It's weird how guns get all the blame, but no one calls out TV pundits who constantly portray CEOs as worse than murderers, then act shocked when unstable people take their words literally and get violent. The harsh rhetoric is part of the problem too.

TV pundits are compensated based on their ability to keep audiences engaged. The people who decide that anger-based engagement is acceptable are, like Brian Thompson, executives.

I don't think any of them deserve to be murdered, but the pundits are an odd place to place blame.

Guns are inanimate objects and cannot be ascribed blame. Gunmen and lawmakers can.

This CEO, in particular, has almost certainly taken actions that resulted in preventable suffering and death.

To some degree, that's the nature of running health insurance companies, but if he put profits ahead of patient outcomes, I think we could have a very reasonable discussion on the morality of letting people die at scale vs murder.

>This CEO, in particular, has almost certainly taken actions that resulted in preventable suffering and death.

Sure, but so have you unless you dedicated every second of your life and penny you own.

The question in both cases is obligation to mitigate and who, if anyone, has an obligation to put patient outcomes ahead of profit.

Doctors who take salary are putting profits above patients.

Some people are more guilty than others. This CEO may have committed more murders than that of kings of past centuries.

Only if you take a twisted consequentialist definition of murder that equates gutting someone with a sword to refusing to help.

You make it sound like "refusing to help" was in the context of a random person begging for help to a stranger.

It's more "hey, pay me a percentage of your wages and when you need help with medical bills, we will help you..." then denying the help.

They never offered a blank check for all medical bills. If someone thinks that is the case, they should re-evaluate.

You can always decline the health insurance and pay out of pocket if you think it is a bad deal.

It's supposed to be a pretty blank check for critical bills, and this company does a bad job of fulfilling that.

> You can always decline the health insurance and pay out of pocket if you think it is a bad deal.

Ha. You could make this same argument about literal scam insurance that denies almost everything once your claims go above your payments. That's not a reasonable defense.

The CEO has bosses, and was presumably doing what they wanted him to do.

Ah yes, the Nuremberg Defense.

What planet do you live on? Are YOU getting your information and worldview from "TV pundits"?

Corporate greed is a race to the bottom and CEOs are the avatars of that greed. Nobody needs a pundit to tell them that, they're experiencing it first hand for themselves, and you're playing a losing game defending them. You will never convince a man who struggles to pay rent and buy food that a CEO deserves millions of dollars. You will never convince a woman that she deserves to be in thousands of dollars of healthcare debt so that the CEO can buy extra houses and cars.

Human nature will never accept this, no matter how much you wish your libertarian philosophizing about the world was representative of reality. Corporations and billionaires continue to gain power and working class people are getting exploited more and more. There's a breaking point and we're racing towards it fast.

The wealth gap is higher now than it was during the French Revolution, if anyone was interested in "history repeating itself" insights into the future.

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html