It's highly likely the FBI reached out to many of these organizations to do some initial contact and provide them some information regarding the current threat outlook. The worry is always copycats.
This strikes me as an overzealous internal response by the content team who otherwise doesn't know what to do with any of this. Since they're publicly traded all of this information is required to be in SEC reports anyways.
To be fair "doing something, anything, mostly stupid" is well established american standard procedure when something happens. Something "has" to be done - so something gets done.
Catching a criminal is usually a much bigger story than not catching a criminal. And criminals that get caught are tautologically "dumb enough to get caught."
We're biased to believe that criminals are dumb because we only catch the dumb ones.
Given limited attention spans, removing prominent publicly available information (i.e. with other publicly accessible information still being available) would help reduce the chances of an incident slightly. This is the reason why all those private jet trackers of those prominent individuals were removed from both Twitter and then later Meta too, despite the information still being available publicly in aviation filings.
Not what I’m reading. People on my timeline are asking why we’re forced to pay into a feudal system in which health coverage is not guaranteed leaving them with hospital bills in the tens of thousands of dollars for minor procedures after their claim was arbitrarily denied. Others are asking how in the wealthiest nation on earth 1 million people go bankrupt from medical bills when guys like this CEO are making $56 million a year
When someone has been wronged, society allows them a temporary excursion from social norms to restore justice. This is also philosophically how the justice systems operate — they are allowed to detain, incarcerate and sometimes murder people who have harmed society. Through this act of justice, society heals.
We like to see it in film too. The hero’s family (or pet) is hurt, and they commit many crimes to bring retribution to the offender. The audience feels an elation at the end of such films, as though things have been put in their right place and there is a sense of completion.
The phenomenon is extremely common. And I’d argue it is seen here. Society has to a large part deemed this killing a justice. Vigilante justice I suppose is the term.
Not making any commentary on whether it’s right or wrong. I think it’s not my place to judge, I don’t have enough context to judge well anyways. But from society’s reaction it appears to be justice.
You don't need precision with a herd. You need to send them in a general direction to "trample" and for just a few of the more skilled-competent ones to feel emboldened and righteous in their vigilante justice - not being competent enough to understand the vast complexities and nuances of every situation.
When healthcare companies are assholes, people die, and it's doubly infuriating that it happens in a way that no one is held liable
People are cheering that in a world full of corruption, someone was actually punished for what they do. That's the opinion. That's why they're celebrating.
This wasn't a random employee, but the CEO of a health insurance company. The person directly responsible for the actions of a company that defrauded its customers. Let's not muddle the issue.
There's a certain point where difference in degree becomes difference in kind.
An accountant working for a major company which does evil things is a very small piece of the puzzle, the rank and file need a salary to live their day-to-day, there's an open job and they apply so they can live their lives.
The CEO is directly taking action to drive the company to harm people, it's their leadership who materialises the evilness, it's their leadership in pursuit of a fucking large paycheck who directly decides that harming thousands of people is worth it for earning a big paycheck.
This is a huge difference in kind of evilness, don't conflate them.
Okay, maybe they don't deserve to be killed, but can we agree that most of our healthcare workers deserve to be punched in the face, since they contribute to this evil system?
Hey now, the Nazi's believed they were making the world a better place. This guy was just lining his pockets off the bodies of his customers. He's in a class of evil above them.
But, the ideal goal is to go from top down, and the allies would have had to kill a lot less rank and file Nazi's if they had been able to knock the top of the Nazi party off.
I think the quote of "I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure." it very fitting for this situation. Both that random nurse, and that nazi soldier are working for evil institutions. Being killed because you work for evil is a risk of the job. Sure, both the nazi and the nurse may be victims of circumstance, may have needed the money, or been inspired by some propaganda. That doesn't absolve who they're working for though.
Should you be killing nurses or nazis? No, you shouldn't be killing any one, just like you shouldn't be gassing children, or denying people life-saving medical care. When you change one side of that equation however, don't be shocked when someone decides to change the other.
While the attention the case is getting from the public is understandable, if this had been some random shop owner opening his store for the morning that got shot, would the NYPD give it the same level of attention? If not, why is it ok for this CEO's killing to get greater resources than the random shop owner?
It's because killing a CEO of a megacorp is a nationwide signal for civil unrest. A lot of people want to see those with power be shot on the street. Virtually no one wants to see a random person be shot on the street.
Everyone is talking in my town about how it feels like its 15F outside today. In Alaska I bet that would not be news.
