Health "insurance" companies in the US are not actually, primarily insurers. For the most part, they are not in the business of insuring rare events. Maybe they were primarily in the insurance business at some point in the past, but today they are mainly in the business of entrenching themselves in the middle of all interactions between patients, doctors, and hospitals, and extracting rents from all of them. Health "insurance" companies have become extractive businesses that produce nothing of evident value except unpleasant paperwork, and extract an economic rent for it, to the detriment of everyone else. I call them "paperwork-shuffling processors."
Accurate. They are literally middle men taking a cut without offering anything to the process. Switch to single payer, dump the middlemen, and have our taxes pay for essential services (keeping us alive and healthy). Seems simple enough but…
Most Americans support a public option, which is the transition step toward a healthcare system that more closely aligns with other first world nations.
I suppose, careful what you wish for. The NHS (UK's single payer health provider), allegedly the envy of whole wide world, is failing under the burden of insufficient funding, aging society and years of mismanagement by politicians. We're talking, properly dysfunctional, like ambulances taking hours to be dispatched to life-threatening emergencies or people dying on emergency wards due to neglect.
Literally the same thing is true of health care providers, which is why we have artificially constrained supply of physicians, sky-high delivery of procedures other countries don't routinely do, and integer multiple compensation across the board for practitioners.
Yes. I almost added a comment about that too. In my experience, all doctors, nurses, and other caregivers with whom I have interacted at hospitals have told me they feel treated like "factory workers" who must meet stringent "quality of care" KPIs, set by hospital executives far removed from actual patient care.
So why are we putting jerseys on and taking the field against the insurers when virtually all of the actual money is going to providers? We could zero out all insurance costs, putting insurers into literal de jure indentured servitude, and get nothing more than a grocery store circular coupon discount on health costs, because insurers are not in fact where the costs are.
I'm certainly not going to valorize insurers, but I find it deeply frustrating the providers are getting a pass here. You can see it on this thread, where there are commenters expressing surprise that I'd even suggest providers are the primary beneficiaries of the current system.
The entire health care system is broken but insurance companies tend to be the pain people experience so that's what people lash out at.
But you don't expect someone dying from losing health care to shut up until they come up with rational cost management system? The point isn't that the average person needs to how to portion blame but that the health care system needs to stop treating people in the fashion it does.
That's a problem though when the blame is so screwy, because it leads people to solutions that are not solutions. Medicare itself drastically overpays for medical services compared to the G20. The biggest problem is with providers, and it's exactly stuff like anesthesiologists overbilling for surgeries.
A lot of private "health insurance" at large companies is just:
- the company pays out-of-pocket for all employee health expenses
- they don't want to directly deal with bills from doctors and hospitals, so they contract that out to a third-party administrator (TPA), which purely handles paperwork and has no financial role at all
but this doesn't remove the tension between the employer wanting to pay less, and the patient wanting more to be paid for
(and for single-payer systems, you still have the tension between taxpayers wanting to pay less and patients wanting more care, although those groups at least overlap a lot more)
Yes, but unless it's literally Lasik, which has a robust private market, your provider will probably literally make a price up on the spot. That happened to me several years ago, when we needed urgently to get a CT scan for our daughter; it was late in the afternoon, the provider couldn't get the insurer on the horn, they proposed to do it the next day, I was jumpy and said "fuck it I'll pay out of pocket", they looked confused and then just made up a price: $1000.
It's mostly not rational. For instance, much of the conversation over the last day has been about Anthem pushing back on anesthesiology pay on the East Coast. That's people angry about their insurers working to make surgeries cost less by employing the literal guideline Medicare uses, and yet people online were overtly suggesting Anthem's CEO be murdered over it. Incoherent.
This won't win me any points in this particular forum, where this opinion (that I strongly hold) is unpopular, but I'm reminded of what someone else said about Net Neutrality: it's a bunch of people suiting up and taking sides on behalf of one group of giant corporations against another group of giant corporations. That's the "health care debate" in the US, where medical staff are paid 2-3x more than they are in other countries, and expensive procedures are prescribed and delivered at drastically higher rates. It's my problem with "Medicare For All", which more or less absolves providers from their role in choking people out with health care costs, despite the leading role they have in this situation.
At any rate: there's no serious theory of change that begins with murdering health care industry people.
> At any rate: there's no serious theory of change that begins with murdering health care industry people.
