Bad People

How are they not bad people?

How could Insurance Company Executives do this:



or this:



and not be bad people?

It's not as though Insurance Company Executives just made honest mistakes that ended up having tragic consequences. They knew what they were doing when they did it.

And these things don't happen in the passive voice. Patients don't just lose coverage, Insurance Companies cancel coverage.

Insurance Company Executives made calculations. Insurance Company Executives made decisions. Insurance Company Executives invented pretexts. Insurance Company Executives canceled coverage. Insurance Company Executives delayed treatment.

And patients died.

It's not as though they only did it once. It's not as though they have stopped doing it. They do it every day.

And why do they do it? Because it's profitable. They make money, a lot of money, when they do these things.



So why aren't they bad people? They do bad things. On purpose. Not just once, but over and over again.

Apparently Wall Street made them do it. Wall Street demanded profits.

And they had to cheat their customers to provide those profits. They couldn't control their administrative costs to provide profits. They couldn't be more efficient in their business. They couldn't limit their own compensation.

It's all Wall Street's fault. You know, maybe it's just me, but I don't think "the devil made me do it" is an acceptable defense for anything unless you're trying to establish grounds for an insanity plea.

Anyone can make a mistake. And mistakes can have catastrophic consequences. Anyone can make an error in judgement that can result in tragedy. But as people we define ourselves by our actions.

And what we do, what we do on purpose, what we do over and over again, our actions establish what kind of people we are more than any words we say. More than any excuses or rationalizations we give.

With all due respect, I have to disagree. They ARE bad people.

The higher you go in the corporate structure, the more the game becomes vital and the reality fades into the background.

And insurance companies not only know this, they are on record in court, as defendants who have been told this repeatedly by judges and juries. But they do not see the judges and juries as a barometer of right and wrong, they see them as a cost of doing business- one which can pinpointed by actuary and worked into the profit equation.

Healthcare is a FUNDAMENTAL HUMAN RIGHT, not a commodity!

too. And so is the system they operate in.

For an extreme example of how otherwise not-bad people convince themselves that doing a bad thing is ok.

Those that tortured "in Good Faith" won't be prosecuted.

How the FUCK can someone TORTURE "in good faith"?

It is always a Red Flag when someone uses the phrase "these people", but I am NOT like "these people". But then, no one has ever accused me of "going along with the crowd", or believing something simply because an "authority figure" told me so.
Yes, I stayed after school a lot.

Health Care "Reform" that channels $Billions to the For Profit Health Insurance Industry is also "evil".

WE MUST make money on each and every transaction, or we are commie, fascist, socialist tyrants.

and we could say "they are bad people." people who work for corporations are under duress to keep their jobs, THEIR insurance and their homes. So, while I don't think I could be the one pulling the trigger on the souls who need transplants, life-saving drugs, or simply have their policies honored, i'm not sure I can say they're "bad" people per se. like the woman in Sicko -- the claims adjuster who eventually quit -- i think they're victims too. who wants their job to be killing sick people?

i could probably be convinced otherwise tho. maybe people are changed by the work they do. maybe they become bad people after having to do so many bad things.

there's also the ignorance thing -- are people who are willfully ignorant of the repercussions of their actions, actually evil? i think that could be true.

And I really wasn't thinking of the person sitting in the cubicle who is doing what they are told to do because they're paying off school loans, and second mortgages, and worried about their own health benefits (maybe they're even stuck in this job because they would have pre-existing conditions if they went elsewhere).

I was thinking of the executives, like the CEO of UnitedHealthcare who made 13.2 million in 2007. Or the CEO of Humana who made 10.3 million in 2007. And the many many levels of vice-presidents and other corporate executives who may not score quite as high in salary and stock options, but who profit from these practices.

It showed I was unclear in the original text. Trying to think how to put that idea in place better.

The insurance companies stopped caring so much about money and a whole lot more about PEOPLE?! Would they (the Cos.) go broke doing it???

Very salient point cogently put.

Thanks for opening my eyes to this point of view.

-Hoot

I heard said while listening to a couple of health care panels on C-span the other morning. "Are insurance companies doing anything immoral? Yes. Are they doing anything illegal? No. They do abide by the state insurance laws, with a few exceptions." Which speaks to then need for new regulations. By the way, I personally hate insurance companies due to some problems I have had. But I thought it was an interesting statement from the gentleman who said it. Sorry - don't know who it was.

nt

Sometimes good people do bad things.


Sometimes they enter into conspiracies to undermine contracts to defraud.


Tony Soprano was not a really bad guy was he?

Oh, I'm sure they can be nice. Charming. Well-dressed. Likeable, even.

But to quote Shakespeare (and I never pass up a chance to quote Shakespeare):

They do have to keep the company running.

This is just a good argument for why the government should do it - make it on a nonprofit basis, put it beyond those considerations.

I can see that a company has to make a profit and even turn one for shareholders.

But why would a business, any business, choose a business model that relys on cheating their customers?

Why not cut costs?
Why not deliver services more efficiently?
Why not limit executive compensation?
Why not deliver more realistic profit margins?

