I think I said on the hell thread that I see it much like dictators - I don't advocate killing them but I'm not overly bothered that someone did, though I'd rather see them in jail with an opportunity for repentance and reform (however unlikely). Of course assassination is not great from a societal point of view either, but it's a consequence of a broken system rather than anything else.
The CEO was horrible and the company is too. But murder is also horrible and wrong, and I’m worried about the kind of radicalization we’ve seen on the right creeping into the left as well.
There's no indication that the suspect was on 'the left'.
The people among my friends that I am seeing cheering this on are on the left. It’s disturbing the living hell out of me.
Maybe that's down to spotlight effect. Insofar as there was cheering it seemed to be an equal opportunity sport, with many 'influencers' on the right seemingly dismayed that their own fans were out of step with them for once.
Maybe what should disturb you more is that the system is apparently outside effective democratic control.
I think I said on the hell thread that I see it much like dictators - I don't advocate killing them but I'm not overly bothered that someone did, though I'd rather see them in jail with an opportunity for repentance and reform (however unlikely). Of course assassination is not great from a societal point of view either, but it's a consequence of a broken system rather than anything else.
I'd also like to see the murderer in jail with an opportunity for repentance and reform. Murder is wrong.
Maybe what should disturb you more is that the system is apparently outside effective democratic control.
How do you know it doesn't? But the people running the system aren't people I know (in most cases people I know online, but I still know them to some degree), and aren't people on my own political side which I don't want to see radicalized into violent vigilantes or mobs, and also, again, this was a murder committed in cold blood.
Being disturbed by one thing doesn't mean I'm not disturbed by something else, nor the level of disturbance I may have at any given moment for either thing.
(I'm tempted to say that the system may be inside effective democratic control, too, which is disturbing on another level. I mean, we got Trump, again, after another national election, which freaks me out. Though the question of what counts as "effective" may be at issue with gerrymandering in terms of elections, and lobbying in terms of giant corporations (medical and otherwise), and tons of money poured into trying to make the system the way awful people want it to be.)
The people among my friends that I am seeing cheering this on are on the left. It’s disturbing the living hell out of me.
In my experience that's because most on the right don't care about the deaths of the under-insured. So anyone cheering such actions is more likely not to be Republican
In my experience people on the right are just as likely as anyone else to be under-insured. This cuts across the political spectrum. It's not a right vs left thing; it's a rich vs everyone else thing, which is why I wondered if it might have some kind of uniting effect. I'm not expecting something along lines of the French Revolution, but I saw a lot of guillotine memes last week. And frankly I think it's good that this cheering, however deplorable, was so universal. Most people have no recourse, and, as @chrisstiles says, the system is outside democratic control -- this cheering was united, vocal and public recognition of something that is profoundly fucked up that the vast majority of us at the wrong end of this sharp and pointy stick could make common cause around.
The shooter has been filmed going into the lockup, yelling that something or other "is an insult to the American people".
Also, his manifesto has apparently been posted by an "independent journalist", but I'm still waiting for confirmation from legacy media. For now, I'll note the somewhat bathetic opening statement...
To the feds, I'll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country.
Kinda sounds like mushy liberalism to me. The rest of the text is similarly prosaic and almost entirely devoid of higher ideological content. At one point, the writer states "The American people have allwed[sic] them to get away with it", which(in line with my earlier ruminations) leads me to wonder if he thinks picking people to shoot from voter-registration rolls woulda been just as morally sound.
(And, yes, I realize the writer probably thinks that the public is ultimately exonerated as a result of having been brainwashed by the companies. But it's testimony to the barebones presentation that that possibility remains entirely unexplored.)
The shooter has been filmed going into the lockup, yelling that something or other "is an insult to the American people".
Also, his manifesto has apparently been posted by an "independent journalist", but I'm still waiting for confirmation from legacy media. For now, I'll note the somewhat pathetic opening statement...
To the feds, I'll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country.
Kinda sounds like mushy liberalism to me. The rest of the text is similarly prosaic and almost entirely devoid of higher ideological content. At one point, the writer states "The American people have allwed[sic] them to get away with it", which(in line with my earlier ruminations) leads me to wonder if he thinks picking people to shoot from voter-registration rolls woulda been just as morally sound.
(And, yes, I realize the writer probably thinks that the public is ultimately exonerated as a result of having been brainwashed by the companies. But it's testimony to the barebones presentation that that possibility remains entirely unexplored.)
AP has more details:
A law enforcement official who wasn’t authorized to discuss the investigation publicly and spoke with The Associated Press on condition of anonymity said a three-page, handwritten document found with Mangione included a line in which he claimed to have acted alone.
“To the Feds, I’ll keep this short, because I do respect what you do for our country. To save you a lengthy investigation, I state plainly that I wasn’t working with anyone,” the document said, according to the official.
It also said, “I do apologize for any strife or traumas but it had to be done. Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming.”
^^ The closest I've come to legacy-media reporting this is The New Republic, but they just seem to be taking Klippenstein at face value, and reproducing some of his passages.
I notice the plural in "parasites." Crap, was he going to go after more people?
Think you might be overanalyzing it. The sentence is in the past tense, and I think he prob'ly just meant that this class of people were due their comeuppance.
We have a terrible dearth of process politics re: healthcare here in the US, meaning (to me) that it's rarely if ever communicated how to get from one system to another. In general I think Americans are terrified of what they infer to be a "cold turkey" process -- wake up one morning and private insurance is completely gone -- and whatever is allegedly replacing it wholesale has to exceed any and all baseline standards of what's come before. We're never told about a transitional period/process. ISTM that people are so terrified of not having the capricious, largely for profit, bankruptcy-inducing system that we do have, because at least that's having something, that we'll never be able to move to anything else. And of course, all the while the Right categorically demonizes any single payer system as abject communism.