I dunno. This is the most publicly-united I’ve seen people against the industry maybe ever. Usually they’re separately-angry at the industry in their partisan silos (everyone hates it, more or less—hence the amazingly consistent and widespread reaction) but this has been the closest thing to a bipartisan healing moment since, like, the week after 9/11. Not particularly close to that, sure, but I can’t think of anything closer.
If this were part of a theory of change, it strikes me as no less serious than any other I’ve seen. At least.
Yes, there is a lot of frustrations. Voters disagree on what they want. That does not justify people to start shooting people when they dont get their way.
Okay. So other than getting mad on HN, what do you propose we do to fix the feelings people have about this situation and prevent this happening again?
I don't think we're going to fix this problem on HN, so I'm content just to point out that a lot of what people are saying about this situation is unfounded.
I don't either, but people feel this way about millionaires and healthcare execs for a reason, they're not just being cruel for the sake of it. Think about the reasons for it, and try to come up with a solution. That's a way more interesting discussion than getting mad about people being dumb on BlueSky or whatever.
People have built a frustrating system for themselves with a century of complicated and messy political decisions (and resulting regulations). They don't have the will or attention span required to solve the various problems via the slow moving & gridlocked political system. So, they take out their frustration on the highest profile participants in the system.
Solutions? I'm worried that there aren't solutions. There are only bandaids.
There is really basic stuff that we're going to have to do no matter what that doesn't involve restructuring the system, like drastically increasing the number of practicing physicians, which is capped by (you guessed) Medicare, which sponsors residencies. But all we can talk about is payer structure because of a complete fixation on insurance companies as singular villains.
The notion that the providers are the ones sucking up all the money in the healthcare industry is certainly... novel.
The majority of people in this particular industry have nothing to do with actually providing health care, just as the majority of employees at a major university have never stood in front of a blackboard.
In the United States, physician salaries were 6.5 times GDP per capita for specialists and 4.1 times GDP per capita for generalists.
(Shrug) I'm OK with the notion that doctors contribute somewhere between 4 and 7 times more value than your average schlub driving a bus, and I'm OK with paying them accordingly.
Now, how much do the administrators, insurance-company execs, and other noncontributors make?
The problem with our health insurance system is that it's insidious. Our doctors spend ~25% of their time filling out information that only gets filled out to try to get insurance to not deny the claims, and hospitals have entire billing departments whose only job is dealing with the billing of our stupid ass system. The problem isn't just the ~15% that the insurance companies take directly, it's that since their percentage of profit is capped, they work to raise prices of the entire health care system so that their 15% cut is bigger. Insurance companies literally negotiate pharma companies to charge a larger amount to uninsured people so they get to take a bigger cut.
That's not all of the reason (some of it is higher cost of living, compare G20 vs G7 and the gap narrows a bunch). Some of the reason is because of US education costs, and immigration policies that make it harder for people to come and work in healthcare.
I'm honestly not sure if I should attribute this comment to disingenuity, ignorance or just bad faith.
> pushing back on anesthesiology pay on the East Coast.
Not even close. BCBS was just pushing extra charges onto patients.
> insurers working to make surgeries cost less
This is laughably ill-informed, I don't know where to begin. The only thing insurers are doing is increasing the gap between what they collect and what they have to pay out. They do this by denying claims. Making the service cheaper has nothing to do with it.
> where medical staff are paid 2-3x more than they are in other countries
Because medical school is so expensive. Also, doctors spend 3-8 years working for minimum wage (ie medical residency) and the cost of billing and administration is enormous. One study showed a primary care doctor spent $99,000 a year on billing and roughly 25% of ER income spent on the same [1].
The US spends the most per capita on healthcare than any other OECD country, by about 50% (Switzerland is #2) [2] for less coverage, worse outcomes and lower life expectancy.
Medicare spends almost all (~98.5%) of its funds on patient care and ~1.5% on admin, compared to 15-25% on admin for private insurers (including Medicare Advantage).
It amazes me how concifently wrong and ignorant about a subject can be while having such strong opinions.
Anthem proposed to apply the precise guidelines Medicare uses to pay for anesthesiology, including references to those CMS guidelines. Billing for anesthesiology has been a hot button issue: the search you want is [anesthesia surprise billing]. Anesthesiology is one of the highest-paid specialties in American medicine.
