WTF? You can't do this here. I've banned the account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Seems like an overreaction. Which specific rule did revscat violate? "Don't be snarky?" "Eschew flamebait?" Because it seems to me that all they did was thoughtfully state an opinion that you had an emotional reaction towards.
The GP comment doesn't count as 'thoughtful' in any sense I recognize. What I see there is: (1) celebration of a murder; (2) denunciatory rhetoric; (3) a major assumption about what happened (in reality, none of us knows yet what happened there); and (4) a barrage of clichés ("justice has been served", "flag away", etc.).
While correct, i wonder when the car insurers, home insurer CEOs etc will suffer the same fate. Answer: they won't. Because they provide a valuable service.
The problem is that healthcare insurance is no longer connected to the value of protection against accidents and extreme, unforseen situations.
Until and unless we recognize that medical insurance only turned into an all you can eat medical buffet in the last 70 years due to government intervention, we will be doomed to continue to bankrupt society with money transfers to captive markets dominated by AETNA, CIGNA, UHC , etc
Double check your home owner's coverage. Based on a conversation with my home insurer, when there is damage to my home, they will only pay out in cases where there I have clear evidence that damage was caused by a third party physically striking my property. Weather? No. Damage caused by incorrect installations? No. Damage caused by ground shaking from reckless construction next door? No. They would have to literally ram some piece of their equipment into my home for me to have grounds for a claim. In this situation, they're just a middle man for a lawyer taking up an easy civil case.
The ACA mandates that insurers spend 80-85% (depending on the particulars) on healthcare. If they don't meet that target, they have to issue rebates until they do.
What, exactly, should this man have done differently? I guess you could say he should have gone above & beyond the law, maybe pushed that up to 90%, but how do we know that this would have been enough to solve the problems people are complaining about?
Try flipping the question and asking yourself: given all of that, why did UHC have a false-denial rate more than double the industry average?
For example, perhaps the issue here is that UHC was undercutting competitors knowing that the vast majority of their fraudulent denials would go unchallenged -- they still meet the requirement for minimum spending on payouts, but they attract more customers[0] and in so doing distort the health insurance market.
[0]: Customers in this case are primarily businesses buying policies for their employees, rather than end users of the product.
This thinking is exactly what the article is talking about.
The CEO sits in his office, looks at bunch of abstract spreadsheets saying that 80% of spending is going on healthcare, and pats himself on the back for doing a good job.
But what about the single mom of 3 whose claim was falsely denied by the AI he rolled out? Whose responsibility is that, and the thousands of other cases like it?
People understand the trolley problem as a thought experiment. Here, we have a big, fat, man who switched the tracks to let the train roll over as many people as he could in order to save a bag of cash.
About 1% of VFIAX is UnitedHealthcare. This is my main mutual fund holding. Product idea: auto short selling in proportion to your holdings for companies you dislike.
> The opinions that are permitted here are narrow.
It's important to remember that HN isn't a monolith and most important of all, we all share in the virtue of "curious" discussion. Arguably this post was flagged because the discussion isn't curious enough and leads us down the same discussion lines that we've had previously.
Not my own viewpoint, FWIW, but definitely the sentiment shared by the moderation team here.
I'm certainly disappointed that none of the discussion is touching on the culpability of technical teams in building these systems.
I'm still struggling with my desire to surprise people with the conclusion instead of including it at the front of the piece. Which tends to lead to people discussing the setup rather than the punchline.
On the left? This issue has been uniquely bi-partisan. From the article:
“ So when UHC’s CEO was assassinated yesterday morning, on his way to brag to his shareholders about record profits, not many people were confused about the motive. What was surprising was the gleeful re-unification of a divided internet - from MAGA twitter threads to progressive BlueSky conversations to the entire nursing subreddit - over a man’s brutal death on a midtown sidewalk. Vaccine skeptics and physicians who have been at each other’s throats since 2020 found the one medical issue on which they are passionately on the same side.”