Executions are somewhat less commonplace than random lethal violence. Plus, everyone knows how to reduce random killings, though we don't do it... this, on the other hand, is a problem requiring more attention.
Because if CEOs and billionaires can't feel safe, then what's the purpose of having all that money?
Also, there are a myriad of channels on which $$$ people can donate to police departments (nycpolicefoundation.org https://gothamist.com/news/5-facts-about-new-nypd-commission... etc), but poorer people are not going to do that, so why bother spending as many resources?
FWIW, I saw Tim Cook in Pac Heights a few months back just walking around. There were two "guys" in plain clothes in front and behind him on that Saturday morning. I was able to say "hello" and he was nice. I imagine there are probably others monitoring his security that I couldn't see also.
Mentally replacing every CEO's about-page blurb with “Here are some words you can use to describe me: bulletproof, golden, untouchable, ironclad, godly.” https://youtu.be/UsGcg1icSyA?t=125
Cyber Security companies always recommend against putting personal information on websites/linked in, guess it took physical security for anyone to actually listen.
It's the third high-profile assassination (or attempt) in the US this year. I think the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping plot in 2020 was the closest thing we had before that. Sadly, I think the answer to 1 is yes.
There were two attempts on Trump less than a month apart. The second wasn’t AS big of a story because I think they got the guy before he was able to get a shot off.
Yes. Copyright issues are handled in the way you'd expect. Take down requests outside of copyright are reviewed internally without guarantee of outcome.
This is actually kind of darkly hilarious. A CEO is gunned down and their solution is... "Let's try to keep secret who our CEO is!" Top minds at work here.
Trying to obscure information from people has never backfired in the history of the internet, and certainly nobody will be motivated to publicize the information further.
Not encouraging it to keep happening, just pointing out the fact that this isn't an effective response. If someone wants to get your information, and is motivated enough to kill you, they will.
The best response would be to up security in the short term, and try to change how you work so people aren't so motivated that they'll want to kill you in the long term.
The people they decline healthcare to are people. Are you not an inhumane executioner denying life saving procedures based on 10 sec check and some AI data?
Sure, I don't condone it and the system must be fixed instead, but 'they are still people' seems not good. A lot of very evil people in history and today are also people.
>Are you not an inhumane executioner denying life saving procedures based on 10 sec check and some AI data?
Parent pointed out that the CEO was a person. Sophistry ensues, where you denied the humanity of the deceased because of your disapproval of his enterprise, but then conclude by appearing to double back and not deny his humanity at the end.
Not so tough; I would not personally not consider a pencil pusher that causes, indirectly but he knew what he was doing, 100k-1m of deaths and suffering, a human at all. People defend him by saying he was just an accountant; you can say that for a lot of unsavory people throughout history.
But I am against insurance as a business at all; it is by design perverse: you want to deny claims, how is or can it be ever good for the client? Where I live, healthcare insurers are not allowed to deny claims, but other insurers can; I always take them to court if they do, even for a few 100 euros. These 'humans' have no right to screw over innocent people without recourse; it's simply stealing and in the case of health or disability it is torture or murder; they need to be held accountable, including the ceo and not just money fines (slap on wrists they are insured for!); prison time. If you deny cancer treatment and it turns out the claim was valid and you had ai decide or someone (or multiple people) knew it was valid but still declined it, that's prison time for negligence, theft and possibly murder (with intent as you knew the outcome and did it anyway); in any other scenario it would be anyway.
I don't want anyone to die, but I feel a lot more empathy with innocent shooting victims than with the CEO of a company known for driving people into bankruptcy or death. Any school shooting victim's life should be considered equally valuable as that of any CEO. Or the lives of people dying from preventable diseases.
If you want to be absolutely disgusted by humanity, go over to reddit.com, pick any random post about this event on the frontpage, and look at the thousands of people celebrating Thompson's murder. And begging for more.
He was the CEO of a company who used an "AI" to deny over 90% of claims. His choices indirectly impacted the life of millions and possibly killed 1000s prematurely. The healthcare industry had it coming, he just happened to be in the wrong place for it.
developers should think long and hard about what they do, where they work and what is the impact of their work on society. if your “ticket” says “do some data mining shit to figure out a way to deny claims” perhaps polishing up your resume is a good idea
If someone did something shitty to contribute to someone else's misery, they shouldn't be surprised the afflicted is upset with them. Where to draw the line for what's shitty and what's an appropriate punishment is subjective, but lawful and ethical only have so much overlap. Job title is irrelevant. Employer is irrelevant.
