Yeah, but the trick seems to be to kill thousands rather than one. Then you have the full might of the law out to protect you. Exhibit A is the Sacklers family.
Again, no. If some drug company killed a single person with a weird side effect that they buried, do you think it'll be discovered, much less prosecuted? The Sacklers got prosecuted because the opiod epidemic was huge, not because they passed some magical threshold so it's magically fine.
> The Sacklers got prosecuted because the opioid epidemic was huge
No, the Sacklers didn't get prosecuted or even hindered, but aided at every turn, therefore the opioid epidemic got huge. Eventually it became so expensive for society as a whole that it couldn't be allowed to continue, and then the Sacklers were stopped.
They weren't "prosecuted," though. Tens or maybe hundreds of thousands dead, no criminal charges, and they're all still impossibly wealthy. I was once prosecuted for sitting on a sidewalk, and spent the night in jail. No Sackler has spent the night in jail, or missed a massage appointment. Why? Because they passed some "magical" threshold that makes it "magically" fine.
If you go pick up the heroin that you and a friend later do together, and the friend overdoses, you will likely be thrown into prison for murder or manslaughter if you take them to the hospital. The Sacklers still get to own pharmaceutical companies, as long as they don't sell opioids.
They literally had to be taken to the Supreme Court to lose civil immunity (barely, 5-4) granted by lower court bankruptcy judges. The criminal immunity is not official, it's simply because of their class as owners. The law is written in an intentionally childish way so that to prosecute them criminally means you have to prove that they had murderous intentions, rather than it being enough that they were top-level opioid dealers who ignored and buried anything that would lose them money.
As long as they just wanted to make money, it's A-OK. They can only be charged if their goal was to murder people, regardless of money. This logic somehow does not apply to lower-level drug dealers who have failed to become "magical," to your best friend who gave you half their heroin for free and rushed you to the hospital when you started looking bad, or to Matthew Perry's dealers.
That's their job? It's not even limited to private insurance companies. Public health systems have lists of what is considered good value for money too, even if the treatments themselves are theoretically life saving. The US is the biggest market for new and rare drugs specifically because other countries consider the prices too high.
Denying their customers claims for healthcare coverage they are entitled to under the plans they pay for is the opposite of their job. Healthcare companies just keep doing that anyway because it makes them more money when their customers are too sick, stressed, exhausted, or eventually dead to fight the wrongfully denied claims.
People die because of this, but the insurance companies don't care because it makes them more money when they refuse (at least initially) to provide the services they were paid to deliver. United Healthcare alone was wrongfully denying claims over 90% of the time.
The health insurance industry is filled with serial killers who are happy to kill in exchange for money.
>Denying their customers claims for healthcare coverage they are entitled to under the plans they pay for is the opposite of their job.
Can you provide some examples? The examples I heard of are never straightforward like "person has a broken hip, insurance refuses to pay for a hip replacement". There's always some complication like "the doctor thinks they need some special procedure/drug that costs extra". If it's in the area where there's a plausible judgement call to be made, I don't see how it's any different than a public healthcare system denying care due to cost reasons, even if theoretically taxpayers are "entitled" to some vague standard of care, and without the care the patient might actually die.
>United Healthcare alone was wrongfully denying claims over 90% of the time.
AFAIK that claim was claimed by plaintiffs with no supporting evidence, and denied by the defendants.
IIRC the one that got Kirked was about to start, or had recently started, denying more than a fixed amount of time for anesthesia. If the operation runs longer than expected, you won't be anesthetised for all of it.
> The examples I heard of are never straightforward like "person has a broken hip, insurance refuses to pay for a hip replacement". There's always some complication like "the doctor thinks they need some special procedure/drug that costs extra".
There are a couple examples in the legal complaint (https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/class...) where the insurance company denied extremely typical things like physical therapy and skilled nursing facilities (the most common form of post-acute care). Nothing special there.
Here's another one for you:
Deirdre O'Reilly's college-age son, suffering a life-threatening anaphylactic allergic reaction, was saved by epinephrine shots and steroids administered intravenously in a hospital emergency room. His mother, utterly relieved by that news, was less pleased to be informed by the family's insurer that the treatment was "not medically necessary." (https://kffhealthnews.org/health-industry/denials-of-health-...)
Now, I don't have all the details of this case, but neither epinephrine shots or steroids are a special procedure/drug. That would be considered the standard treatment for life-threatening allergic reactions depending on the circumstances and how long ago this occurred.
I can't think of any reason why they'd ever deny epinephrine, and although steroids have fallen out of favor in recent years as standard treatment in every case, they are still called for in common situations like when epinephrine alone isn't doing the job, or when the reaction has triggered an asthma attack.
Evaluating these can be challenging. Even though many people are sharing their stories of how they've been screwed over online (and publicly exposing their private medical matters in the process), there's often a lack of hard details. Both government regulations intended to protect patients and insurance industry policy intended to protect the corporations can make independent verification of these complaints difficult.
The best source for examples will be lawsuits against insurance companies which can surface instances collected through the discovery process and used as evidence at trial, but that can take many years and may never come to light if those lawsuits get settled first with the victims and their surviving loved ones paid off and silenced.
If you think that denying a specific treatment (justified or otherwise) is comparable murder for hire, then I don't think there's anything worth discussing between the two of us.
Yeah, in my opinion an unjustified and profit motivated refusal to save a life is the same as intentionally taking that life. It's just the trolley problem and you're arguing that there is some innate nobility in refusing to touch the switch.
