The current news has me thinking that, while the death of any human is not something I actively relish, most people feel a certain satisfaction, relief or, at least, less sad when someone like Osama Bin Laden dies, because they were responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people.
Which got me wondering, have studies been done estimating how many legitimate insurance cases are rejected, delayed or otherwise mishandled, and how many of those result in deaths? I guess other industries are also responsible for some pretty measurable risk factors (e.g. air pollution). It would interesting to see some rough numbers of how many deaths the CEOs who choose to continue running these companies in harmful ways account for. Obviously, they are only indirectly responsible, but the same could be said about Bin Laden, he didn’t fly the planes himself, he delegated.
I have no idea how to answer your question, I just want to point out something you hinted at, intentionally or not: The UHC CEO and other ghouls like him have killed more Americans than Bin Laden could ever dream of. Hell, I think even Adolf would be impressed.
They are killing people on an industrial scale
These companies are the death
(lost the word, “courts”?)panels* that the Republicans cried fake outrage about when Democrats pushed the Affordable Care Act.Edit: thank you @DisguisedJoker@lemmy.world and @neidu3@sh.itjust.works
“Death panels”. Yeah, I remember when that was the talking point some 15 years ago and I wondered how that didn’t apply to insurance companies. It made me glad I lived in Glen Becks definition of “socialist hellscape” - Scandinavia.
It’s bonkers, too, with how much we know and knew pharmaceutical companies were and are doing the same thing. Look at the price gouging for insulin! Look at the opioid industry and pandemic! But, just like those, the oil, cigarette, and even alcohol industries… they’re protected. It’s ok if it’s capitalism! Up until someone finally brings out the guillotine for a CEO.
Yes, but these ones are for-profit, see?
It is impossible to accurately quantify how many deaths and human years lost can be directly attributed to Brian Thompson. UnitedHealthcare themselves may have some data but there are also indirect deaths and shortened life spans as a result of denied or delayed treatment.
The kind of information you’re looking for, are in the databanks behind the closed doors of said company. They’re the record holders. And prying that kind of information out from them isn’t going to go as smoothly, not without breaking laws of confidentiality.
Yes, of course we can estimate it. We can just guess, that’s estimation. From there, it would have to come along with clues, or metrics, though. At that point, that’s when the real problem emerges: each company has a completely different impact on the planet, economy, culture, etc.
So, in other words, you can’t proceed with a single model, and therefore the models are difficult to compare with one another in terms of their accuracy.
It’s almost better to, instead of trying to measure each company (depressing, time consuming, complex) just come up with a threshold of what constitutes too much death. Then it becomes clearer that the problem is that we’re looking for a certain tally to determine if a line has been crossed or not, when we already know the answer:
One preventable death is enough to warrant a major response.
No amount of bureaucracy or legislative tissues can change the fact that it’s morally wrong to broker death for profit. Scale of profit doesn’t matter, plausible deniability doesn’t matter. It’s the end of someone’s life for money. Either it is okay, or not.
We often get caught up in the numbers because they introduce a debatable, grey terrain where the gravity of what we’re really discussing isn’t as hard to face. But it’s the trolley problem, and ultimately most of the actions we do in the interests of debating it just serve the purpose of letting us talk and ignore the lever. Meanwhile the trolley barrels on.
