Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Dalewyn 558 days ago
>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.

2 comments

> 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.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Would you rather have had this guy around you / your loved ones, or one of the people in the other groups I named?
What precisely is your point?

I'd rather have the Sackler family show up for a dinner than the Manson family, but if we're being honest, the former is responsible for several orders of magnitude more deaths than the latter.

Wasn’t the topic scorn?
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.

Depends how you cut 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.

> You don't actually think that he was worse than a murderer ...

The difference in opinion might be many people considering the guy himself to be a murderer, and not just of one or two people?

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.