I completely disagree with everything you're advocating for. I've worked at shitty companies and I quit because I didn't want to do shitty things. This is HN. The majority of people here are incredibly privileged and aren't forced to work an immoral job just to afford necessities. Barring extenuating circumstances - which absolutely do not apply to most people here - it is a choice.
Anyway, I don't really wanna have a back and forth with you. You come across as incredibly childish to me. I don't respect you enough to care what you think about me and I assume the feeling is mutual.
I find it interesting that you think I'm childish, whereas there are dozens of people in this hn thread celebrating a man being murdered with a gun in NYC literally 3 feet away from an innocent bystander. That seems pretty childish to me.
I dont work for UHC or any shitty place like that, my Mama raised me right.
if you knowingly and wilfully do something that can cause death of other humans - yes, 100% you might be on someone’s hit list regardless of your profession.
This is useless. The SEC requires public companies to list their entire c-suite on their annual proxy statements which anyone can find with a 2 second google search.
UHG had $22B in profits last year. They did it in part by having the highest claim denial rate of any major insurer, and things like (allegedly) using an AI based claim evaluation tool with a 90% error rate. UHG also includes other "middleman" companies that are purely extractive, like Optum.
"Profiteering" doesn't seem like that tough a claim to make here...
Yea... "complicated resource allocation issues" is a really, really charitable way of describing "massively profiting from denial of health care, leading to the suffering and death of one's customers."
I'm actually kind of pleasantly surprised at the raw "FAFO" comments we're seeing. I was truly expecting the mainstream media to circle the wagons and treat this thing like a hero-has-died tragedy, with "respect the dead" and thoughts and prayers and everything, but the public's cynicism actually seems to be overtaking all the corporate whitewashing. This was a truly evil person, and although nobody should call for someone to die, one is allowed to "read an obituary with great pleasure," as the saying goes.
Considering insurance companies are bound by Medical Loss Ratio rules, if they approved all those claims, all it would do is cause everyone's premiums to skyrocket.
With revenue of $372B that is a profit margin of 5.9%. Which is frankly terrible.
I suppose ideally they would have 0% margin, but 5.9% is a shitty business to be in. The owners could just buy treasuries and get 4.5% with no work and no risk.
Where are you seeing that the UHG executive team still held their meeting the same day? Everything I've read said they cancelled it.
"Thompson, 50, led UnitedHealthcare, the largest private health insurer in the U.S. He was on the way to UnitedHealth Group’s investor day set for Wednesday at 8 a.m. ET at the Hilton, the NYPD said. The company canceled that event after the shooting."
In the U.S. there is a whole lot that is going in the wrong direction. This direction isn't new, but more and more 'regular people' are sliding into the 'desperate' category.
That, in my mind, is why there is a visible amount of schadenfreude or even glee from seeing suffering of the people who make millions running the companies that bankrupt them or prevent them from getting treatment they need.
It is a waste of time to argue whether those feelings are right or wrong. They are a result of a broken and exploitative system that is benefitting only the perpetrators of it.
Few things are as worthy of time as arguing whether feelings are right or wrong. If you can't tell right from wrong, you totter perilously close to becoming a beast, and it's worth trying to save people from that.
> Few things are as worthy of time as arguing whether feelings are right and wrong
Sorry, but no. Feelings are not right or wrong, they just exist. What we do with those feelings can be right or wrong, and I agree that if one wants to live an ethical life, one needs to evaluate whether their actions are just.
My original point stands: debating whether others feelings are right or wrong is a waste of time. Its far better to understand why, especially if you want to influence that reality.
And yet here you stand, spending your time trying to convince me that it is a waste of time to convince me that you are wasting your time in trying to change my feelings.
You should really take a look at the 10 year stock price history of UNH. It's price is up around 650%. IBM has gone up 12% in that same time. Gold metal up 60%.
UNH is the third highest earning issue I have in this 10 year old strategy test portfolio beat out only by NOW and MPWR.
It was all selected by automated strategy in 2014. This one was built by looking for particular price signals, inside a market cap range, with a favorable ratio of insider buys vs sells or option exercises.
> I'd much rather see that worked through legislative means than through targeted assassinations..
I believe the voters and their politicians have tried, repeatedly. Usually healthcare organizations inject just enough turbulence into the legislative process such that legislative bills don't lead to any kind of reforms. Meanwhile, average life expectancy in the US is still falling.
In terms of being able to affect political change, yes. If the wealthy were targeted in assassinations using firearms, the 2nd amendment would mean very little. When the political will of the country is reflected in a small group of people it becomes increasingly possible to affect politics by affecting that group.
