always welcome (not that you need my invitation lol, you’re basically famous around here).
The problem I see, though, is all the most morally defensible and procedural fixes require the healthy functioning of institutions that have been weakened, dismantled and / or perverted and turned against us. And a frightening number of us see that now and feel that normal channels for change are closed. I’m not at quite that point myself, but I know how bad it is for so many and I don’t blame anyone who reads our current situation that way.
Our institutions no longer fix our problems, and that’s growing worse, not better - the deck is getting stacked more and more heavily against us as time goes on.
I’m not advocating mass violence. What I am saying is that executives who create conditions like these, for people suffering under an increasingly-dysfunctional and hopeless system like this, should absolutely expect their lives to be in danger on the daily - out of just pure pragmatism. I’m not putting a value judgment on that, I’m saying it is flat out inevitable.
CEOs frequently measure any and all human events as costs to be managed. Especially these insurance executive pieces of shit. I don’t see why a certain number of fairly predictable CEO murders resulting from their hideous behavior should be any different.
The problem I see, though, is all the most morally defensible and procedural fixes require the healthy functioning of institutions that have been weakened, dismantled and / or perverted and turned against us. And a frightening number of us see that now and feel that normal channels for change are closed. I’m not at quite that point myself, but I know how bad it is for so many and I don’t blame anyone who reads our current situation that way.
Relevantly, I think this also makes a good argument that “how we solve things” as a society is as important the problems we’re solving. When our institutions are weakened or bypassed (through corruption, lobbying, or vigilantism), it’s destabilizing and leads to bigger issues. I hate how much power insurance companies have over care too, and I get it, I just want to urge everyone to be cautious about this familiar type of language that tries to frame violence as the “only remaining option”. It’s almost always pure rationalization coming from people’s anger rather than truly being our only option.
