Innocence and morality isn't restricted to the determinations or domain of the legal system.

For clarity, are you talking about the dead UHC CEO? You're right, I nor anyone I know ever gave him the authority to lead the highest healthcare claims denial rate in the industry and it's super gross that this kind of thing is allowed. If you pay for insurance, you should be able to use it.

> If you pay for insurance, you should be able to use it.

For what? The insurance company has to put some guardrails on unnecessary treatments or else the rates for everyone go up even further.

I don’t want to be pooled with a hypochondriac that hits up 30 specialists in a year.

Doctors should make that determination, not insurance companies.

Doctors are paid for the service they provide so they are incentivized to prescribe things that arent effective. This is a large part of why americans consume so much more healthcare than other countries where doctors get paid per patient on their panel. I agree doctors should determine health care prescriptions but we need to align incentives first.

I think doctors' incentives are more aligned with patients than the incentives of insurance companies. I agree that incentives aren't perfectly aligned, but I'd rather a doctor decide whether I should get a treatment than an insurance company, given the system we have.

There is literally zero incentive for a doctor not to over recommend procedures. That’s why no medical system in the world works that way.

Of course it's gross, so change it via the democratic process. You can't seriously be arguing that murdering individual CEOs is a better course of action.

Think of it like our current criminal justice system. It's easier to get one criminal off the street than it is to make systemic changes. At least this guy won't be committing any more crimes. Isn't that how it's usually described?

Health insurance relies on young people subsidizing old people. If you lose enough young customers, you end up in a "death spiral" where you can't afford your claims, but if you raise rates more customers will leave.

There are a lot of problems with the healthcare system, but it's reductive to point at this one guy and say "you're evil".

The killer didn't have the right or the authority to kill the CEO, and he'll likely spend a very very long time in prison because of that, but that doesn't make the CEO innocent.

You're just imputing different meanings to what people said than what was actually said. The claim was about whether the CEO was innocent or not. Not whether there was authorization, moral imperative, or moral justification to kill.

You don't have to go through the courts to be guilty of something

Something about "innocent until proven guilty". If you haven't been proven guilty, you are presumed innocent.

And if you aren't going to extend that to others, why should you expect it be extended to you? Do you want someone to, completely apart from the courts, to judge your guilt, and act as your executioner? Because that's the problem. Someone decides that you are guilty, is unhappy with the lack of action by the legal system, and takes it upon themself to bring about "justice".

So, are you guilty of something? Anything? In anyone's eyes?

> If you haven't been proven guilty, you are presumed innocent.

That's a sensible procedural rule for courts to follow, but I'm not a court. I have no legal or moral responsibility to presume someone is innocent. I exercise my own judgement on the matter.

I agree we don't want vigilante executions in nyc to become more normal than they already are. But don't get it twisted and think that means we are obligated to believe, or act as if we believe, that someone is innocent.

You're free to privately judge anyone anyway you want.

As long as you don't impede their freedom to live their own life. We have laws that prevent you from harming other people. Not only you cannot murder them but there are also laws around stalking, defamation etc.

Nobody is forcing us to like the people who we think are terrible human beings.

The point is that we do not have laws that prevent the CEO from harming many people - instead the legal frameworks supported his deadly actions

Perhaps the problem is the fact that healthcare is privatized in the first place?

Yes or controlled through ultimately undemocratic powers and without free associative non coercive means (people are able to coordinate on work and employ leadership without requiring a hierarchy of controllers). We all pay our time and labor into these services but it’s proxied through money and abstracted away

Wow. "Make America Great Again", right?

Do you need to be tried in court to be guilty of something? The guy he killed contributed to the suffering of many Americans. In this country that should be illegal but it isn’t, it’s rewarded.

It's very interesting to me that everyone is blaming the CEO and not the system. The tethering of health care coverage to employment is the real issue. If decoupled, people could actually shop around and not purchase from companies with high denial rates.

It's baffling to me that people are calling this a righteous cleanse when it was purely the murder of an innocent man with a family.

Being part of the system does not absolve one of consequences of one's actions. Auschwitz management was part of the system. UHC wasn't an average participant it was really pushing the boundaries of abusive practises to the extreme. Go to any place where medical professionals hang out online and read their accounts of UHC shenanigans.

Ah, right, it’s never the CEOs blame for bad things, that’s why they get they are paid so little. Or was it the other way around, they are paid a lot because of their responsibility?

Anyway, it’s the State’s and regulations fault, as usual.

This is the legislation’s fault though. As long as insurance payments have to balance with insurance payouts, insurance companies need to strictly control payouts. An insurance company with no checks on treatments will have premiums significantly higher than the ones that do and ultimately won’t get picked.

Yes, of course, of course. CEOs just follow the laws strictly. That's why Thompson is accused of insider trading, because of legislation.

People are lazy, and blaming an individual is easy, while understanding complex systems is hard.

Understanding that the role of a CEO is essentially a replaceable cog in a vast and complex machine is beyond the capabilities of most people’s good-bad moral system, and so it’s easier to scapegoat one guy instead of looking at the deeper structure.

The concept of a "chief" is deeply rooted in human psychology and thus also in the circuitry behind moral intuition.

We spawned an emergent disembodied super-human organism called "society" that lives through the action of individual humans like an ant colony lives through the actions of individual ants.

But yet we have the strong need to put a human face on it. We need to attribute agency to something that has behaviour.

In order to explain phenomena like thunder, earthquakes etc, humans throughout history have often felt it much easier to imagine some "person in the sky" being the cause of it.

The same mechanism powers many conspiracy theories. "Global financial system that's hard to understand? Nah, it's just the Rothschilds".