If you want that, here it goes. This is how Canada did it and why, using the same ingredients that existed in the US at the the time and still do.
The fogotten parent of Canada's healthcare system was Blue Cross. Blue Cross started in Texas in the 1930's and quickly spread across the US and Canada. In its original form, the plans were non-profit and owned by state/provincial hospital associations. They were offered on a group-only community rated (not individual-rated) basis. It was an attempt to be universal and voluntay.
The problem was that this system was unstable. An insurer can be voluntary and have underwriting/denials or be universal and compulsory, but not universal and voluntary, it leads to selection against the insurer and eventual collapse. Most Blue Cross plans in the US became for-profit starting in 1994. In Canada starting in the 1960's, the alternative was chosen: the government picked up the tab through Medicare. Blue Cross formed the adminstration/claims infrastructure as it was already accepted by nearly all doctors and hospitals. In provinces outside Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia Blue Cross is still the government Medicare administrator. In those three provinces the provincial Blue Cross plans were 'in-sourced' to the provincial ministry of health to form the basis of the Medicare billing infrastructure. Blue Cross essentially became what is known as an Admistrator-Only Plan, they are 100% indemified for claims by the government.
In cases where the public and private health care systems in Canada overlap, no private insurers cover government-paid services. They can't compete (even if they wanted to) and don't. They offer a wrap-around. The old fear of Americans losing their health insurance to a worse government plans is to my mind so much bunkum. It's not an either/or thing, it's both.
Canada's health system really is Medicare-for-all or Blue Cross-for-all. There is zero reason why the same cannot be done in the US by broadening the mission of state Medicare providers.
Did I mention that Obamacare bears an uncanny resemblance to an Ontario proposal for mandatory private medical insurance from 1966 that was defeated in favour of the government option?
Interesting difference in perspectives. Social media right from the start was assuming, with approval, that it was meant as a statement against the company or the industry in general, and I pretty much shared that assumption, minus the approval.
Part of the reason I rejected the cloak-and-dagger hypothesis was that, Hollywood movies aside, there really aren't a lotta cases in the developed world(*) of corporate types murdering each other to settle disputes. Jimmy Hoffa and Joseph Yablonski are really the only cases that come to mind, and they were killed by fellow labour-unionists. (Though in Yablonski's case, his killers were from the pro-management faction.)
(*) Now, western corporations in the developing world hiring local thugs to carry out violence is another story.
I suspect - remember this is from a long way away and a media world that claims to be familiar with the context but isn't really - a possible subtext was that the victim had got across somebody dangerous in some other area of his life. This was sort of hinted at when his wife was reported as saying that she could not understand how such a thing could have happened to him.
Because of a widespread assumption among the possibly ill-informed. that as everyone in the USA can carry a gun, they all do. So a lot of people here, on hearing the story, would simply interpret it as a particularly egregious example of the consequences of that.
Part of it is because the elites who run media companies have a lot sympathy when something bad happens to a fellow elite, and this is reflected in their coverage decisions.
I'm not sure that is true here. The culture is different, and this victim did not come from an elite of which anyone even in the media would be that aware. hence the way it was initially reported without the reporter picking up the cultural background and possible implications.
Remember, neither of the victim nor the company that he ran are people or entities that anybody over here is likely to have heard of. There is though a general public perception over here of the entire medical world in the USA is that it is ill thought of, very expensive, exploitative and something whose sinister tentacles are very unwelcome.
Average insurers’ overhead costs are about 12.4 percent, according to an April 2017 Annals of Internal Medicine article by Steffie Woolhandler and David U. Himmelstein. A February report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research totaled overhead costs for private individual and employer based plans at 12.3 percent in 2015. And America’s Health Insurance Plans found that 17.8 cents of every premium dollar goes to operating costs.
But those are averages looking across health care markets. When the Congressional Budget Office broke those costs down, they put administrative costs in the nongroup market at 20 percent, small-group market at 16 percent and the large-group market at 11 percent.
Federal caps on administrative costs reflect this range. Group market insurers have a 15 percent cap and individual market insurers have a 20 percent cap. If exceeded, insurers have to pay a rebate to policyholders under the Affordable Care Act.
One former Cigna executive recalled how the US health insurer used to frequently face threats when claims were denied. “We’d have times when you’d deny proton laser therapy for a kid with seizures and the parent would freak out,” said the former executive.
Another industry executive said: “What’s most disturbing is the ability of people to hide behind their keyboards and lose their humanity.”
Yes, imagine how disturbing that must be. :rolling_eyes:
In my experience that's because most on the right don't care about the deaths of the under-insured. So anyone cheering such actions is more likely not to be Republican
In my experience people on the right are just as likely as anyone else to be under-insured.
100% And yet are they trying to fix the system? I haven't seen a lot of effort from the Republicans to do anything. They don't want to hurt business (themselves) so they wring their hands but don't do much. And they get in the way of any attempts at bipartisanship. And Republican voters hate it when they themselves are uninsured, but they don't seem to stop voting for Trump. As you know, poor Trumpers are a very real segment of his vote.
It's not a right vs left thing; it's a rich vs everyone else thing, which is why I wondered if it might have some kind of uniting effect. I'm not expecting something along lines of the French Revolution, but I saw a lot of guillotine memes last week. And frankly I think it's good that this cheering, however deplorable, was so universal. Most people have no recourse, and, as @chrisstiles says, the system is outside democratic control -- this cheering was united, vocal and public recognition of something that is profoundly fucked up that the vast majority of us at the wrong end of this sharp and pointy stick could make common cause around.
This is why I keep hoping that Republicans will try to get Trump an easy win by regulating insurance companies some. Even some regulation would be a real improvement, and it's something Democrats would support even if it made Trump look good.
Amazon has now pulled recently posted "Deny Delay Depose"-themed merchandise.
