You are viewing a single thread.
View all comments
134 points

Brian Robert Thompson murdered 51,000 innocent human beings.

permalink
report
reply
57 points

Please cite a source. It’s gotta be much higher than that.

permalink
report
parent
reply
29 points

I’m no math wizard but I’ve read 68k people die per year from preventable shit due to denied claims. Brian worked at United since 2004, CEO since 2021 so he contributed directly or indirectly to that number of deaths per year, at least the portion United is responsible for. United has double the industry average of rejected claims.

It’s def higher than OP states.

permalink
report
parent
reply
2 points

The 51k estimate was just taking into account the time that he was CEO.

permalink
report
parent
reply
53 points

It is a reasonable first order estimate. See a comment here. I think I will organize this a bit better and make a blog post on this tomorrow. But suffice to say, 51,000 is a good baseline number, based on UHC’s share of the private insurance market and the length of Thompson’s tenure as CEO of UHC. It could be as high as 100,000. But really, at this scale, it ceases to matter. You can only really comprehend it in comparative terms. And his number of victims was order of magnitude greater than that of Osama Bin Ladin.

permalink
report
parent
reply
5 points

Osama bin Laden was a chump compared to these guys. Osama was already wanted by the US for a crime he did in 1993 and had his Saudi citizenship revoked and he was a stateless runaway doomed to live in hiding and squalor no matter what.

He wasn’t even the mastermind behind 9/11. Hell, he even had a hard time controlling Mohammad Atta, the ringleader of the hijackers, who wanted the operation to be more about him and his final end more than anything else.

permalink
report
parent
reply
9 points

Not OP, but it’s going to be really hard to assign a hard value to that. There are plenty of obvious examples where they denied a life-saving treatment. But many of them would’ve died anyway.

Then there are cases where they deny preventative/early treatments. Some of these eventually led to more serious and fatal conditions, some did not. How do we count these?

Then there’s quality of life denials. These don’t directly lead to fatal conditions, but can affect morale and the like, thus allowing more serious conditions?

All of it would be compared to the unexplored alternatives (where treatment was authorized). This is inherently an unknown.

I’m not defending him by any means. It’s just that his body count is, at best, a rough estimate.

permalink
report
parent
reply
4 points

Whether they would have died anyway isn’t a measure of whether it is ethical to deny someone care that was the only chance they had. Removing the possibility is still murder.

permalink
report
parent
reply

Not The Onion

!nottheonion@lemmy.world

Create post

Welcome

We’re not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!

The Rules

Posts must be:

  1. Links to news stories from…
  2. …credible sources, with…
  3. …their original headlines, that…
  4. …would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”

Comments must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.

And that’s basically it!

Community stats

  • 7K

    Monthly active users

  • 693

    Posts

  • 15K

    Comments

Community moderators