You cannot reasonably support Medicare and claim that Anthem was doing something unconscionable, because Anthem was adopting Medicare's own policies.
Medicare's admin cost ratio is a function of who it covers. Somewhere in the comment history on HN, there's a short writeup I did of how the math works out if you extend Medicare to the whole population; the admin overhead, for obvious reasons, shoots up --- people pay the same amount of money but require far fewer services, reversing the "advantage" Medicare has in the metric currently.
Insurers use the Medicare schedule as a weapon to simply reduce how much providers get paid and/or increase how much patients have to pay out-of-pocket.
The Medicare schedule is generally low because of the negotiating power of the Federal government so when Anthem (or whoever) says something like "we'll pay Medicare rates" or "we'll pay 120% of the Medicare rate" they're really just cutting payments and increasing patient costs. Nothing more.
In the recent BCBS case, all they were doing was saying "it may take 8 hours for the surgery but we're only going to pay you for 3". They haven't made the surgery cheaper to provide. They just wanted to pay out less.
Also, if we're going to simply do everything based on Medicare, why exactly do we even need private insurers? Just expand Medicare to everyone if the schedules are good, right?
You're saying "the Medicare schedule" as if it's an abstraction, but it is literally the payment process used by the largest buyer of medical services in the country. What Medicare pays matters more than what anybody else pays, because most medical services are performed for Medicare patients. So I'll ask directly: how is it unconscionable for Anthem to use those policies, but not for Medicare to use them?
You are exactly right that Anthem is demanding providers charge less for surgeries, not for surgeries to take less time. Providing "less anesthesia" is not a thing. This is entirely about preventing health providers from charging more money to Anthem and, in turn, their customers. That's why Medicare does the same thing.
The fundamental difference between Anthem and Medicare is that when Medicare cuts reimbursement, that cost isn't passed on to patients, but when Anthem does, it is. Medicare's rates are arguably too low, but low Medicare rates are getting a good deal for the country. Low Anthem rates are passing costs onto consumers and profits onto shareholders.
I dont think it counts for something good. I think it is giving in to one of the worst possible aspects of humanity. Like people cheering at a lynching.
if they are that successful to make it to a point where they can be hired to be CEO of UHC or Monsanto or other axis of pure evil, perhaps they would choose to take their talents elsewhere
> there's no serious theory of change that begins with murdering health care industry people.
You sure about that? Show me one theory of change where the oppressed somehow rise above without violence? Even the groundwork for Ghandi's peaceful protest were laid by a strong anti-colonial military force that led assassinations of British military officers. You think Britain left because Ghandi said some profound things and changed their minds? The official position was that continued occupation of India would be met by violent resistance and they retreated.
There have been many many examples throughout history of oppressed people rising up with violence against their oppressors. The majority of the substantial changes in culture happen this way - things reach a boiling point and it spills out on the streets.
I'm not saying mob justice is an ethical or principled way to instill change. But historically it has been extremely successful.
Bullshit. Show me the proof. Given that nearly all successful revolutions against oppressive powers have been backed by violence, I'm curious what you come up with.
There is one group, the insurance companies, which have unequivocally stated that they will physically harm other people if it yields marginally higher profits. That's not up for debate, that's the stated business model. It is extra-judicial killing for profit, backed by the state. And when the state abuses their monopoly on power, history shows that people will claw it back as violently as they feel necessary.
The proof is that you'd be going to war over a 5% discount in prices, and it's based on an accounting of where the money in our health system goes. Sorry, the numbers here are easy to find and they are unforgiving.
Definitely was already there. I'd guess that people hate insurance companies more than they hate politicians - in fact, I'd go so far as to say that at least some of the hate for politicians is sublimated hate for insurance companies and our Kafkaesque healthcare system. It's almost a bit surprising that this is the first time this has happened. And now that someone has done it, it seems likely that there will be copycat attempts.
Was it? If that's the case, why do the majority of M4A voters say their support is conditioned on them retaining access their existing private insurance?
You get frustrated when your doctor is 30 minutes late. Being denied coverage by your insurance for something serious and expensive is a matter that causes hate.
Genuine question: What is so difficult about healthcare in the USA?
European countries solutions range from free to government subsidised (for those who can't afford it). The free ones vary in quality, but systems where you pay unless you can't work pretty well, and the quality is very high.
Why is this such an issue in the USA? Is it purely a "powerful people with vested interests" thing?