They're still selling The Turner Diaries and the Unabomber Manifesto, but I guess the 90s were a long time ago.
Though Amazon is still selling the book that most likely inspired the use of the words "Deny Delay Depose". I haven't read Mr. Feinman's book, but my guess is that he doesn't include the assassination of insurance executives as a tactic for taking on insurance companies.
I'm seeing a bunch of people posting statements along the lines of "if my doctor says I need treatment X, why can my insurance company tell me that I don't?"
The obvious answer is that you getting treatment X is what puts your doctor's kids through college. Every healthcare system, however it operates, has to have some kind of mechanism to control costs, and decide whether a particular treatment is worth paying for.
People can't pay out of pocket for healthcare in general, because the general case is rare-but-expensive care: this is why we have some kind of risk pooling in all sensible healthcare systems. So every healthcare system ends up with a dynamic where the person wanting the healthcare is not the person who is directly paying for it, which means there has to be a cost control mechanism of some sort.
If your doctor was paid on a fixed salary basis by the single payer, then your doctor can be the cost control mechanism: you can give the doctor guidelines, and they can follow them. But when the doctor's income depends on them performing more procedures, there's a rather large conflict of interest if they also perform the cost control role.
It really doesn't help that medical billing is deliberately obfuscatory. A standard medical bill will tell you that the price for some medical service you have received is $30,000, for example. It will then tell you that the medical provider has negotiated with your insurance company to accept $453.27 for this service, that your insurer has paid 80% of this, and that you owe the remaining 20%. Or something like that.
The vast difference between the headline price for a service and the price that the provider negotiates with the insurer is completely normal, and complete nonsense.
Amazon has now pulled recently posted "Deny Delay Depose"-themed merchandise.
They're still selling The Turner Diaries and the Unabomber Manifesto, but I guess the 90s were a long time ago.
Though Amazon is still selling the book that most likely inspired the use of the words "Deny Delay Depose". I haven't read Mr. Feinman's book, but my guess is that he doesn't include the assassination of insurance executives as a tactic for taking on insurance companies.
I guess it's kinda like dual-purpose medication? The book can be purchased by people who wanna celebrate the shooting, but also by people who just wanna get some context for this news item. Whereas the DDD merch can only be used to celebrate the killing.
As for Mr. Feinman's advice on health-care reform, I'm guessing he doesn't advocate random mow-downs either. Last I heard, he wasn't answering media questions, and I suspect he's had a rather...hectic time lately.
The cost control mechanism is dependent on one or both of two assumptions: there are doctors willing to prescribe unnecessary or ineffective treatments OR there are some necessary or effective treatments that are nonetheless too expensive to be funded. The NHS operates on the latter principle, with a fairly clear if arguable mechanism (Quality Adjusted Life Years). The US system seems to assume both principles, but implies it's about the first rather than the second, presumably because it's thought less outrageous to say a treatment is unnecessary than too expensive. This seems to mean that cost control in the US is opaque and hits randomly as inexplicably denied claims and medical bankruptcies.
...I keep hoping that Republicans will try to get Trump an easy win by regulating insurance companies some. Even some regulation would be a real improvement, and it's something Democrats would support even if it made Trump look goo
I've already seen a few anonymous comments saying that the killing was a blow against "Obamacare", and I think I read that someone in the right-wing media-sphere was saying that "woke health-care" was to blame for the problems in the US system.
That's probably the tact Republicans are more likely to take. "Of course there's no money for grandma's cancer treatment!! It's all being spent on gender-reassignment surgery!!"
That's probably the tact Republicans are more likely to take.
The "tack" they're more likely to take. "Tact" is from someone who didn't understand sailing metaphors and produced a spurious back-etymology from tactic.
That's probably the tact Republicans are more likely to take.
The "tack" they're more likely to take. "Tact" is from someone who didn't understand sailing metaphors and produced a spurious back-etymology from tactic.
Thanks. I was always kinda uncertain about that word. And I hate making those kinda mistakes.
I'm seeing a bunch of people posting statements along the lines of "if my doctor says I need treatment X, why can my insurance company tell me that I don't?"
The obvious answer is that you getting treatment X is what puts your doctor's kids through college. Every healthcare system, however it operates, has to have some kind of mechanism to control costs, and decide whether a particular treatment is worth paying for.
People can't pay out of pocket for healthcare in general, because the general case is rare-but-expensive care: this is why we have some kind of risk pooling in all sensible healthcare systems. So every healthcare system ends up with a dynamic where the person wanting the healthcare is not the person who is directly paying for it, which means there has to be a cost control mechanism of some sort.
If your doctor was paid on a fixed salary basis by the single payer, then your doctor can be the cost control mechanism: you can give the doctor guidelines, and they can follow them. But when the doctor's income depends on them performing more procedures, there's a rather large conflict of interest if they also perform the cost control role.
It really doesn't help that medical billing is deliberately obfuscatory. A standard medical bill will tell you that the price for some medical service you have received is $30,000, for example. It will then tell you that the medical provider has negotiated with your insurance company to accept $453.27 for this service, that your insurer has paid 80% of this, and that you owe the remaining 20%. Or something like that.
The vast difference between the headline price for a service and the price that the provider negotiates with the insurer is completely normal, and complete nonsense.
In my experience, the doctor recommending an expensive procedure is rarely the same as the person who performs said procedure, who is usually a specialist or tech the first doc refers me to. And kickbacks are illegal AFAIK. So no, my surgery for x or my sleep lab test for y is not putting the doctor’s who recommended it kids through college; and for cases where thethe recommender actually IS the performer, we have the institution of second opinions.
The YouTube peanut-gallery has branched out from its anti-white collar Death Wish re-enactments, into debating the authorities' case against Magione. Lotsa bickering over how he looks in the different photos.
