News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious biased sources will be removed at the mods’ discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted separately but not to the post body. Sources may be checked for reliability using Wikipedia, MBFC, AdFontes, GroundNews, etc.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source. Clickbait titles may be removed.
Posts which titles don’t match the source may be removed. If the site changed their headline, we may ask you to update the post title. Clickbait titles use hyperbolic language and do not accurately describe the article content. When necessary, post titles may be edited, clearly marked with [brackets], but may never be used to editorialize or comment on the content.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials, videos, blogs, press releases, or celebrity gossip will be allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis. Mods may use discretion to pre-approve videos or press releases from highly credible sources that provide unique, newsworthy content not available or possible in another format.
7. No duplicate posts.
If an article has already been posted, it will be removed. Different articles reporting on the same subject are permitted. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners or news aggregators.
All posts must link to original article sources. You may include archival links in the post description. News aggregators such as Yahoo, Google, Hacker News, etc. should be avoided in favor of the original source link. Newswire services such as AP, Reuters, or AFP, are frequently republished and may be shared from other credible sources.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
Do you give this same consideration to other people who get shot? What if he had been the kingpin of a drug cartel - would you still be saying 'Oh, won't anyone think of his family!' if the police raided his meth lab and he got shot?
The example I prefer is Bin Ladin. The United CEO killed more people than Bin Ladin. Bin Ladin was just a drama queen and made his killings a lot flashier. Does someone care so much for the rule of law, on such a deep principled level, that they objected to Bin Ladin's extrajudicial execution? If there is such a rare and gentle soul that they were willing to be offended that even Bin Ladin didn't get a fair trial, then I will be willing to listen to that person's objections to celebrating a murderous CEO's death.
Personally, I am not that good a person. And I am glad that both Bin Ladin and this CEO are out of the picture.
The fact that you only remember one of their names should tell you that you don't have a valid comparison. If Thompson was as bad as Bin Laden, you'd remember it.
$10 says you and everybody else in this thread didn't even know this dude existed 2 days ago.
Everyone knows Bin Laden because his name was plastered all over the news for months on end. People have been angry at United Healthcare for a lot longer but it was always a faceless corporation. This event has put a name to that corporation and a focus for that anger. If the media covers this like they did Bin Laden I guarantee everyone would remember his name.
If Thompson was as bad as Bin Laden, we'd have been talking about him already. It's not like United anonymized their CEO position or anything, there's been a face to the corp the whole time. It's just that nobody cared.
I get that people are glad he's dead. But be realistic; he's a piece of shit, but he's not fucking Bin Laden. Gross indifference to suffering patients and flying planes into buildings are both despicable acts, but on two completely different orders of magnitude.
Which is why we should hold them accountable, instead of offering them an easy way out of facing any consequences like this numbnuts vigilante did by granting Thompson a swift and early death.
The whole point of a corporation is so that the people involved don't get held personally responsible when bad things happen. It's virtually impossible for them to be held accountable with our current laws.
Then we change the laws, because it's completely impossible to hold them accountable when they're killed before a trial could ever occur. Now all his ill-gotten earnings will be given to his already-wealthy family instead of distributed back to his victims and surviving families of his victims.
The rich getting richer isn't justice.
WTF are you on about? Being killed is the ultimate form of being held accountable.
Not in the slightest. He's free. His money is safe and secure. He won't spend a day behind bars. Just because he stops breathing doesn't rectify his wrongdoing. There are still victims of his actions right now who would probably love to have seen him face a trial and be forced to pay back everything he took.
He felt like... what... A minute of pain, before his lights faded out? How the fuck is that justice? If I oversaw the deaths of thousands of innocent people, I could only hope to be so lucky that being shot in the street is the worst punishment I'd face.
Not to rain on your parade, but how do we do that when they're the ones "lobbying" (aka paying) for the laws to be changed? Money speaks, and they can spend a ridiculously large quantity of it without worrying about making ends meet.
Sounds like killing a healthcare CEO isn't the right action for the type of change people are wanting.
It’s not the type of change people want. However if violent retribution is all that’s on offer it makes perfect sense that someone would eventually take that deal and that people would celebrate it.
Not being notorious doesn't make somebody not a bad person.
I'm not defending Thompson. I'm just saying that comparing him to Bin Laden is asinine.
How many people do you need to kill before you're worse than Bin Laden? At least Bin Laden had legitimate grievances with (some of) his victims; this guy was killing thousands every year for money.
