digitalagriculture
6567
459
4
https://www.forbes.com/sites/daraabasiita/2026/06/09/the-algorithm-that-counted-on-no-one-appealing/
Aug 17, 2026 1:52 PM
digitalagriculture
6567
459
4
https://www.forbes.com/sites/daraabasiita/2026/06/09/the-algorithm-that-counted-on-no-one-appealing/
JohnWickdidnothingwrong
He engaged in cultural self-defense. The guy he capped hasn't killed anyone since then, so it seems to work.
Unclescam
The people saying violence is never the answer have already won and are simply trying to make staying on top easier.
DemSumBigAssRidges
He did nothing wrong except not get more of them.
ShieldAnvil1
It's only muder if the stocks don't go up.
Ostegonation
My wife and I have had to fight with insurance companies that we paid tens of thousands into each year... We stopped. Now we're putting that monthly payment into a savings account. Wake up people, it's time to tell the insurance companies to choke on a bag of dicks.
eronth
Killing is, default, wrong. But killing can be made neutral or even right based on circumstances.
meme2zombie
eg self dense or defense of others (that's the easy go to example)
OneMoreLime
What if we made a machine that just defaults to denial and anyone who really needs care will just appeal as many tikes as they need to before they either get approved or die what could go wrong?
TheDefective
LtRooney
EroticZombiePants
As much as a bunch of people don't like it, you really do have to punish Luigi for what he did, because I guarantee you if he got off scot-free for it, this would become the default defense used literally every time every Republican commits any crime. They would spend the entire time yelling that we're being hypocrites if we convict them.
thisStanley
"if we convict them"
That "If" is carrying quite a load, and it has been failing to produce any consequences. So why should they stop :{
Corrodias
Objection, I'm not convinced that "of course they are" in the face of the overwhelming murder (not legally) committed by the victim with the full protection of the law.
zubb999
I understood why he pled guilty, but I would have loved to hear his lawyers find the moral high ground behind his actions. It really would have made this entire country unable to ignore the vastness of the problem with healthcare in this country for a few weeks/months. It would've sparked deeper conversations and understanding about how flawed the current system truly is to the point that we would HAVE to have these conversations. But now, that won't really happen.
FrolickingFrolicking
Especially when police murder people, claim “I felt threatened”, and courts say OK then it’s OK to murder anyone anytime.
I wanted to hear Luigi’s defense talk about how the CEO was knowingly responsible for pain and suffering of his mother (and more broadly)
SuspiciousCactus
John Q, a major motion picture starring Denzel Washington, about a man who takes a hospital hostage to get healthcare for his dying son. Movie came out like 20+ years ago, and nothing has changed still just as relevant today.
wabitgirl
Oh bull shit, things have changed plenty since then! Denial rates for insurance coverage have gone up exponentially, as has the cost of retaining insurance, as have the penalties that are assigned for not having insurance, while federal subsidies to help make insurance affordable have been stripped away, on top of the consistent degradation of care provided when insurance DOES deign to cover what you fucking paid for!
Don't say it hasn't changed when they've made it significantly worse.
NotSomoneElse68
IIRC, he's only pleaing guilty to stalking charges and not to the murder charges.
huey9k
Moral high ground?
Brian Johnson DESERVED to die because he was the figurehead of a company responsible for the death of THOUSANDS.
barstr7
It certainly would have been interesting to see the argument if they wanted the death penalty for a man who caused one death versus the self-defense killing of a man who caused thousands. I'm not sure any lawyer is actually that ballsy though.
thanatos777
What I really wanted was for them to plea self-defense, and then use the actions of United Healthcare as the basis for that, then request a ton of their internal documents during discovery.
It's a pipe dream, but as close as you can come to a happy one in the hellworld we live in.
NotSomoneElse68
The tricky part with self defense (or defense of others) is proving someone was in imminent physical danger that was thwarted by the killing. I'm not anything near a lawyer, this is just from watching YouTube lawyers.
wabitgirl
See, here's my question: How the fuck are they going to get an "unbiased" jury of peers? Literally anyone choses by standard juror selections processes is going to be a citizen subject to US healthcare practices. 99% chance of bias against the health care system (obvious is obvious). However, anyone NOT subject to the standard US health care system cannot be reasonably said to be a peer of the accused. So WTF is jury selection going to look like for a trial?
spiffylookingnerfherder
Unfortunately you will find lots of bootlickers, law and order types, 'enlightened centrists', and simps for billionaires in any jury pool.
wabitgirl
A jury of people who are sycophantic towards oligarchs and billionaires is also not unbiased, which is the other side of this issue. Unbiased typically signifies both uninvolved and unaffected by the trial, so as to have them pursuing judgment purely on a logical, legal basis. No one in our country is uninvolved with and unaffected by our predatory healthcare system, and solely selecting for people who don't fucking hate UHC by default is still a heavily biased selection.
MundySeme
Crime is a social construct. Billionaires do not follow our laws. Why would I think negatively of Luigi for not following theirs.
This is the basis of the social contract and foundation of human society itself.
Imademyselfsquirtle
Laws where created to benefit those in power. However some laws are guidelines of what the fuck dont do that, because apparently some people are so inept and stupid they need laws written to tell them no, like the Bible.
Kingdomonsterdeath
The bible is not a law book. It has never been a law book. It should never be treated like a law book. When it has been used as a law book in the past, thousands of people died horrible deaths. 100s of thousands, or even millions of horrible deaths.
AnythingMuchShorter
In pretty much any war, the aggressor would call it a crime when the people they attacked fight back and kill some of them (see Israel for another example)
BearieBlue
Much like how wage theft is one of the largest, most prevalent crimes committed in the US, yet it's rarely prosecuted and when it is, it's a slap on the wrist for offenders.