Now, in some cases like CEOs of companies that do harm, it's harder to dismiss the individual responsibility, because there is a freedom of choice that the individual could do.

It's easier thus to pin the blame on that single cog rather than blaming the whole society for not voting the right people who would fix the problem at the root.

But ultimately, if that one cog would refuse to do harm then another person would take their place until the rules of the game would be patched to prevent that.

Punishing culpable people is effective only inasmuch it deters from the unwanted behaviour.

Letting people administer "justice" via violence is not conducive to a just and peaceful society. The side effects of letting that happen will backfire and will undo any "justice" improvements you may seek to achieve.

I think we all can personally loathe big bad CEOs and still think that murdering them is the wrong thing you do no matter what your moral theory is.

I agree fully. One additional comment I have is that, while the CEO chooses to work in that role, the general public is not always privy as to what their influences are.

It's possible this CEO was fighting to reduce claim denial rates but was squeezed or cutoff from his legal team in every attempt. It's also possible he pushed to deny as often as possible. But until we have evidence, it seems a bit wild to attribute "willingness to work in an influential role at a company massively disliked" with complicity in crimes against humanity. And as you point out, it is never acceptable to use violence offensively against such a person, even if he was foaming at the mouth to hit the deny button daily.

I'm personally happy to scapegoat all CEOs. Basically anyone over a certain pay.

10M is my number but I'm sure all the temporarily embarrassed billionaires on here would be shocked by such a low number.

Anything over that and I'd be quite happy to see them "adjusted" and all the cogs replaced.

Innocent? No, he was a bad person with blood on his hands, made rich by the pain and suffering of the sick. Those people have families, too.

I think all of these things can be true. It is possible for one person to be ambivalent about the killing of a bad man, acknowledge that he had a family and that is unfortunate, and accept that the system is flawed and that systematic change is required to materially improve things.

I agree that the system needs to change.

I agree it's fair to criticize executives who are responsible for suffering.

But I also think we have to be very careful with the messaging about that.

Because I don't want to live in a society where we think that violence is an acceptable solution to injustice.

It doesn't lead to a good place.

Yes, sometimes it's necessary. But very very very rarely.

Violence is always the solution. We just usually deputize the police and courts and prisons to do it for us.

Even that violence is better when minimized right?

You don't want police to apply excessive force. You won't want innocent bystanders to be shot by the police. You don't want the police to hurt people just because they think they may be guilty, etc. Those things do happen and when they happen people get upset and rightfully so.

Violence is only necessary when people refuse to abide by the rules. If nobody was violent, cops wouldn't need to be. If people adhered to the system and went to jail whem convicted, there would be no problems. Violence begets violence. It is possible to craft a society where we leave it in our past.

> Because I don't want to live in a society where we think that violence is an acceptable solution to injustice.

Personally, I'm with you. I absolutely don't want justice delivered via a mob or a vigilante without due process or the other protections that a fair justice system is supposed to provide us with.

This is why it's so important that congress, police, prosecutors, judges, and even juries do their jobs. If the people have no legal, accessible, and effective means to get justice they might resort to illegal means to get it. The longer people are denied justice, the more likely it is they'll take it into their own hands.

There are peaceful means to affect policy. But not only you have to vote for the right people, you also have to let candidates know what they have to promise in order to gain the votes.

This election cycle nobody quite focused on healthcare; more abstract culture wars were in focus instead.

You can't blame that on congress and on judges etc. The whole society is responsible. The way we talk (or not talk) to our relatives and neighbors has profound effects on the society you'll live in

the system is the people propelling it.

Bureaucrats of the holocaust were also innocent?

No man that gets a bonus when people that could be saved die is an innocent man

HN is quite a glass house. Moralizing then back to selling peoples data and ensuring warehouse workers suffer and get our kids get addicted to doomscrolling, while selling people more shit they don't need. Then use that money to push up house prices.

What makes you think that people supporting the exit of evil CEOs also support evil CEOs selling people's data?

You don't think there's a single person on here celebrating this killing who also worked at Facebook, Google, or the like at any point in their lives?

I'm sure there are people here who have caused a lot of harm to others while working at amazon or google or facebook. Probably even a few who should be behind bars. It's possible that some of them were happy to hear that the CEO was killed. I doubt it's most of us though.

There's a lot of space between "knowingly kills people for profit" and "collects user data from an app/works on a manipulative algorithm" which could make it easy for some people to pretend that they aren't doing "real" harm or to believe that the CEO was a "real problem" while they personally aren't.

I hope that the more people are held accountable for what they do (regardless of how that happens) it'll force others to do some self-reflection even if only out of a sense of self-preservation, but I'd be careful about generalizing too much. The people posting here are a pretty diverse lot, and you can find hypocrisy in any sufficiently large group. I wouldn't call HN a "glass house" but it's got a few big windows.

Literally every single one of us is guilty, then. You could personally do something today that would save a life, instead of what you'll actually do. That doesn't make you guilty of anything, though.

> Literally every single one of us is guilty, then

Yes, all of "us" doing it industrial scale and getting paid for it are guilty. Not me, but maybe you.

I am not, as I'm sure you guessed, the CEO of a healthcare corporation. I'm probably as equally guilty as you are, in your own terms.

As always, there is a cost benefit analysis one must perform when doing anything, including administering healthcare treatment. Is it worth $40M in costs to save a 94 year old from death today when the expected payoff is 2 more months of life?

I'm all for changing the system, but this action likely won't do that.

You haven’t missed anything, we are merely witnessing the scary, pathetic beginning of the internet version of medieval peasant mob violence.