As our house critic of the avenging angels, anything to observe on Elizabeth Warren's commentary? From what I saw, it was pretty clearly in qualified defense of the cheering spectators, not in defense of the shooter. I think she's since walked some of it back, but haven't read that far yet.
The YouTube peanut-gallery has branched out from its anti-white collar Death Wish re-enactments, into debating the authorities' case against Magione. Lotsa bickering over how he looks in the different photos.
As our house critic of the avenging angels, anything to observe on Elizabeth Warren's commentary? From what I saw, it was pretty clearly in qualified defense of the cheering spectators, not in defense of the shooter. I think she's since walked some of it back, but haven't read that far yet.
I haven’t read it. I generally like Elizabeth Warren and would have eagerly picked her for president in the last few elections, but my concerns remain the same, whatever she or anyone else has said about it. (I only found out in the last few minutes—oddly, not from this post, but from the email I get from The Dispatch—that she’d said anything at all.) I’m genuinely more bothered by people I know, in person or online, saying various things, and “ground level” stuff like people buying t-shirts with the words carved into the bullets the killer used, and so on. Just… yikes.
I think that your phrase is apt. People deciding that they are avenging angels and taking the law into their own hands and all that.
Warren now says that "Violence is never the answer. Period." But since her original statement can't actually be interpreted as saying that violence is sometimes okay(but rather that cheering for it is sometimes understandable), I think she just wants people to take it as a shapeless expression of regret for whatever bad interpretation they might be putting on her words.
Oh, I think the emotions are definitely understandable. But I’m concerned about people actually believing that murdering people in the street is morally acceptable, or even laudable. Or worse, deciding to go down that path themselves, encouraging others to, etc.
Oh, I think the emotions are definitely understandable. But I’m concerned about people actually believing that murdering people in the street is morally acceptable, or even laudable. Or worse, deciding to go down that path themselves, encouraging others to, etc.
Yeah, because, as I've said elsewhere, if there are copycats, we're eventually ending up with some guy shooting-up the cafeteria at an insurance office, because the suits wouldn't cover the cost of cost syrup for his 24-hour flu.
So far, no copycats, though. Maybe there's a subconscious or at least tacit understanding, even among the vigilante-fandom, that this should be a one-off.
Oh, I think the emotions are definitely understandable. But I’m concerned about people actually believing that murdering people in the street is morally acceptable, or even laudable. Or worse, deciding to go down that path themselves, encouraging others to, etc.
Yeah, because, as I've said elsewhere, if there are copycats, we're eventually ending up with some guy shooting-up the cafeteria at an insurance office, because the suits wouldn't cover the cost of cost syrup for his 24-hour flu.
So far, no copycats, though. Maybe there's a subconscious or at least tacit understanding, even among the vigilante-fandom, that this should be a one-off.
Well, it happened a week ago. But I’m also concerned about this moving the needle just a little bit further toward violence, rather than copycats per se.
Oh, I think the emotions are definitely understandable. But I’m concerned about people actually believing that murdering people in the street is morally acceptable, or even laudable. Or worse, deciding to go down that path themselves, encouraging others to, etc.
Health insurance companies want us to think denying life-saving care is morally acceptable, and we do accept it. What's the moral difference between Luigi Mangione killing one person and Brian Thompson and other health insurance bigwigs facilitating the deaths of thousands? They don't pull triggers so they don't go to prison, but the suffering they inflict is tens of thousands of times greater.
Oh, I think the emotions are definitely understandable. But I’m concerned about people actually believing that murdering people in the street is morally acceptable, or even laudable. Or worse, deciding to go down that path themselves, encouraging others to, etc.
Health insurance companies want us to think denying life-saving care is morally acceptable, and we do accept it. What's the moral difference between Luigi Mangione killing one person and Brian Thompson and other health insurance bigwigs facilitating the deaths of thousands? They don't pull triggers so they don't go to prison, but the suffering they inflict is tens of thousands of times greater.
Oh, I think the emotions are definitely understandable. But I’m concerned about people actually believing that murdering people in the street is morally acceptable, or even laudable. Or worse, deciding to go down that path themselves, encouraging others to, etc.
Yeah, because, as I've said elsewhere, if there are copycats, we're eventually ending up with some guy shooting-up the cafeteria at an insurance office, because the suits wouldn't cover the cost of cost syrup for his 24-hour flu.
So far, no copycats, though. Maybe there's a subconscious or at least tacit understanding, even among the vigilante-fandom, that this should be a one-off.
Well, it happened a week ago. But I’m also concerned about this moving the needle just a little bit further toward violence, rather than copycats per se.
Well, except for copycats, the shooting's contribution to any burgeoning culture of political violence is gonna be pretty hard to quantify. American politics has not exactly been 100% pacifistic these past few decades, and who knows what inspirational impact one particular act has on any that comes after it?
Oh, I think the emotions are definitely understandable. But I’m concerned about people actually believing that murdering people in the street is morally acceptable, or even laudable. Or worse, deciding to go down that path themselves, encouraging others to, etc.
Yeah, because, as I've said elsewhere, if there are copycats, we're eventually ending up with some guy shooting-up the cafeteria at an insurance office, because the suits wouldn't cover the cost of cost syrup for his 24-hour flu.
So far, no copycats, though. Maybe there's a subconscious or at least tacit understanding, even among the vigilante-fandom, that this should be a one-off.
Well, it happened a week ago. But I’m also concerned about this moving the needle just a little bit further toward violence, rather than copycats per se.
Well, except for copycats, the shooting's contribution to any burgeoning culture of political violence is gonna be pretty hard to quantify. American politics has not exactly been 100% pacifistic these past few decades, and who knows what inspirational impact one particular act has on any that comes after it?