The US spends over 17% of GDP on healthcare while comparable countries are around 8%. There are some ways we could reduce that but at the end of the day americans consume a lot of healthcare and americans get paid a lot to provide health care so any solution is going to have cost related problems. Because theres so much money involved there are tons of special interests which makes it politically extremely difficult to change anything. Two of the most obvious things we should do are pay less for pharmaceuticals and increase the number of doctors but the pharma lobby and AMA make that impossible.
> But that did not stop social media commenters from leaping to conclusions and from showing a blatantlack of sympathy over the death of a man who was a husband and father of two children.
The journalists' tone and choice of words here, which I've italicized, isn't helping the overall feeling many Americans have of "the people running the show have active and unceasing contempt for us", which of course is what's driving the "torrent of hate for health insurance industry" that this article sets out to document.
I'm sorry, but where do these writers get off wagging their fingers and tut-tutting people who'd prefer not to spend their neurons on sympathy for someone at the helm of an inhuman system? The point's already been made, but plenty of monsters are husbands and fathers.
Unfortunately, it is the same system where journalists have bills to pay and mouths to feed, and their wages comes from advertising of these Fortune 500 companies.
There's a distinction to be drawn between challenging norms of discourse like not speaking ill of the dead, and actively cheerleading murders, like "we should boycott Starbucks for providing evidence about the murderer to police", or Taylor Lorenz calling for the assassination of Anthem's CEO by name.
The incoming President told his supporters that if he lost they’d still have to the option of shooting his opponent, when he ran in 2016. Instead of being ejected from politics forever by an outraged public, he went on to win that election. Then another one more recently.
I don't think you understand me. I'm not saying people are taking to fainting couches over norms violations. They're reacting to people like Taylor Lorenz literally calling for the assassination of people by name. In my case, past that, for Lorenz doing so based on a comically flawed understanding of what her target was doing.
"The point's already been made, but plenty of monsters are husbands and fathers."
For example, the ones establishing and profiting from so-called "social media" at the expense of organisations that employ journalists.
Advertisers choose between supporting organizations that employ journalists versus supporting ones that do not, the ones profiting instead from the "torrent of hate". NYT has plenty of paying subscribers; it is not 100% dependant on ads, unlike "social media", generally.
Indeed "the people running social media have active and unceasing contempt for us". They prefer computers over people. Surveillance over sympathy.
I'm terribly sorry, but all of your italicized fragments, taken in isolation, do paint a stark picture of the murder of a person.
You might have beef (or whatever you call it these days) with his job and industry but in the end a man was murdered. You may not like and "hate" seems appropriate to describe how you feel about a legitimate industry in the USA. Your issue is with a deeply embedded part of the US experience - health insurance, and not with this man.
Please attack the industry that you hate and not the individual ... who was murdered. That is what the journos are doing.
I dont find the "lack of sympathy" to be an issue.
What I do find disappointing is the lack of concern over people being gunned down in the street, and the not so subtle glee some people are expressing.
Murder should not be normalized or endorsed. It isn't healthy for a society and doesn't lead to progress.
I pay around $20k/year for health insurance for myself, my wife and my daughter. I need insurance coverage to save my life and it is denied and I die. Under what US Statute (any state or federal) can a prosecutor charge the people
responsible for my death? surely on the system of laws and courts you say we have there is something… I’ll wait…
also people should most definitely NOT kill law abiding citizens! we do have laws for that
I guess this is the crux of it. The law does not hold anyone responsible for your death, and nobody is responsible for providing you life saving services.
These are the laws that your fellow citizens have chosen and established.
> We have a system of laws and courts to decide what is criminal.
We do, but unfortunately it heavily favors the party with the most money. If you want to take a health insurance company to court it's gonna cost you a lot of money in lawyer fees and you'll face a phalanx of corporate lawyers who have a lot of experience in crushing cases brought by their customers. That's not to say that people should go out and take matters into their own hands, but there is a lot of pent-up frustration out there and we really need to start addressing some of these issues before more of this happens.
The problem with this argument is that it assumes that one killing implies anarchy and and discarding of the system. It does not. Chances are, most reasonable people believe there should be a chain of justice with courts, laws, and investigations.
Someone has turned to vigilante justice here not because they believe that the courts are useless, but because they believe that this is such an extreme case that courts would not have worked in this case.
