Aaron's Status

8:41 am

I’m feeling the urge to expound on this United Healthcare CEO assassination, if only because it will help me to sort my thoughts and feelings about it. If you’re not into that, well, you know where to find the door.

Assassinating the head of any corporation is unlikely to be an effective salve for whatever misdeed the corporation has perpetrated against you. Corporations are, to use Cory Doctorow’s words, “sociopathic colony organisms.” Cut off the head, and a new one grows back.

Setting aside entirely the fact that committing a murder as some form of vengeance is both morally bankrupt and contrary to the tenets of any civil society, what is the real-world utility of killing this guy? Will anything come of this? Is this the flashpoint of a burgeoning revolution?

These are the kinds of questions being batted around in my social circles, and I’m not sitting here saying that I have any answers, but what I do have—in spades—is observations.

When was the last time some tangible population of Americans celebrated a murder? I am having trouble thinking of one. The reaction to this event across the various social channels has been apathetic at best and celebratory at worst. I say worst because I’d love to live in a society that doesn’t celebrate murder, and yet here we are.

So “the people” to some extent are aligned that this guy, for whatever reason, or at least in some small way, deserved to die. I’m sure that these sentiments are amplified by parasocial distance; you can offhandedly wish death on public figures for trivial reasons and raise exactly zero eyebrows these days. Yet still, there’s not much hand-wringing about this, is what I’m saying.

What are people hoping for? What do we want to have happen? Will this public killing cause or accelerate it? All of this remains to be seen, but I can render an opinion.

First, murdering this company’s CEO is vanishingly unlikely to change its behavior. Not least of which because of the whole colony organism thing, but also because the incentives are so stacked against us here, which is how we got to where we are in the first place.

The system as it exists is literally optimized to create inhumane, even murderous, organizations. Every control mechanism in and around these insurance companies is rigged up to the money-making machine and as long as it keeps going brrrr, nobody is going to pull that plug. The sole directive of a private company is to make as much money as possible and the biggest hindrance to that goal is paying claims.

Some of the indescribable lengths that these companies will go to in avoiding a payout are actually emergent properties of these complex systems. Broken workflows, inadequate controls, and so on, often have no identifiable perpetrator. Systems are built to some spec, or more likely integrated across acquisitions, and it is discovered that parts don’t work terribly well, but because fixing it costs money and doing things right would only cost more money, they are left as they are.

Seen from a helicopter altitude, this is a company knowingly putting a few dollars ahead of human lives, but that isn’t how it gets that way. More likely it’s individual, separately incentivized departments managing a P&L and electing not to fix bugs or processes that clash with other departments.

Justified? No, of course not. Understandable? Yeah, I think so.

There are only two solutions, broadly speaking, that I can see:

One: government steps in and establishes regulation that forces these companies to (effectively) make less money in order to provide more robust care. Such legislation would be difficult to write and politically fraught, but it could help.

Two: government steps in and offers health care itself, acting both as a provider-of-last-resort as well as an influential competitor in the industry. A single-payer with an undeniably large customer base and immense bargaining power.

In reality I think some degree of both are required. I also don’t think that killing people is going to make it happen… Unless they start killing senators.