I think basically we’ve been seeing more violence and extremism on the far right for a while, and I’ve worried that this could happen on the left here as well. I pray it doesn’t. I’ve often thought that if you could show conservatives from the 1980s the events of January 6, not to mention the Trump presidency, they’d be flabbergasted and horrified. And I’ve worried that someday there might be some kind of movement on the left that we’d look at the same way. Again, I pray it doesn’t happen. The extremism of another Trump presidency might itself tempt people to go down that road, and they’ve already seen Jan. 6 happening on the other side. I’m used to thinking of the liberal side (in the US) as the anti-violence side, but that’s not been a given even before now.
Oh, I think the emotions are definitely understandable. But I’m concerned about people actually believing that murdering people in the street is morally acceptable, or even laudable. Or worse, deciding to go down that path themselves, encouraging others to, etc.
Health insurance companies want us to think denying life-saving care is morally acceptable, and we do accept it. What's the moral difference between Luigi Mangione killing one person and Brian Thompson and other health insurance bigwigs facilitating the deaths of thousands? They don't pull triggers so they don't go to prison, but the suffering they inflict is tens of thousands of times greater.
Well, yeah. But you can arguably apply this logic to similar situations.
To compensate for doctors lost to higher-salaries in the USA, Canada has for awhile hired doctors away from developing-world countries, most of which are probably facing, overall, more serious health problems than Canada. Furthermore, Canada has continued this policy even after one poachee, South Africa, requested a cessation of such hirings in 2000.
So, let's say someone from South Africa who suffered as a result of the doctor-shortage gets the name of some Canadian bureaucrat who was involved in implementing the policy, and guns him down. Do you think it would be fair to say there's no difference between what shoiterbdid to the bureaucrat, and what the bureaucrat did to South Africans?
Two very different people, Ken White, a criminal defense attorney at a boutique law firm in Los Angeles and former federal prosecutor, and Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker, separately noted in a newsletter and podcast respectively that Americans made folk heroes of Bonnie Parker, Clyde Barrow and John Dillinger for robbing banks during the last period of obscene income inequality in the US. This is not brand new territory for us.
American politics has been more violent than not throughout most of our history. We've had a few decades without a lot of obvious political violence, but there was plenty in the 60s and 70s. Cops and vigilantes used to attack striking union workers in the 30s. Not to mention the thousands of Black people lynched.
So, let's say someone from South Africa who suffered as a result of the doctor-shortage gets the name of some Canadian bureaucrat who was involved in implementing the policy, and guns him down. Do you think it would be fair to say there's no difference between what shoiterbdid to the bureaucrat, and what the bureaucrat did to South Africans?
I don't know. I'm not going to make a moral judgement about something I only learned about on an internet discussion board a few minutes ago.
What I will say is that we are much better at identifying violence when it is on a small scale and personal than when it's on a large, impersonal scale. Numerous commentators over the last week have pointed out that UHC and other health insurance companies do violence and are rewarded for it.
So, let's say someone from South Africa who suffered as a result of the doctor-shortage gets the name of some Canadian bureaucrat who was involved in implementing the policy, and guns him down. Do you think it would be fair to say there's no difference between what shoiterbdid to the bureaucrat, and what the bureaucrat did to South Africans?
I don't know. I'm not going to make a moral judgement about something I only learned about on an internet discussion board a few minutes ago.
What I will say is that we are much better at identifying violence when it is on a small scale and personal than when it's on a large, impersonal scale. Numerous commentators over the last week have pointed out that UHC and other health insurance companies do violence and are rewarded for it.
Fair enough. I'll just leave for consideration my point that deciding which legally operating capitalists can be considered fair-game for the "white-collar serial killer" equivalency is a pretty slippery slope.
Back on YouTube, a right-wing racist Brit I occasionally check into has just posted a video denouncing "left-wingers" for making a "folk hero" of Thompson's killer.
This is the sorta channel where close to 100% of the comments will normally concur with the opinions expressed in the video. But this time around, he REALLY misread the room. There doesn't seem to be a single person who agrees with him.
Many of the commenters are saying "It's not a left/right issue", which I think might be somewhat ominous for the left, since it means a lotta people might not look to them for the solutions.
I'll just leave for consideration my point that deciding which legally operating capitalists can be considered fair-game for the "white-collar serial killer" equivalency is a pretty slippery slope.
I'm not saying anyone is fair game. I'm saying very wealthy people, among them health insurance execs, consider the rest of us fair game. Or more accurately, they don't consider us at all. Also, "legal" and "fair" are two really different things.
Many of the commenters are saying "It's not a left/right issue", which I think might be somewhat ominous for the left, since it means a lotta people might not look to them for the solutions.
It's a rich people vs everyone else issue, which could be great for the left if they can actually be lefties. Not Democrats, but actual leftists.
So, let's say someone from South Africa who suffered as a result of the doctor-shortage gets the name of some Canadian bureaucrat who was involved in implementing the policy, and guns him down. Do you think it would be fair to say there's no difference between what shoiterbdid to the bureaucrat, and what the bureaucrat did to South Africans?
I don't know. I'm not going to make a moral judgement about something I only learned about on an internet discussion board a few minutes ago.
What I will say is that we are much better at identifying violence when it is on a small scale and personal than when it's on a large, impersonal scale. Numerous commentators over the last week have pointed out that UHC and other health insurance companies do violence and are rewarded for it.
Fair enough. I'll just leave for consideration my point that deciding which legally operating capitalists can be considered fair-game for the "white-collar serial killer" equivalency is a pretty slippery slope.
We decide that legal behaviour shouldn't be legal all the time.
I'll just leave for consideration my point that deciding which legally operating capitalists can be considered fair-game for the "white-collar serial killer" equivalency is a pretty slippery slope.
I'm not saying anyone is fair game. I'm saying very wealthy people, among them health insurance execs, consider the rest of us fair game. Or more accurately, they don't consider us at all. Also, "legal" and "fair" are two really different things.