Any other business a track-record of cheating customers and selling unreliable products would have a hard time finding customers.

But in this business model, their customers are trapped.

Fraud and other forms of criminality are essential components of capitalism as it's practiced in today's world. (And, I suspect, ever since the days of Adam Smith.)

Advertising that, if not technically false, manages to convey inaccurate information.
Hidden interest rates on credit cards.
Dangerous cars like the Pinto, that are too costly to retrofix and redesign.
Fast food that kills us slowly.
Lies about climate change so the fossil fuel industry can squeeze out more profits before the earth dies.
Prescription drugs that poison our livers while suppressing the symptoms of bogus "illnesses."
Communications companies that collect information on us for purposes of social control.

The list is endless.

endemic crookedness of businessmen very unquivocally. He said that they used even the most innocuous-seeming occasions to conspire against the common good. Not occasionally, but that they never missed a chance.

As has been said of Christ, "It's not Adam Smith I despise. It's his fan club."

getting healthcare is only secondary
I mean, we must avoid being far left: they're correct too often
also, they're sure of themselves, just like the far right is!
they're both fringe! outside the all-American holy centrist consensus!

And call it for what it is.

:cry:

Specifically, heinously greedy people. And they are NOT unconscious of what they do.

Even if you put GOOD PEOPLE in the insurance companies at these decision making positions, you will end up with same kind of EVIL results sooner or later. For it is the "relentless profit expectations" of Wall Street that are driving the murderous behavior of insurance corporations. It is a totally impersonal dynamic. The insurance giants are all publicly traded companies --which why Wall St. is invoked. They aren't necessarily headquartered there, but they ANSWER to Wall St. as any Catholic parish must answer to the Vatican. The companies live or die by the movement of their traded stock. The management of these companies are in part paid in stock options, and upper management all live or die by the direction of the share price. Every insurance corporation like every other traded corporation, must achieve GREATER PROFITS year over year, or share price declines, then shareholders bail, management heads roll, executives' options expire worthless, and taken to the extreme the company goes under. Like every other traded company an insurance corporation management is like what they say about the shark: it can't stop swimming or it dies. It swims, it eats, and swims and eats - and all for the same reason. To go on eating and get bigger, and to not get eaten itself.

A SHARK is not an appropriate model for the institution that fulfills the social function of caring about our people when they are sick, injured, and vulnerable. Sharks do not care for the sick, injured, and vulnerable--except as an easy meal. It's not a matter of malice or allegiance to Evil, it's just what sharks do. It's what Nature makes sharks do to survive. The "relentless profit expectations of Wall St." and the nature of for-profit private enterprise makes insurance corporations do what they do, too. All countries that have healthcare systems that we admire for their cost containment and their coverage and superior outcomes have at some point or another made a SOCIAL DECISION that for-profit (capitalist) insurance is not an appropriate model for delivery of primary healthcare. This is true even in banker's paradise Switzerland, which forbids by law primary healthcare insurance policies to be sold for a profit. The more insurance companies are locked out of the healthcare market or confined to offering boutique supplemental insurance to the wealthier minority, the more a society contains health costs.

Whether the people who occupy insurance company offices are good or bad is not the point. Unless you change the underlying model from ruthless for-profit self-interested adventurism, to boring regulated non-profit service delivery, patients will continue to be murdered for money and the cost of the system will continue to explode. You can call them "bad people" but they are not making decisions that any more BAD in their motivation than the decisions made at other corporations in other fields. It's textbook capitalism. It just doesn't belong in this area of society.

We now have a system set up to reward evil. The executives of health insurance companies were selected by that system. They are bad people, that is how they rose to the top.

explicitly rewards sociopaths

what if there's a line at the end ...

And they are bad people to trust with something as important as our health care.

But I also think it needs to be painted as an ethical and moral issue. Personal Responsibility isn't something that just applies to the poor. Corporations by their nature enable people to separate themselves from having personal responsibility from their actions. That gives them free license to commit actions that are truly despicable. It was a small point I was trying to make. I'm fascinated by the directions this discussion has taken.

is not excluded by the need to concentrate on purging the capitalist system of its utterly fundamental wickedness, in prioritizing greater profits to the detriment of everything else.

From a practical viewpoint, incidentally, it has also proved to be massively counter-productive in the long run, as we seem to be about to "reap the whirlwind".

is not excluded by the need to concentrate on purging the capitalist system of its utterly fundamental wickedness, in prioritizing greater profits to the detriment of everything else.

From a practical viewpoint, incidentally, it has also proved to be massively counter-productive in the long run, as we seem to be about to "reap the whirlwind".

Incidentally, on this theme of the evil of Western capitalism and the far right-wing politics which promotes it, I can understand poor Nassim Taleb's letter to the Guardian, expressing an appalled, stunned horror at the way in which two of the journalists whose articles on him they had published, yet in a way I found it very comical.