What I believe people fear is not the rise of anarchy due to one killing, but a fundamental shift in attitudes of the ordinary people in response to the unreasonable rise of the power structure. This threatens not order but the very power structure itself, which implies that a lot of people who benefit from injustice will suddenly be at risk of losing those benefits (money).
> People should not kill law abiding citizens they disagree with because everyone has a different opinion.
That's not what happened.
Brian Thompson isn't a "law abiding citizen I disagree with" he's a law abiding citizen who killed people. If you or your loved one died because of his actions, would you "have a disagreement with him"? Is that what you'd call that?
There is a massive difference between not helping and killing someone. If you attribute the deaths from healthcare denials to him, did he also save every life that wasnt denied?
> Murder should not be normalized or endorsed. It isn't healthy for a society and doesn't lead to progress.
I guess the American revolution didn't lead to progress then. Or any of the other revolutions, many of which had assassinations. And murder is not being endorsed. Putting an end to it is.
This is one of those things we state as a normative absolute in general society and you usually only see the nuance (or how it’s basically just a polite lie, in some cases) in relevant college classes or spaces dominated by certain kinds of professionals and nerds (the kind who took those college classes, usually).
I actually think the murderer would have been found and either arrested or killed for resisting arrest by now, were that the case.
That the murderer, who killed someone in literal broad daylight on the sidewalk of one of the biggest cities in the world, is still on the loose speaks volumes to me about all sorts of things.
It speaks volumes as to how incompetent the NYPD is. NYC is one of the most policed cities with the most cameras constantly watching people, and the fact that a crime like this can happen in broad daylight and the perpetrator can remain a ghost is an indictment of that whole dystopian atmosphere and system
In a society where democratic tools no longer function effectively—due to capture by concentrated powers—people often feel powerless to address systemic harms. I can understand how the only power an individual can have in that situation is something like murder.. but it’s making many assumptions.. like this person really was working as an individual from moral grounds in the interests of majority of society.. and that we can trust this moral judgement to and individual, as in today it might be an arguably utilitarian good but tomorrow it might be a cultural or religious thing.. will this action really would have any positive affect on healthcare results for many people, or change any behaviors of people in power apart from getting more security guards..
I think most people are confusing captured democracy for the fact that the actual voting population is split on issues once people step outside their bubble.
>What I do find disappointing is the lack of concern
This is (was) the CEO of the largest health insurer in the country which has shown a lack of concern for paying out insurance or securing data both private and medical. Their data leak this year is second only to National Public Data's leak (also this year) of practically every single SSN on the planet and arguably worse because their leak also contains medical data.
Murder is never okay, but this guy is also about the most unsympathizable man in the country.
> this guy is also about the most unsympathizable man in the country.
There's no way that is true. It's only remotely possibly true if you're only talking about people who at least nominally obey the rules and laws of society. You don't actually think that he was worse than a murderer, or a rapist, or a child abuser, of which we have many, many thousands in this country.
When deciding who deserves my scorn, I genuinely do put those who are in power and commit atrocities at scale (like healthcare CEOs) above one-off violent criminals.
Even if you’re a few levels removed from the deaths you’ve caused, you still have blood on your hands imo.
Who knows too... maybe if we have better access to affordable quality (mental) healthcare, which does not deny millions of claims in any given year, then we might perhaps have less murders, rapist, and abusers running around.
The sheer breadth of misery this person inflicted through his actions is hard to quantify, and trying to say who is worse/better will always be a judgement call. But the broad dislike for this person doesn't come from nowhere..
Our healthcare system literally shaves ~5 years of lifespan off of the country as a whole. Illegal denial of claims by his company almost certainly kill hundreds of thousands a year.
> You don't actually think that he was worse than a murderer, or a rapist, or a child abuser, of which we have many, many thousands in this country.
I think there is not much point in defining a single metric of "worse" because that is confusing. A rapist is worse if they are following your spouse. This guy is worse if he is about to make a decision that will prevent your loved one from getting medical treatment at the exact time that they need it.
The acts of Murders, rapist, and child abusers are far more heinous than health insurance CEOs. However, I would argue the magnitude of damage is larger from the decisions of health care CEOs.
Like I said, I dont think it is about sympathy, but not wanting to live in a country where people are murdered in the street. That is the part that is disgusting and dangerous.