Many of the commenters are saying "It's not a left/right issue", which I think might be somewhat ominous for the left, since it means a lotta people might not look to them for the solutions.
It's a rich people vs everyone else issue, which could be great for the left if they can actually be lefties. Not Democrats, but actual leftists.
Well, I've seen right-wingers saying that Luigi is right, but it's "Obamacare" that's to blame for the bad things about US health-insurance companies.
If someone is led into believing that, then he's not likely to vote for any party advocating leftist solutions.
So, let's say someone from South Africa who suffered as a result of the doctor-shortage gets the name of some Canadian bureaucrat who was involved in implementing the policy, and guns him down. Do you think it would be fair to say there's no difference between what shoiterbdid to the bureaucrat, and what the bureaucrat did to South Africans?
I don't know. I'm not going to make a moral judgement about something I only learned about on an internet discussion board a few minutes ago.
What I will say is that we are much better at identifying violence when it is on a small scale and personal than when it's on a large, impersonal scale. Numerous commentators over the last week have pointed out that UHC and other health insurance companies do violence and are rewarded for it.
Fair enough. I'll just leave for consideration my point that deciding which legally operating capitalists can be considered fair-game for the "white-collar serial killer" equivalency is a pretty slippery slope.
We decide that legal behaviour shouldn't be legal all the time.
Sorry. I honestly don't understand how that relates to what I wrote. Could you maybe re-phrase, with direct reference to my comment?
Taking action to cause someone's death whether it be by shooting them or denying lifesaving medical treatment to them when you have it within your power to approve that treatment, but don't in order to make profit for your corporation, feeling morally equivalent to me.
I'll just leave for consideration my point that deciding which legally operating capitalists can be considered fair-game for the "white-collar serial killer" equivalency is a pretty slippery slope.
I'm not saying anyone is fair game. I'm saying very wealthy people, among them health insurance execs, consider the rest of us fair game. Or more accurately, they don't consider us at all. Also, "legal" and "fair" are two really different things.
Many of the commenters are saying "It's not a left/right issue", which I think might be somewhat ominous for the left, since it means a lotta people might not look to them for the solutions.
It's a rich people vs everyone else issue, which could be great for the left if they can actually be lefties. Not Democrats, but actual leftists.
Well, I've seen right-wingers saying that Luigi is right, but it's "Obamacare" that's to blame for the bad things about US health-insurance companies.
If someone is led into believing that, then he's not likely to vote for any party advocating leftist solutions.
I just saw someone on social media say "They never vilified Kyle Rittenhouse the way they're vilifying Luigi."
Maybe it's true that Mangione is being vilified more than the average murder suspect, but I don't think someone who chooses Rittenhouse as his example is really gonna be open to progressive solutions.
Honestly, I don't think I've seen more than a half-dozen posts advocating political solutions to the problem. The general assumption just seems to be that health-care companies should just change their practices voluntarily, with no impetus from the government even considered.
Taking action to cause someone's death whether it be by shooting them or denying lifesaving medical treatment to them when you have it within your power to approve that treatment, but don't in order to make profit for your corporation, feeling morally equivalent to me.
Yeah, but I don't understand how that relates to deciding that some "legal behaviour shouldn't be legal", as per @chrisstiles's phrasing.
I agree that the behaviour of the insurance companies should be legally curtailed. But what I had been directly debating with @Ruth was the circumstances in which it's fair to compare capitalists to serial killers.
Comments
Maybe that's down to spotlight effect. Insofar as there was cheering it seemed to be an equal opportunity sport, with many 'influencers' on the right seemingly dismayed that their own fans were out of step with them for once.
Maybe what should disturb you more is that the system is apparently outside effective democratic control.
I'd also like to see the murderer in jail with an opportunity for repentance and reform. Murder is wrong.
@chrisstiles said
How do you know it doesn't? But the people running the system aren't people I know (in most cases people I know online, but I still know them to some degree), and aren't people on my own political side which I don't want to see radicalized into violent vigilantes or mobs, and also, again, this was a murder committed in cold blood.
Being disturbed by one thing doesn't mean I'm not disturbed by something else, nor the level of disturbance I may have at any given moment for either thing.
(I'm tempted to say that the system may be inside effective democratic control, too, which is disturbing on another level. I mean, we got Trump, again, after another national election, which freaks me out. Though the question of what counts as "effective" may be at issue with gerrymandering in terms of elections, and lobbying in terms of giant corporations (medical and otherwise), and tons of money poured into trying to make the system the way awful people want it to be.)
In my experience people on the right are just as likely as anyone else to be under-insured. This cuts across the political spectrum. It's not a right vs left thing; it's a rich vs everyone else thing, which is why I wondered if it might have some kind of uniting effect. I'm not expecting something along lines of the French Revolution, but I saw a lot of guillotine memes last week. And frankly I think it's good that this cheering, however deplorable, was so universal. Most people have no recourse, and, as @chrisstiles says, the system is outside democratic control -- this cheering was united, vocal and public recognition of something that is profoundly fucked up that the vast majority of us at the wrong end of this sharp and pointy stick could make common cause around.
Definitely sharing that video--thank you!
Also, his manifesto has apparently been posted by an "independent journalist", but I'm still waiting for confirmation from legacy media. For now, I'll note the somewhat bathetic opening statement...
Kinda sounds like mushy liberalism to me. The rest of the text is similarly prosaic and almost entirely devoid of higher ideological content. At one point, the writer states "The American people have allwed[sic] them to get away with it", which(in line with my earlier ruminations) leads me to wonder if he thinks picking people to shoot from voter-registration rolls woulda been just as morally sound.
