AIBU to say I'm surprised a healthcare CEO hasn't been assassinated sooner?

I think what's becoming obvious is they've lost the shooter.

A very plain, unmemorable face, and realistically from the second picture it could be a woman.

I read that half of all parents in the USA whose children are diagnosed with cancer end up declaring bankruptcy.

I wonder if this is true. As someone whose teenage son was diagnosed with leukaemia 2 years ago, I can't even begin to imagine the fear of facing losing your home on top of facing losing your child to a horrible disease. :-(

Any business model which relies for profits on people being denied healthcare is morally untenable in my view.

I'd be interested in reading this. What is the name of this short story? I couldn't find it on a quick google. Thanks for sharing.

Its sad really, this man probably thought he had it all. Super rich, head of massive company, had a wife and kids to share his money with - but now look at his legacy?

There are so many people either outright glad he is dead or sharing testimonies of United Healthcare screwed them over etc. This was his mark on the world.

There are more important things in life than how much money you hoard.

Exactly. As vile as the Tory government were and how much misery, harm and deaths they indirectly caused through austerity, sanctioning vulnerable people on benefits etc I still wouldn’t support any vigilante action against them (or anyone else)

You were....

I don't think you can compare the new Labour Govt or any of its ministers to that of a CEO and company, that as a matter of policy and design chose to not treat people.
Maybe we could say it of Dentists though who refuse to treat people in agony because they don't have enough money.

Austerity has according to the LSE, cost 190,000 lives, using measures of excess mortality.

Even if it was a 1/10th of that, its still pretty horrific.

But i don't think anyone in the Tory Government "has it coming"

...and neither am I.

For the avoidance of doubt I will reiterate that I am NOT in any way shape or form in favor of vigilantism.

the NYPD offering 'up to $10K' reward for anyone who helps identify the killer seems very 'meh, we're really not that fussed'.

YANBU the same thought crossed my mind. Not condoning it obviously.

Yanbu. I find it astonishing people want to switch to a US style system.
I know even wealthy people in the US who have been left utterly broken by the cost of co-pays or the exhaustion of battling insurers for approval of things I was given immediately on the NHS

Yanbu........and thus will be just the tip of the iceberg. I think there'll be A LOT of copycats. 😬

is it awful?

I’m surprised too, it would seem to be a bad idea to be CEO of a company that denies people life saving treatment in a country with a large amount of firearms.

Was he billionaire?

one of those lightbulb moments where you find out why & say why on earth hasn’t this happened before.

Wonder how many people the CEO finished off. We’ll never know- funny, that.

I thought the same too. I should think there is a backstory to this no doubt.

Quick, execution style killing with a silencer. Apparently arrived by bus and stayed in a cheap hostel under a fake name.
It's Jack Reacher!

@ElaborateCushion I think you're solved it! But he definitely looks like the Tom Cruise version of Reacher as opposed to that hulking hunk in the Amazon Prime show.

To be fair, I just read a post on another thread where the same thing happened to someone in the UK: NHS refused an MRI resulting in delayed diagnosis etc.

But there is a culture of gun violence in the US that doesn't exist in the UK and I'm doubtful that there'd be a lot of cheering if an NHS administrator was murdered as a protest.

I'm still not convinced that this shooting wasn't related to something in the personal life of the victim v/s outrage over insurance practices. But we'll see in due time!

I find it useful to subdivide "the banality of evil" into those who enact harmful policies on behalf of the state (the Home Office over the past decade certainly counts, and it's essentially the basic conceptual MO of a police force) and those who enact harmful policies because it's the logic of their societal system (capitalism, in this case, which would apply to Brian Thompson).

But the thing that underlies my lack of sympathy in this case is the fact that in all those cases accountability isn't possible without revolution, because the harm enacted is a feature of the system, not a bug.

I am in the US. I ended up completely disabled because an insurance company refused to permit an MRI that would have diagnosed an issue that was treatable. It wasn't Unitedhealthcare. But I'm unphased by this happening. I'm surprised it hasn't happened sooner.

Oh, interesting. I haven’t heard about Hannah Arendt or zygmont bowman but I will add them to my reading list.

I don’t think I can reword it without it getting deleted, unfortunately as it was really just a list of organisations/people I hoped be held accountable in a similar way 😂