This is what I was thinking. You can kill thousands of schoolkids and nothing will change, but gun down a few CEO's and suddenly there'll be hard conversations about control.
>> the very simple solution of universal healthcare
Umm no. Even if we force insurers to be nonprofit there are still huge problems. Treatments can cost arbitrarily much - even in labor costs, so there will always be a limit to what can be covered. "Patients" will still use excessive amounts of service. Doctors will suggest extra tests so long as they are covered. Referral bonuses will happen behind the scenes. Price gouging is ongoing.
Universal care only addresses a little of the problem, and eliminates some of the checks on others.
I don't have a solution, but just wanted to refute the idea that there is a simple one.
One thing I speculate is that elimination of insurance entirely might be good in some ways. Along those lines, only catastrophic things should be covered. Passing reasonable costs on to patients directly will put downward pressure on costs while also eliminating middle men. But that has downsides too.
I don't have a solution, but just wanted to refute the idea that there is a simple one.
Having a public insurance option to put downward pressure on existing insurance carriers was the most sensible strategy. Both Republicans and Democrats were on board too but exactly one Democrat torpedoed that idea…
I mean literally every other developed nation has a solution: universal healthcare. Some have far better healthcare systems than the US too. So saying that this is an unsolved and possible unsolvable problem is clearly disingenuous.
Now, the process of transitioning to universal healthcare for such a large system is something that is likely unprecedented. But that’s not what you are talking about.
When you actually look into the details, you'll find that "universal healthcare" doesn't have a universal definition and there are incredible numbers of negative outcomes in other developed nations. People from every developed nation will complain about how much their health system sucks as long as there isn't an American in the room. Reality and Reddit are rarely the same thing.
Oh I have been waiting for you! Thank you for this comment, now let’s see every single thing that’s wrong with it:
First let’s break down why your argument of “people complain when Americans aren’t in the room” followed by “Reality and Reddit are rarely the same thing” is ironically flawed. The number of people unhappy with any given system is measurable. That number is not proportional to the number of complaints about said system. For example if you have 100 people, and 20 of them are unhappy but 3 will talk to everyone of the 100 about how unhappy they are the number of complaints will be 100. See how the math doesn’t math? And whether people complain on Reddit or “in a room” doesn’t matter here. Lastly, “incredible numbers” is an amazing summation of what you are saying here. You are right, they are not credible.
Now that we got that out of the way, let’s look at what does matter: metrics. With so many people, so many cases, so much money the law of averages lets us make conclusions about which system on average does better. There are two metrics I can think of: cost and outcomes. You can’t of course optimize for two variables at once: what if for nearly infinite cost you could have perfect outcomes? But let’s look anyways and see if we can spot a pattern.
Notice that on any of these charts the US is not number 1. It is number 2 for one of them but the rest are far worse, including 31 out of 45 for cervical cancer!
Go to that link, sort in descending order and see how the US has total per capita spending at 50% higher in 2022 than the next most expensive country (Switzerland). The WHO estimate isn’t quite as dramatic but it still is a huge jump from Switzerland (you’ll need to look at 2021 since more recent data isn’t available).
In other words countries that objectively beat the US in outcomes ALL have cheaper per capita healthcare than the US. You cannot argue that because you have heard people complain that it means other systems are worse. But I can argue that given this data the US clearly is doing something very wrong. It pretends like the solution doesn’t exist and when the people point to the 30 countries that beat us at things like cervical cancer at a half to a third of the cost while also providing the peace of mind that you won’t go bankrupt due to medical bills, our politicians stuff dollar bills they got from insurance company lobbyists into their ears and keep yelling “la la la we are the greatest country in the world”.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk on my particular area of interest. Enjoy the rest of your evening.
Health insurance companies have reasonable margins and it's really tough to make the claim they're profiteering off the system.
Health insurance doesn’t need to be second-guessing doctors. I understand that someone needs to pool the money before it is needed and distribute it out to the needy once the emergencies happen but that’s as far as they need to exist.
If you really want to conserve resources from wasteful doctors, there are strategies for making that happen but putting a private profit-driven firm in charge of second-guessing every treatment is the worst by far.
Certainly someone needs to be second-guessing doctors, because they routinely make decisions that fail to adequately consider both costs and risks. I grant that the insurance companies don't do a good job of it, but don't fall for the ridiculous trope that doctors would make great decisions without insurance companies.
This strikes me as an overzealous internal response by the content team who otherwise doesn't know what to do with any of this. Since they're publicly traded all of this information is required to be in SEC reports anyways.