[jtbayly]

Sad but unsurprising story. How do you reach your targeted cost per user without implementing death panels? “Sympathetic” agents will feel this pressure more and more, but there is a way to avoid this solution that is even more insidious.

No need to preemptively offer to help kill somebody. Just make their life so miserable that they ask for it.

Refusing them the medical care they need to not be miserable will go a long way toward that goal.

Edit: plot twist: I just realized this could be the official way that death panels are implemented. A “black spot” is placed on the person’s record indicating that no more treatment is to be paid for, unless they ask for somebody to kill them. Agents are, of course, forbidden from telling the person with the black spot. So this agent would indeed have been trying to skirt the rules by clueing the person in to their status. Thus, the agent clandestinely fighting death panels would be fired. It does not seem outside the realm of possibility to me that this truly might have been an agent fighting an active death panel.

[bigmattystyles]

Just wait until you hear about insurance companies.

[knewter]

Yeah when it's the entity with a monopoly on force it's more insidious