My take on the charges is that, if you’re going to overcharge as a terrorist and do a full SWAT perp walk and so on, why shouldn’t the next person aim higher? See if they can beat McVeigh’s body count with a truck full of ANFO at a corporate headquarters somewhere.
Of course he isn’t. It’s legal to kill people when it’s in the name of maximizing shareholder revenue. That’s why so many people are celebrating Mangione.
The nice part about having a system and being a part of it is that you don’t have any personal liability. “If it wasn’t me it just would have been someone else.” You’re right, Thompson wasn’t guilty of murder. It’s likely he didn’t even committed any state or federal crimes. Martin Luthor King, Jr. wrote that “a riot is the language of the unheard.” So many people are cheering Mangione because they’re unheard. I’m not happy Thompson was murdered, I’m not even happy my response was basically, “meh,” but I understand why people aren’t sympathetic.
According to a story in Vox, the Anthem decision wouldn’t have made any difference in terms of patient care, but was rather a dispute between \the company and anesthesiologists providing care. No patients would have been either harmed or overbilled had the decision stood, and the only people hurt would have been anesthesiologists who had been overestimating procedure times and overbilling as a result, and the financial professionals, real estate agents, car salesmen, and the like who make more commissions thanks to getting a piece of the overage that the doctors are charging.
It’s an interesting piece - give it a read. In a sense, the design of the Affordable Care Act was to pit insurance companies against health care providers, because “bending the cost curve” means those providers will over the long run get a lot less reimbursement for their labors. Unfortunately, health care providers are unhappy with this and have been banding together via practice acquistion and corporate mergers to reduce the number of service providers in some areas, thus giving them more bargaining power against the insurers. Patients do get caught in the middle, but this is more than an insurer-insured dispute.
That has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the murder. It is a serious issue, but besides the point here.
No, it is not.
Sure, but his murder has nothing to do with that.
And every major car company has had a safety issue with a car- which killed people.
The coal industry was killing 43000 americans a year.
Oil industry?- "According to a study from Harvard University, the oil industry, through its fossil fuel emissions, is responsible for an estimated 8 million deaths globally per year due to air pollution, " And about 500 a year industrial accidents.
Tobacco kills more than 480,000 people annually – more than AIDS, alcohol, car accidents, illegal drugs, murders and suicides combined.
The Toll of Tobacco in the United… | Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.
and so forth- Hell by comparison, we should be buying the CEOs of health Insurance companies a medal.
And of course your great example of the infected factor 8. Which wasnt insurance it was- The companies involved included Alpha Therapeutic Corporation, Institut Mérieux (which then became Rhone-Poulenc Rorer Inc., and is now part of Sanofi), Bayer Corporation and its Cutter Biological division, and Baxter International and its Hyland Pharmaceutical division.[2]
Contaminated haemophilia blood products - Wikipedia.
However, the companies in the USA did pay out quite a bit in lawsuits for doing this. No one went to jail, sadly. That is- in the USA, but elsewhere-
In February 2000, three former drug company executives accused of selling blood products tainted with HIV were given prison terms… In 2001, Leonor Beleza, a former health minister, was indicted for propagating a contagious disease during her time in office during the 1980s.[6]… A former Health Minister was convicted for failing to adequately screen the blood, leading to the deaths of five people from AIDS, and the infection of two others during a key period in 1985.[6] Two other government officials that continued to use the old unheated stock in 1985, when a heated product was available, received prison sentences.[
So there were prison sentences. Just not here.
There is- lawsuits. And United Health care is being sued- a LOT.
I heard that lawyers cost money.
But all of those industries who are killing people through neglect and negligence and priorotizing profit are, in fact, just as bad. Killing people via pollution or addiction is pretty terrible.
There’s some responsibility on the part of the dead in some cases: some automobile deaths are user error or collision with moose or other things the manufacturer has no control over; people perhaps ought to be stronger than advertising and peer pressure, though I’m not sure where that line is.
Still, “the other CEOs leave a trail of excess deaths, too!” is not a particularly strong or sympathetic argument.
Not in those kinds of cases- they take 30% or something off the final amount.
The point is- no one can prove the UHC CEO caused even one.single.death. Not one.
BUT we know, and can prove Big tobacco is killing hundreds of thousands, some of whom arent even smokers - through second hand smoke.
Yes it is.
I was wondering where to put the following (thanks for the assist. 
)
As DrDeth noted, to run a large industrial enterprise such as an electric power plant is to set company policies that result in death. Economists note that there is a socially optimal amount of pollution and that amount is not zero. Company utility execs punt off the process of making tradeoffs to the government which would be fine, except they also lobby the government for more lenient standards (with a few exceptions - IIRC Motorola once lobbied for tougher pollution standards).
But sometimes executives kill in a more direct way. When this happens, they get away with it. UHC is one example. Letting dirty air into the atmosphere results in the loss of statistical lives; issuing denials to individual policyholders does a more direct harm to individuals.
Further along the morality spectrum is the now defunct Film Recovery Systems, profiled in the Encyclopedia of White-Collar & Corporate Crime. FRS was in the business of extracting silver from used film. Their business hit some rough spots when silver prices declined during the 1980s. So they cut some corners.
