[lkey]

Intentionally and artificially reducing the quality or quantity of life-saving resources to the point of excess death is, in fact, violence. I think you wouldn't have trouble recognizing the starvation campaign is Gaza as intentional violence.

Thus, I have no trouble asserting that PE firms commit intentional violence against patients.

Indirection allows you diffuse the responsibility into the anodyne 'immoral decisionmaking' while social murder remains as it ever was.

[tptacek]

Hurtling down the road in excess of the speed limit is also dangerous. Both actions have some probability of killing someone over a long enough time horizon. What's the threshold? Or are most people in cars also essentially murderers as well?

[lkey]

You misunderstand.

It isn't 'all the drivers' fractionally at fault (others can quibble about that), it's the people who create the moral hazard. The car industry and politicians that decided that the ungoverned car, the road, and the parking lot will be the only way to traverse Dallas or LA lo those many years ago, the ones that affirm that system with 'one more road' using tax dollars year after year, knowing that more people will die as a result. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... <- the line goes up.

They have a duty of care as representatives that they are failing to meet. Compare that to cities in Europe or the North East. When you make policies that serve the few and sacrifice the bodies of the many, that act is violence.

Likewise, with PE. When they intentionally understaff a hospital, no single doctor is responsible for killing the patient that died bleeding in the waiting room. It is the choice that we allowed that PE firm to make. Are you comfortable with a fresh MBA using excel to ensure that your local hospital should have four less doctors than strictly necessary to treat you in a timely manner? Society doesn't need to be organized this way, we can and should demand better.

Imagine the reverse, a municipality decides to privatize their water and sewage treatment, but puts no restrictions on the results as long at those wealthy enough are not inconvenienced. This is precisely how you get Flint. Or redlined cities that put the 'undesirables' in industrial waste parks. These acts are violence.

[tptacek]

This seems like a worldview calculated so that individuals almost never have any culpability --- even when speeding down the road, the responsibility for that harm is more properly attributed to corporations and politicians. From that vantage point, it's clear to me why one would see the decisions of a hospital-owning PE firm as "violent", while not seeing the decisions of a reckless driver that way.