United healthcare CEO assassinated, the P&E edition {This is not a gun debate/statistics thread!}

Politics & Elections
501

Of course no one here has taken the position that there should not be healthcare reform. Heck even in the broad public sphere I hear little of that, albeit huge differences in opinion of what that reform should be (“appeal the ACA!” still a cry from some parts …)

And of course you have zero actual support for “deaths of thousands for profit”, but never let that inconvenient information get in the way of celebrating the murder of someone who has more than you.

Nice to know the not so far left can make MAGA supporters look pretty normal, or at least not exceptionally batshit, in comparison.

502

I think the point about evidence of deaths is quite salient, but what form would this evidence look like?

No insurance company would make a decision in such a way that they would be liable for harm resulting from that decision. Ergo, it is structured from the get-go that the responsibility to get and pay for care is on the patient, not the insurer. What that means is that in legal terms, there can never be proof that an insurance company’s decision is the proximate cause of a death.

So that type of evidence is ruled out a priori. We do have evidence that insurance companies’ decisions cause financial hardship. We also have evidence that people make health decisions in part on finances (especially avoiding care due to lack of means).

Given the nature of the insurance business and health regulations, how could one prove the insurance companies’ culpability beyond what is already accepted?

I opine that the decision to make care difficult to access, through a combination of cost, obfuscation (who is in my network? How much will kidney surgery cost me out of pocket?), and denial of treatment, effectively removes treatment from a large number of people. A subset of these people will experience harmful outcomes; a subset of that will be death.

It seems vanishingly unlikely that the number of deaths is zero. It remains to be seen whether it’s in the tens, hundreds, or thousands.

There’s also the factor that they’re never going to be the sole cause. Insurance companies may be a cancer, but they do not cause cancer (as far as I know). So someone dying of cancer is killed by cancer, as is presumably recorded on the death certificate; I don’t know how you could reliably document a case of someone who dies of a sometimes fatal disease, except in cases where they are denied access to ALL care, not just some of it.

So I hear your call for numbers and evidence, but the reason no one is providing those is because they are damnably difficult to extricate reliably, not because they do not exist.

503

Isn’t the entire point of all this that a LOT of people have no hope of reform within the system? And that the insurance companies and the people who run them is a huge reason why?

Related topic: is it true that national media has been going out of their way to try to humanize and engender sympathy for Thompson, above and beyond anything they do for the vast majority of murder victims?

504

I think we should all agree that murder is wrong. But I dont know anyone arguing for the 2nd part. I would like to see Universal healthcare in America, and i think by lowering the medicare age over and over, we can do it painlessly. 60, the 55, then 50, then… Other have other ideas- and some ideas are very good.

Yep. There are no facts to back that up.

Not never. I mean, some gross error or negligence could occur.

I dont think that it is deaths , the main issue is more like bankruptcies caused by medical bills. Because when you are in a hospital and you NEED like saving care- afaik, they give it to you, insurance or no. Mind you the bills can be enormous. So the idea that UHC has caused deaths on the order of Hitler with the Holocaust is totally bogus. (The CEO was compared to Hitler, more or less in this very thread). I am sure some deaths have occured, but mostly huge bills. And in some cases- undeserved huge bill.

i concur.

I have seen the exact opposite- the ionization of the (presumed) assassin.

Mind you, was UHC (and Thomson) not nice people, who deserve a full investigation in how they do business? Sure. A full and complete audit, with every rejection double checked.

505

  1. Well, that’s rude; he deserves a corporeal form as much as anyone.

  2. In the national media?

506

And we should all be happy that he isn’t being treated the way the rightwing media treated Daniel Penny and Kyle Rittenhouse and George Zimmerman and Bernie Goetz and a long list of others because that would be wrong and never happen.

507

I’m afraid I don’t understand this comment. Over in the Ethics of Health Care thread, I quoted the passages of the federal Act which mean that all provinces must cover medically necessary treatments.

If a doctor provides treatment, they bill the single-payer and get paid.

508

It would be statistical. Outcomes data by specific diagnostic codes and demographics compared - UHC vs the mean or even the group of insurers with below the mean denials, for example. Even looking at outcomes specifically among those who had care denials. This is not impossible to obtain information. See for example the citation that 90% of denial by UHC were reversed on appeal, used in a court case against their use of AI for initial denial review.

Of course “lack of evidence is not evidence of lack” … but lack of evidence is … lack of evidence. Belief based on faith it must be, is?

Not to my knowledge.

No.

Most highly publicized shootings have the media spend energy trying to tell the stories of the victims, humanizing them. Few though have so much positive and empathic attention paid to those who lionize the killer and to the possible motivations as justifiable. I have in comparison seen very little humanizing Thompson. Much more media humanizing Mangione as a sympathetic character.