The process for removing silver from film involves a certain white powder. Their workers earned $3.50 to $4.50 an hour back them: most of them were illegal Mexican immigrants, some were Polish immigrants. None spoke English well. None knew that the white powder was cyanide.
There were no goggles and not enough gloves to around. Workers got sick: they didn’t like the air, they felt dizzy, nauseous. They had no safety training. Eventually one man died. The victim was Stefan Golab a 59 year old Polish immigrant who died of cyanide poisoning.
Upon review, the Cook County DA filed charges against the executives themselves. And not just for negligence. The charges were murder. The trial went before a judge and the judge sentenced the executives to 25 years in prison in 1985. It was the first and only time that US company executives were convicted of murder.
It was overturned on appeal in 1990, remitted for retrial. The perps copped a plea for manslaughter and received shorter sentences:
On September 7, 1993, just prior to their retrial, the three former employees entered guilty pleas of involuntary manslaughter for the 1983 cyanide poisoning death of Golab. After entering the pleas, O’Neil was sentenced to three years in prison, Kirschbaum to two years in prison, and Rodriguez to 30 months’ probation, four months of home confinement and 500 hours of community service.
So they got away with something that looks like murder to me.
No, it is not, so far, a total lack of evidence.
and
Following their conviction at trial, three former executives of Aequitas Management, LLC, and associated companies, were sentenced to federal prison today for their roles in a vast fraud conspiracy wherein the executives raised nearly $300 million from defrauded investors.
Former CEO Of Medical Device Company Sentenced To Six Years In Prison For Creating And Selling A Fake Component That Was Implanted Into Patients
Sadly, altho i can check for prison, I cant check for murder charges, since all it will show is the current crime here, but there is this one-
Pacific Gas & Electric confessed Tuesday to killing 84 people in one of the most devastating wildfires in recent U.S. history during a dramatic court hearing punctuated by a promise from the company’s outgoing CEO that the nation’s largest utility will never again put profits ahead of safety.
Manslaughter is a form of murder. And they went to prison.
Based on my experience, that settlement was mostly paid by the insurance industry, not by the companies.
I’m glad to learn that in some other countries, actual human beings who made the decisions were found guilty of a crime. They weren’t in the US. No, the CEO of UHC wasn’t “guilty of murder” because our laws define crimes in a way that shields people like him. Doesn’t mean those people aren’t guilty in a moral sense. Doesn’t mean there’s no cause for anger. And
is not a great defense. I mentioned above that there are some other CEO’s whose murder would also spark public support.
It absolutely has relevance to a discussion about why people aren’t universally horrified and weeping for the victim and what that says about those people. Which, IMO, is a big, if not exclusive, part of what we’re talking about here.
And posters here clinging to a delusion that they and others are feeling some satisfaction with this murder because Thompson was getting away with government sanctioned murder by another name, a fantasy that this is some sort of vigilante justice, says much about people too.
Simply that people suck.
It’s more that a lot of people have been propagandized into perfect victims who will look at powerful individuals killing people like them and just think it doesn’t count. That killing by the millions is just fine if a corporation does it.
Oh bullshit. Now the lie has grown to him killing by the millions. Thousands was not a big enough lie.
Let me be very clear. I honestly don’t care too much about this person’s death, no more no less than any other murder that happens every day. Less honestly than the poor woman who was set on fire while just sitting on a subway. Tragic events happen and I don’t have bandwidth to be upset. Enough to worry about for those I care about.
But the smug explicit comments that range from “getting it” to “good” to beyond … that is a sign of how horrible humans are to me.
I just checked. A jury in something called the Supreme Felony Court has twelve people. They must reach a unanimous decision. They sit until they reach a decision or until a hung jury is declared. The jurors must come from New York County (which covers Manhattan in New York City in New York State).
It frankly seems impossible for me to imagine a jury coming to a guilty verdict. Can the prosecution ask for a change of venue?
This will be a very tough case to prosecute. Maybe they will offer him no death penalty if he cops a plea.
So… I don’t think this guy deserved to be murdered. But i also think that i understand our healthcare delivery system a whole lot better than the average Joe. My father was a doctor and i worked in the US insurance industry for decades. I have friends who work for pharmaceutical and medical device companies.
So i don’t think it’s a sign that “people are horrible” that the murder of a guy who represented one of the worst health insurance companies in the US sparked popular support. Was it his fault that UHC caused an enormous amount of pain, suffering, and yes, no doubt a lot of deaths? Probably not. Like, really, I’ve heard he was trying to make it better. But did he represent a really nasty company? Yes, he did.
Why would a change of venue matter? And anyway, I’d think that New Yorkers, who have an interest in not being gunned down in the streets of their city, would be more likely to convict than a jury that doesn’t care about public safety in New York.
No, I was talking about corporate behavior in general, not just what he did. The tobacco industry has already been mentioned.
And it’s not a “lie”, it’s pointing out the obvious. We just aren’t supposed to admit it, because then we’d have to acknowledge what we allow corporations to do to us.