(And, yes, I realize the writer probably thinks that the public is ultimately exonerated as a result of having been brainwashed by the companies. But it's testimony to the barebones presentation that that possibility remains entirely unexplored.)
AP has more details:
https://apnews.com/article/unitedhealthcare-ceo-shooting-suspect-c68d0328f278d85fcf201ae89f634098
Think you might be overanalyzing it. The sentence is in the past tense, and I think he prob'ly just meant that this class of people were due their comeuppance.
If you want that, here it goes. This is how Canada did it and why, using the same ingredients that existed in the US at the the time and still do.
The fogotten parent of Canada's healthcare system was Blue Cross. Blue Cross started in Texas in the 1930's and quickly spread across the US and Canada. In its original form, the plans were non-profit and owned by state/provincial hospital associations. They were offered on a group-only community rated (not individual-rated) basis. It was an attempt to be universal and voluntay.
The problem was that this system was unstable. An insurer can be voluntary and have underwriting/denials or be universal and compulsory, but not universal and voluntary, it leads to selection against the insurer and eventual collapse. Most Blue Cross plans in the US became for-profit starting in 1994. In Canada starting in the 1960's, the alternative was chosen: the government picked up the tab through Medicare. Blue Cross formed the adminstration/claims infrastructure as it was already accepted by nearly all doctors and hospitals. In provinces outside Ontario, Quebec and British Columbia Blue Cross is still the government Medicare administrator. In those three provinces the provincial Blue Cross plans were 'in-sourced' to the provincial ministry of health to form the basis of the Medicare billing infrastructure. Blue Cross essentially became what is known as an Admistrator-Only Plan, they are 100% indemified for claims by the government.
In cases where the public and private health care systems in Canada overlap, no private insurers cover government-paid services. They can't compete (even if they wanted to) and don't. They offer a wrap-around. The old fear of Americans losing their health insurance to a worse government plans is to my mind so much bunkum. It's not an either/or thing, it's both.
Canada's health system really is Medicare-for-all or Blue Cross-for-all. There is zero reason why the same cannot be done in the US by broadening the mission of state Medicare providers.
Did I mention that Obamacare bears an uncanny resemblance to an Ontario proposal for mandatory private medical insurance from 1966 that was defeated in favour of the government option?
They're still selling The Turner Diaries and the Unabomber Manifesto, but I guess the 90s were a long time ago.
Well, if you want to do something about it you are going to have to legislate and regulate, they are simply not going to change that bit of their corporate culture by appeals to their better nature, as denying claims is a source of profits ( https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/analysis-health-insurance-claim-denials-are-on-the-rise-to-the-detriment-of-patients ) and you are in fact asking them to voluntarily cap their profits (from their point of view).
Because of a widespread assumption among the possibly ill-informed. that as everyone in the USA can carry a gun, they all do. So a lot of people here, on hearing the story, would simply interpret it as a particularly egregious example of the consequences of that.
@Crœsos wrote I'm not sure that is true here. The culture is different, and this victim did not come from an elite of which anyone even in the media would be that aware. hence the way it was initially reported without the reporter picking up the cultural background and possible implications.
Remember, neither of the victim nor the company that he ran are people or entities that anybody over here is likely to have heard of. There is though a general public perception over here of the entire medical world in the USA is that it is ill thought of, very expensive, exploitative and something whose sinister tentacles are very unwelcome.
Yes, imagine how disturbing that must be. :rolling_eyes:
This is why I keep hoping that Republicans will try to get Trump an easy win by regulating insurance companies some. Even some regulation would be a real improvement, and it's something Democrats would support even if it made Trump look good.
Though Amazon is still selling the book that most likely inspired the use of the words "Deny Delay Depose". I haven't read Mr. Feinman's book, but my guess is that he doesn't include the assassination of insurance executives as a tactic for taking on insurance companies.
The obvious answer is that you getting treatment X is what puts your doctor's kids through college. Every healthcare system, however it operates, has to have some kind of mechanism to control costs, and decide whether a particular treatment is worth paying for.
People can't pay out of pocket for healthcare in general, because the general case is rare-but-expensive care: this is why we have some kind of risk pooling in all sensible healthcare systems. So every healthcare system ends up with a dynamic where the person wanting the healthcare is not the person who is directly paying for it, which means there has to be a cost control mechanism of some sort.
If your doctor was paid on a fixed salary basis by the single payer, then your doctor can be the cost control mechanism: you can give the doctor guidelines, and they can follow them. But when the doctor's income depends on them performing more procedures, there's a rather large conflict of interest if they also perform the cost control role.
It really doesn't help that medical billing is deliberately obfuscatory. A standard medical bill will tell you that the price for some medical service you have received is $30,000, for example. It will then tell you that the medical provider has negotiated with your insurance company to accept $453.27 for this service, that your insurer has paid 80% of this, and that you owe the remaining 20%. Or something like that.
The vast difference between the headline price for a service and the price that the provider negotiates with the insurer is completely normal, and complete nonsense.
I guess it's kinda like dual-purpose medication? The book can be purchased by people who wanna celebrate the shooting, but also by people who just wanna get some context for this news item. Whereas the DDD merch can only be used to celebrate the killing.
As for Mr. Feinman's advice on health-care reform, I'm guessing he doesn't advocate random mow-downs either. Last I heard, he wasn't answering media questions, and I suspect he's had a rather...hectic time lately.
I've already seen a few anonymous comments saying that the killing was a blow against "Obamacare", and I think I read that someone in the right-wing media-sphere was saying that "woke health-care" was to blame for the problems in the US system.
That's probably the tact Republicans are more likely to take. "Of course there's no money for grandma's cancer treatment!! It's all being spent on gender-reassignment surgery!!"
Thanks. I was always kinda uncertain about that word. And I hate making those kinda mistakes.