He is by many across social media, including here. It is disgustingly hypocritical to do so in my mind.

My read is that large swaths of the public are feeling good about this death for reasons other than healthcare inadequacies overall. Thompson was not a cause of much of our system’s shortcomings, but insurance denials and worse coverage than expected are something that many otherwise comfortable white middle class folk with company provided insurance have had to deal with. Systemic inequities? Lack of care in rural regions? For those on Medicaid with major systems capping their volumes or refusing to care for those on it? In urban poor areas? For kids under and unimmunized because of structural challenges to getting to locations to get vaccine? Relatively not two fucks given by these masses of middle class celebrants.

Trust me I am aware of our system’s shortcomings more than the average poster here, dealing with aggravations as consumer and provider both, living with a profession being corporatized into oligopolies over the course of my professional life. There is lots to complain about. And lots to be pleased about compared to before the ACA.

The cartoon version of evil sadistic CEOs murdering for fun and profit is however just a naive old Saturday morning version of a complicated reality.

It will help Trump when he tries to scrap the ACA. And it may inspire copycat killers. That’s all.

509

I would be really interested in seeing such data, but even so, that would only prove how UHC fares compared to similar businesses. If all the insurers are rationing care in such a way that it results in deaths, I can’t see how your dataset would give you a baseline to compare it to.

This is far outside of my field; I’m just trying to build the logical case of why I think the call for data is not going anywhere. I agree that without data, it’s belief-based. The strength of belief is clearly a reaction to something, but without data you may be right that it’s about something that isn’t killing people. I don’t think you are, but then, I subscribe to the belief, so that biases my reasoning.

510

@Der_Trihs may need some convincing.

511

Is there even a thread for Daniel Penny? Or his victim?
Pretty sad how so few (even here) give a shit unless the deceased is rich and the right color.

512

Sort of,

513

The key charge against UHC rests on the fact that their denial rates are significantly higher than others in the industry. (Many reversed on appeal, and many not denied until after services had been provided, part of the aggravating needless stressful stupidity at times when stress is already in ample supply.) I am not sure how much rationing actually results but the charge is that the high rate of denials cause thousands of deaths every year. The theory (fantasy?) goes that there is a plan for denials to result in delays and deaths before approvals are achieved, saving the company money. If the story is correct it has to be quite a few thousands of deaths to make a meaningful difference to the bottom line of a company with this many billions in revenues.

Clearly being insured has better outcomes than being uninsured. And I believe the data that shows that single payer systems can deliver as good or better outcomes for less. That does not equal insurance CEOs murdering thousands.

514

Well, ya could have clicked on my Wiki link to remind yourself. :wink:

He’s the pharma guy that his MO was buying up drugs that only had one source, and jacked the cost up X1000. Got in legal trouble for securities fraud.

515

I did click your link. And yeah, he’s pretty horrible. But if he’s gunned down in a year, i won’t recognize his name. That’s what i meant.

516

What if Trump gives him a job? Sounds like a Trump appointee.

517

Yes, it would be statistical. A comparison of outcomes across different health plans, controlling for medical characteristics and demographic factors would be another approach. Or you could piece together causal chains leading to premature deaths and show how UHC’s policies affected various transition probabilities.

This isn’t a trivial amount of work. I trust you have limited your remarks to pointing out the absence of evidence that UHC is responsible for thousands of deaths, and have not inferred that UHC’s actions have had no consequences on health or mortality.

Until now. There is reasonable basis for the opinion that UHCs policies have killed people, to the extent that denied or deferred medical care can kill. It doesn’t even rise to the level of requiring common sense.

Quantifying the harm is another matter. I have poked around the internet a little and have found 2 citations from 2016 and 2019 on the topic of insurance denials. I checked their references and I couldn’t find any papers along the lines of what we discussed. This isn’t a shock: running these sorts of statistical studies would require a fair amount of effort.

If you can secure a copy of this 2024 paper, we could check their references. It doesn’t cover what we’re discussing but it’s more recent and closer to our topic.

I’m struggling to make this point. I agree that’s its entirely legit to point out the lack of statistical evidence for UHC massacring their clients. This calls for some humility. But I think it’s reasonable to infer that medical care saves lives and deferred or denied medical care costs lives, even without statistical evidence. Studies require work. An expert health care policy analyst might be able to make a few back-of-the-envelope calculations, but my efforts begin and end with the Kevin Drum tables.

518

This current thread, in P&E, is much more voluminous. Just sick of all the attention given to this one case.

519

Well done.

520

Plus, he would probably agree that America works better when more people are unionized.