You've been on the wrong side of this thread a lot. Perhaps you have a lot to reconsider. You strike me as a kapo.
If being against vigilante killers puts me on the "wrong side", then go ahead and start putting up a fence along that line, because I'm not crossing over it.
Thompson was a piece of shit, but now he's never going to face consequences. Maybe you're okay with that, but I'm not. I'd rather see him rotting in a cell while all his belongings are stripped from him and given back to his victims. Giving him a get-out-of-jail-free card is the farthest thing from justice, IMO.
He did face the consequences, but his fellow executives who were just as much to blame haven't and likely never will. This isn't a solution, but it is a warning sign that things are approaching a tipping point. Historically when things get this bad and the "peasants" start pulling out guillotines and scaffolds things have gone very badly for both the ruling class and many of the ones leading the executions, but in the wake of such things there is some improvement. This is a significant warning to politicians and lawmakers that if they don't do something soon to address the rampant corporate greed and rapaciousness this sort of thing will start becoming more common and eventually the mob will be coming for them as well.
No, he's dead. He's free from any prosecution, never having to answer for his actions, and all his money gets to stay in his family. Literally the easiest way out, and the only people who benefit from this are people who are already wealthy off of health insurance CEO money.
No, it's a warning to corpos to start hiring security. That's the only change that will happen. They're just going to make themselves harder to reach. Vigilantism rarely ever results in any meaningful change, and even more rarely does that change benefit the victims.
More security won't save them. For a time it will stop these vigilante style attacks, but if that outlet is cut off eventually you'll see large mobs leading the attacks instead and security won't be able or willing to stop them.
Death is the ultimate consequence. His family has kept the wealth for now, but if it gets bad enough that won't last either.
Your problem is you're taking the principled stance of how a fair system should work, but we're well past that point now. The system is broken and rigged. Desperate people when given the choice between lashing out randomly at those responsible or wasting time and energy playing rigged games that don't achieve anything will opt to lash out even if it doesn't accomplish much in the long term.
Things are at their breaking point and it's going to get messy. These sorts of things are just the first cracks along the stress points. If significant changes to reduce peoples frustrations aren't made it will lead to significantly more violent events like this.
The rich should be very scarred right now because there's absolutely nothing more dangerous than a group of people backed into a corner and desperate.
Should whoever did this have done this? No. But by the same token most people aren't going to be particularly bothered by this either. A complete scumbag got murdered and considering the society we're living in now that's literally the only bad thing that could have happened to him. He was never in any danger of facing consequences from his actions through legal means.
That was never even an option. Everything he did was legal. It was completely morally bankrupt, but there aren't any crimes to pull him in on, nor was there anyone who would do it. The system is broken.
You're just mad it wasn't done how you like it. Think about that.
Uhh yeah. No shit? The way I would've wanted it done is one in which the victims get something out of it. Now they get nothing.
They get revenge. Maybe you can't eat it nor you can use it as a medicine to cure your illness, but you can use it to sleep and live better knowing that, one way or another, for some of these people the clock is ticking.
I, at least, have slept much better after receiving this news. And I'm not even American, just a simple European hoping that this trend will be imported from America like many others before it.
(I say imported but we actually are far more advanced than American in this matter. During the 70s there were a lot of terror groups fighting for a better society and what did we get? Social security, a fairer economy and personal rights such as divorce and abortion. After the 90s the situation was so good that these groups disappeared and in 30 years time we're back at where we were before the terror season. Maybe it's time to get back to where our fathers left us)
You're gonna lose that bet. As soon as my mom started working for UHC I knew which evil fuck was the CEO of the worst healthcare insurer in the country. Their own employees refer to it as the Walmart of healthcare, and it's lived up to that description in every comparison imaginable. I'm not surprised at all that someone decided to take doing something about it into their own hands.
The problem with capitalism is there are thousands of bin ladens running around and we're not aware of the misery they inflict, because it's normal. This guy is a hero for reminding us of that.
I think what I meant is pretty self-evident. Read it again, and lose the knee-jerk reaction where you assume that I was saying, "Oh, won't anyone think of his family!" I was just saying it was a mindfuck.
Probably, if the head of the cartel got shot, his family would be shattered but they wouldn't think it was shocking to hear everyone cheering for it. This guy lives in a world where he thinks he's doing everything he's supposed to be doing. He and his family probably thought he was really doing good, and everyone else should be getting on his level. Maybe not. I have no idea. It was just a mindfuck for me thinking about it.
Big pharma is next.