Here is the article:

http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/cameronstatements.htm

Note these words: "This transformation of my ideas by Nicholas Watts is extremely wicked."
It is most uncommon to find the word "wicked", never mind "very wicked" applied to actions of individuals (or indeed corporations) in public life in the UK; in fact, I don't think I have ever come across it. So, it's both very refreshing that a man of integrity, who makes his living in the World in all its villainy, should make so bold as to express his real thoughts on the degree of moral turpitude of their journalistic shenanigans with such emphatic clarity. They might, indeed, mark a new low in our journalistic mendacity - geopolitics aside. No-one, not even Goebbels, could have misrepresented Taleb's beliefs so absolutely; rather they both apparently did so, with an almost Latin panache!

However, that's what creases me up with laughter. Maybe their articles took the mendacity of tools of the far-right to a new low. I don't know. But what I do know, is that the far-right and even crypto far-right NuLab are the spiritual siblings of a convicted extortionist racketeer and gun-runner. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Is it really any surprise that our far-right polity should resort to such wickedly mendacious, political propaganda.

sick to the core. In our respective, US and UK capitalist societies, it's difficult to avoid working for one of the great beasts. If I work as a wage-slave at McDonalds, if I have a cup of tea, I'm furthering their agenda. Of course, there are degrees of culpability and innocence according to the nature of the work.

A mate and I went on a hitch-hiking trip to Liege from our regiment at Sennelager, and one of our lifts was with an interesting kind of bloke. In the course of conversation, it turned out that he'd worked at a very low level in the German army during WWII (though I don't think his rank was quite as low as mine), and I was puzzled, because he seemed to have a high worldly intelligence and education.

When I asked him how that came about, his reply was simply that he didn't want to be part of what was going on in his country's name; although that sounds a little more pompous than the way he expressed it. Being bad and being motivated by profit, to the detriment of all human decency, are not by any measure, mutually exclusive; quite the contrary.

Everything is viewed thru the lens of political expediency. Simply put, I believe he views everything as will this benefit me politically, i.e; people will like and accept me and vote for me again?

between people who are divided because of seemingly irreconcilable differences.

I think he's doing what a good President is supposed to do. He's leading everyone because his job is to do what's best for the country and all it's citizens. We saw what Bush did which was to destroy the country in favor of his friends and leave this discord reverberating right now. We may want Obama to kick ass and do the same in retaliation but it wouldn't be a wise move and would continue the rift. Attempting to de-demonize the opposition is a wise tactic. Al Franken did it the other day when he talked to a group of teabaggers and almost everyone here admired him for it. They ended up actually talking instead of screaming their hatred at him. He was using moderation language.

It may not be a big drama because it's more exciting to loath and despise in righteous wrath but it sometimes works better than screaming.

and I hope it doesn't read that way.

I see the wisdom of building bridges in a a deeply divided society. And the "bad people" statement came after a litany of abuses and before another section of strong talk.

For all I know, he meant it ironically.

But I also see the wisdom of honestly addressing the nature and the motivation of the parties who have been invited to the negotiating table.

so tired of this "corporates are good people its just that the shareholders made them do it" bullshit. Right. Just following orders as they shovel people into death camps.

Folks these are bad people. These are the scum of the earth. And we've given them sanctuary as a legitimate business. This isn't time for the "age of reason", these mother fuckers are going to rape you and your family for every last penny you have. And then, they'll give a percentage to congress to buy more legislation that allows them to rape you again and again.

One more time - these are bad people. They trade in flesh and blood. They treat you like a commodity. The strip mine sick people and exploit them for profits. Now they outsource claims people to India where they don't have to worry about "sympathy" nor worry about giving those employees benefits like health insurance.

And here is the kicker - right now they are lobbying to buy and sell bundled policies of life and even health insurance, home owners insurance etc in an unregulated derivatives market in *exactly* the same way the bundled sub-prime mortgages.

Just wait, things are about to get much worse.

So sick of the "insurance companies are your friend, they are necessary for health care" bullshit from the immoral and sub-human benefactors of dirty insurance money.

Anyone who knows the death their policies bring and continues to do it because "they got theirs fuck everyone else" is definitely a bad person.

Of course, corporations cannot be held to good versus evil standards, they aren't persons are they? They are above any issues of morality. It's one of the biggest and most well protected fucking lies out there.

They are many of the same folks offended more by profanity than killing your neighbors for profit.

Insurance corporations add NO value to healthcare. They provide not one well baby exam, one immunization, one socialworker visit to new moms, or one home visit to a newly diagnosed type 1 diabetic.

What would work, and be painful, is to get rid of these leeches who take 30% off the top of premiums for themselves.

the other side hunts abortion providers. There is a price on the head of every sick person in this country. In a just world, the situation would be reversed and it wouldn't be so rewarding a choice for health insurance executives.

I know some would accuse me of inflammatory rhetoric, but people are dying for profits and there isn't anything much more obscene than that.

We're gonna win this fight even if it takes decades.

If crime pays, then it's not evil, it's just good business. God rewards the virtuous. Therefore, if a corporation makes profits, God Almighty must have judged them, and saw that they were good. Conversely, those people who can't afford health insurance and then get horribly, expensively sick, well, they must have done something vile in the eyes of God to warrant bringing down such furious wrath. Shame on them.

Sadly, some really do work out the moral calculus that way.