In my experience, the doctor recommending an expensive procedure is rarely the same as the person who performs said procedure, who is usually a specialist or tech the first doc refers me to. And kickbacks are illegal AFAIK. So no, my surgery for x or my sleep lab test for y is not putting the doctor’s who recommended it kids through college; and for cases where thethe recommender actually IS the performer, we have the institution of second opinions.
@ChastMastr...
As our house critic of the avenging angels, anything to observe on Elizabeth Warren's commentary? From what I saw, it was pretty clearly in qualified defense of the cheering spectators, not in defense of the shooter. I think she's since walked some of it back, but haven't read that far yet.
I haven’t read it. I generally like Elizabeth Warren and would have eagerly picked her for president in the last few elections, but my concerns remain the same, whatever she or anyone else has said about it. (I only found out in the last few minutes—oddly, not from this post, but from the email I get from The Dispatch—that she’d said anything at all.) I’m genuinely more bothered by people I know, in person or online, saying various things, and “ground level” stuff like people buying t-shirts with the words carved into the bullets the killer used, and so on. Just… yikes.
I think that your phrase is apt. People deciding that they are avenging angels and taking the law into their own hands and all that.
Yeah, because, as I've said elsewhere, if there are copycats, we're eventually ending up with some guy shooting-up the cafeteria at an insurance office, because the suits wouldn't cover the cost of cost syrup for his 24-hour flu.
So far, no copycats, though. Maybe there's a subconscious or at least tacit understanding, even among the vigilante-fandom, that this should be a one-off.
Well, it happened a week ago. But I’m also concerned about this moving the needle just a little bit further toward violence, rather than copycats per se.
Health insurance companies want us to think denying life-saving care is morally acceptable, and we do accept it. What's the moral difference between Luigi Mangione killing one person and Brian Thompson and other health insurance bigwigs facilitating the deaths of thousands? They don't pull triggers so they don't go to prison, but the suffering they inflict is tens of thousands of times greater.
Sorry, I’m not engaging with you. Take care.
Well, except for copycats, the shooting's contribution to any burgeoning culture of political violence is gonna be pretty hard to quantify. American politics has not exactly been 100% pacifistic these past few decades, and who knows what inspirational impact one particular act has on any that comes after it?
I think basically we’ve been seeing more violence and extremism on the far right for a while, and I’ve worried that this could happen on the left here as well. I pray it doesn’t. I’ve often thought that if you could show conservatives from the 1980s the events of January 6, not to mention the Trump presidency, they’d be flabbergasted and horrified. And I’ve worried that someday there might be some kind of movement on the left that we’d look at the same way. Again, I pray it doesn’t happen. The extremism of another Trump presidency might itself tempt people to go down that road, and they’ve already seen Jan. 6 happening on the other side. I’m used to thinking of the liberal side (in the US) as the anti-violence side, but that’s not been a given even before now.
Well, yeah. But you can arguably apply this logic to similar situations.
To compensate for doctors lost to higher-salaries in the USA, Canada has for awhile hired doctors away from developing-world countries, most of which are probably facing, overall, more serious health problems than Canada. Furthermore, Canada has continued this policy even after one poachee, South Africa, requested a cessation of such hirings in 2000.
So, let's say someone from South Africa who suffered as a result of the doctor-shortage gets the name of some Canadian bureaucrat who was involved in implementing the policy, and guns him down. Do you think it would be fair to say there's no difference between what shoiterbdid to the bureaucrat, and what the bureaucrat did to South Africans?
John Brown's body lies a-mold'ring in the grave...
American politics has been more violent than not throughout most of our history. We've had a few decades without a lot of obvious political violence, but there was plenty in the 60s and 70s. Cops and vigilantes used to attack striking union workers in the 30s. Not to mention the thousands of Black people lynched.
What I will say is that we are much better at identifying violence when it is on a small scale and personal than when it's on a large, impersonal scale. Numerous commentators over the last week have pointed out that UHC and other health insurance companies do violence and are rewarded for it.
Fair enough. I'll just leave for consideration my point that deciding which legally operating capitalists can be considered fair-game for the "white-collar serial killer" equivalency is a pretty slippery slope.
Back on YouTube, a right-wing racist Brit I occasionally check into has just posted a video denouncing "left-wingers" for making a "folk hero" of Thompson's killer.
This is the sorta channel where close to 100% of the comments will normally concur with the opinions expressed in the video. But this time around, he REALLY misread the room. There doesn't seem to be a single person who agrees with him.
Many of the commenters are saying "It's not a left/right issue", which I think might be somewhat ominous for the left, since it means a lotta people might not look to them for the solutions.
It's a rich people vs everyone else issue, which could be great for the left if they can actually be lefties. Not Democrats, but actual leftists.
We decide that legal behaviour shouldn't be legal all the time.
Well, I've seen right-wingers saying that Luigi is right, but it's "Obamacare" that's to blame for the bad things about US health-insurance companies.
If someone is led into believing that, then he's not likely to vote for any party advocating leftist solutions.
Sorry. I honestly don't understand how that relates to what I wrote. Could you maybe re-phrase, with direct reference to my comment?
I just saw someone on social media say "They never vilified Kyle Rittenhouse the way they're vilifying Luigi."
Maybe it's true that Mangione is being vilified more than the average murder suspect, but I don't think someone who chooses Rittenhouse as his example is really gonna be open to progressive solutions.
Honestly, I don't think I've seen more than a half-dozen posts advocating political solutions to the problem. The general assumption just seems to be that health-care companies should just change their practices voluntarily, with no impetus from the government even considered.
Yeah, but I don't understand how that relates to deciding that some "legal behaviour shouldn't be legal", as per @chrisstiles's phrasing.
I agree that the behaviour of the insurance companies should be legally curtailed. But what I had been directly debating with @Ruth was the circumstances in which it's fair to compare capitalists to serial killers.