> I'm sorry, but where do these writers get off wagging their fingers and tut-tutting people who'd prefer not to spend their neurons on sympathy for someone at the helm of an inhuman system?
And what exactly is your solution?
Healthcare should be a charity from the rich?
It should be nationalized, and somehow magically all the problems go away?
You’ve got the answer right there. It should be nationalized. And a major reason it will never be nationalized is because of lobbying by health insurance corporations.
Medicare for all is actually a very popular policy, with majority approval (across people who identify with both parties).
M4A is nationalized health insurance if not quite nationalized healthcare, but the point remains that the only reason we don’t have major steps in this direction is because of people in power who will not let it happen.
Do you have an argument that would be persuasive to someone who doesn't believe the voters in every state where this was proposed were successfully hoodwinked by "money"?
Political operative here. If you're wondering why healthcare reform has been so hard to get and so piecemeal, even though most Americans want it, the big reasons are:
1) any reform has to get past the Senate, and the Senate gives a lot of extra weight to states with conservative electorates. In 2009, this meant the pivotal Senators were right-wing Blue Dogs, an independent (Lieberman), and a former Republican (Specter). In 2024, this means the pivotal Senator will be a conservative Republican, since Dems run fewer Blue Dogs, and liberals can't win states like North Dakota and Louisiana.
2) people don't only vote on healthcare; Democrats also support much less popular stances on other issues, especially immigration.
Lobbying etc. matters some, but is much less important than those two big ones.
Polls consistently show the public supports Democrats more than Republicans on healthcare policy, even as they trust Republicans more on other issues like inflation and immigration
Right, I'm a pretty engaged Democrat, but I'm asking: what reforms do you think are within the boundaries of acceptable to the median voter? Clearly single-payer is not. It couldn't even survive in Vermont.
The majority of Americans believe the Federal government should provide health care [1][2].
The current Democratic Party is essentially "Republican Lite", Republican with a happy face on it. Democrats as a whole are more interested in defeating progressives and leftists than they are in defeating Republicans.
This is issue polling. There are lots of problems with issue polling, but even when delivered well, the fundamental problem is it's not concrete. Poll people to see if they'd like the option to stop paying for health insurance: you'll get Assad numbers. Now write a ballot initiative for single payer, where customers see the tax price tag, and have to worry about losing their current private health insurance: the numbers fall through the floor. This isn't supposition: it's happened over and over for the past several election cycles. People do not like this idea as a concrete thing.
I'm a Coloradan who voted for the 2016 universal healthcare (aka ColoradoCare) proposal, but I understand why the majority (79%) voted against it: there was sticker shock at the additional 10% income tax (with caveats, but people saw the 10%) and an inability of proponents to answer basic questions such as "Will I be able to keep my current doctor?", "Will I be able to get an abortion?", and "Will there be additional tax increases?".
I remember polling either done at the same time or the same pollster that found different approval ratings for Obamacare and the ACA. Its like dihydrogen monoxide vs water.
Right, but the point is (I'm belaboring) we don't have to rely on issue polling at all here, because has repeatedly made it to actual ballots, which are the votes that actually count.
At first glance, this looks pretty similar to the Bob Lee murder last year. I find it interesting and a little surprising how different the reaction and coverage has been
This reminds me more of Chris Dorner. The manifesto is shorter, but this sense of injustice felt by the perpetrator is similar.
Back in the days, mainstream media had enough control over the narrative to water down the "manifesto" part and avoid copycats. This time, "rogue" social medias are much more prevalent, so there's not much of a barrier to prevent the perpetrator from becoming a hero. We can think that copycats will emerge.
I guess that billionaires around the world are dusting off their "apocalypse bunker" protocol...
And, in case we all need a reminder: Chris Dorner was an actual monster, and his brief casting as a cause celebre a pretty big embarrassment in retrospect.
So, private insurance companies ripping off patients is such an injustice that we are arguing that a literal murder could be (somewhat) justified - in HN of all places, where "it's the evil billionaires" was never a popular position - as if we are in total desperation and everything is on the table.
...when it is simply a consequence of America's system and the solution (public health insurance) is implemented in every other places.
Have we all got drunk on libertarianism until we would rather see CEOs murdered on the street than admitting maybe, sometimes, government managing its own citizens' welfare is an acceptable solution?
The libertarian argument is that he should have employed better security to protect himself from weirdos. This is why the rich need more tax cuts -they need to be able to afford security.