It appears that in every thread about this event there is someone calling everyone else in the thread sick and twisted for not proclaiming that all lives are sacred and being for the death of one individual.
It really is a real life trolley problem because those individuals are not seeing the deaths caused by the insurance industry and not realizing that sitting back and doing nothing (i.e. not pulling the lever on the train track switch) doesn’t save lives…people are going to continue to die if nothing is done.
Taking a moral high ground and stating that all lives matter is still going to costs lives and instead of it being a few CEOs it will be thousands.
You’re absolutely right and I’d argue it boils down to the fundamental error in OP’s shower thought:
Killing the CEO doesn’t save the lives on the other track. It just adds another dead body to the pile.
Why wouldn’t it, though? Every CEO makes a profit/loss calculation in their head. Now they’ve got one more potential entry in their loss column. We’re not talking about saving lives already taken by UHC, but future lives that other CEOs might cost.
We all know that the death of a CEO is a blip in the actual day to day operations in the company. The teams and departments will continue operating as before, and the broad strategic decisions made by the executives aren’t going to factor in a remote likelihood of violence on a particular executive.
After all, if they’re already doing cost/benefit analysis with human lives, what’s another life of a colleague, versus an insurance beneficiary?
They’ll just beef up personal security, put the cost of that security into their operating expenses, and then try to recover their costs through the business (including through stinginess on coverage decisions or policies).
That only remains true so long as this doesn’t turn into a copycat situation, which it very well might given how numerous the people with motives are, how easy it is to get guns in this country, and how fervently the people of this country are supporting the gunman.
The key word there is ‘remote likelihood’. My point was that if it goes from ‘remote’ to ‘possible’ or ‘likely’, then it will start getting factored into decision making.
There’s a difference once they start considering their own lifes on the line.
Unlike fines, which can be passed off as a cost of doing business, their lives are irreplaceable. And once the logic has been hammered into their heads, it can start influencing their decisions.
They won’t. Anyone who has a semblance of belief that their decisions in the job might actually cause their own death just won’t do the job. Instead, it becomes a filter for choosing even more narcissistic/sociopathic people in the role.
And once they’ve internalized the idea that any decision made by any one employee of the company, including their predecessor CEOs, can put them in danger, it’s pretty attenuated from the actual decisions that they themselves make.
It’s a dice roll on a group of people, which isn’t enough to influence the individuals in that group.
Who then get removed from society
Depends how many dice you roll. That’s my point. If you roll enough dice, it can start affecting decisions.
This is ludicrous. A person faced with unpopular decisions that might send assassins after him is going to make himself harder to assassinate, not less hated.
So you’re saying that, given a choice between
You’d take the 2nd choice and hire bodyguards. Sure, you might. But not everybody would.
They’re being intentionally dense. But we understand your point. Some people were born to lick the boot. Let them stay dumb.
No, the question isn’t whether everyone would. It’s whether anyone would. And the answer is obviously yes.
So now the position is filled. Did the healthcare system change?
My argument is that no, you can’t kill your way to reform on this one. There will always be another CEO to step into that place.
And the ratio of dead would-be assassins to CEOs would also pile more bodies on.