RockthunderJonny
I would upvote this every time.
meme2zombie
PoliticalWanderer
The trouble with society is that it can easily the violence in shooting someone in the street but it has entire systems built not to perceive or hold accountable the violence that Brian Thompson committed on large groups of people.
If that doesn't change, reform will be impossible. The only paths will become oligarchs like Thompson crushing the entire population, or people murdering the oppressors in the street. I'd prefer reform, but I'm not confident.
wabitgirl
Kill one man, that's murder. Kill 10, it's mass murder. Kill 10,000 and turn a profit? That's just the cost of doing business.
tryin2figureitout
Brian Thompson did not commit violence. That is not the definition of violence.
wabitgirl
Brian Thompson unequivocally committed systemic violence against vulnerable populations. Denial of PAID FOR care due to unethical rejection of insurance coverage for survival necessary procedures is systemic violence, which is violence, plain and simple.
Violence is not just punching someone else. That's physical violence. There are many types more than just physical, and you'd do well to learn that ASAP, given the current state of the world.
tryin2figureitout
He didn’t follow anyone’s laws. There’s no evidence the man he murdered, who was not a billionaire, broke any laws. Vigilantism is bad
meme2zombie
Swing and a miss, try reading it again.
wabitgirl
If the law is your entire barometer for right and wrong, you will make a lovely footsoldier for the fascists when they take over.
Legal is not equivalent to moral. Morally correct is not always legal. The holocaust, and detainment and execution of the Jews in WW II was legal. Sheltering jews, protecting them, or helping them escape the country was illegal. Blind devotion without critical thinking is bad, and aids authoritarians.
PoliticalWanderer
Health insurance is a scam. It remains a scam, it always was a scam. It can be less of a scam if you regulate private insurance within an inch of its life ala Germany, but we all know there is no taste for that in the United States. From the linked article: (emphasis added by me)
pgdave
Single-payer is still insurance, would you say that taxpayer-funded healthcare is a scam? No insurance would just mean that each person was essentially self-insured, and so would save up for (or borrow money for) any medical treatment they needed.
adamlstf9
Literally anything would be an improvement over the current leech system. Even no insurance would end up being better because insurance companies negotiate to hike the costs of all basic services so they can charge and reimburse for more.
pgdave
The problem with self-insuring is that it's easy to go years with little to no costs, then get into a car accident and need $80k worth of surgery and physical therapy. In theory (not in practice) insurance lets you smooth out that risk, so that you end up paying basically the same amount overall (generally less, actually, because of the time-cost of money) but the spikes are a lot smaller.
spookyu
It's the same concept as a rebate, which if I recall correctly operates off the phrase "slippage and breakage" where the system is designed to be unusable, confound people, and get them to give up, or screw them over with technicalities.
Rijacki
The insurer knows that appeals take time and cost the one making the appeal money to do so. If the care needed is immediate, the time of the appeal will delay the care until it's not needed either because the patient died or the window for the efficacy of the procedure has passed. The patient paying and getting reimbursed is also not allowed for many of the denied claims. The insurance "wins" (and makes their blood drenched profits) when the patient can't appeal due to circumstances.
ziralien
You shouldn't *have* to appeal and wait weeks and months. You pay for the service, and the service is denied.
PoliticalWanderer
Yep. Worse, for the company all the incentive is to cheat the insured. Every claim they turn down is free money. Hence why I was saying that health insurance is a scam, especially in the States.
Hell, after Luigi killed Brian Thompson, United Healthcare briefly denied fewer insurance claims... and got sued by its own shareholders for not being aggressive enough in denying claims and not making them enough money.
You can't let psychopaths like that run healthcare stuff. It cannot be allowed.
Rijacki
The profit factor in health insurance is draconian. It's like the cash register in the Simpsons' episode. "I can't hear you the money is too loud." (or something like that)
hogeyegrex
Theoretically, they should be able to make more money by paying out more claims. Because under the ACA, profits are capped at 20%. So, if they want more profits, theoretically, they should pay more claims. That they work the other way just proves that they’re violating what little regulation is imposed on them, and with impunity.
Mind you, the fact that one dollar out of five goes straight to the middleman is a travesty. And the fact that that was an improvement at the time is crazy.
wabitgirl
*taps sign*
When social services required for survival are used for profit, people will die for the sake of profit.
PoliticalWanderer
Ooh, meme time. Thanks for the inspiration.
wabitgirl
Ooh, a new meme to throw at capitalism apologists! Thank you!
Pieccentric
European health insurances work just fine. US health insurances are mostly a scam, because they're not regulated well enough. As a German, I have literally never had to worry about anything, I've been in the hospital well over 60 times now (cue I like to live dangerously meme), and I know several people who went through cancer treatments. We pay our monthly fee that scales with income and that's literally it. Any visit to any doctor and whatever they prescribe or however they treat you: covered.
Pieccentric
That being said, law is a social contract. It is supposed to benefit the whole society, in a way that makes it logical to follow it because antisocial behavior is punished by the system. If a system is only affecting you in a negative way, why be part of it? I'm frankly amazed that big corpo CEOs and billionaires aren't murdered on a daily basis. Our system over here is less shitty and I still have too much to lose. But if I was working 50 hours and still food insecure I'd luigi someone, too.
nichfra
What you're talking about isn't private insurance though. That doesn't scale with income for example.
Pieccentric
Our system is a bit complicated. It's not like we got one state-owned health insurer, instead we got lots of private and several non-private insurers. And that is far from perfect, but as mentioned before, the public insurance covers everything, too. It's not like you'd get worse treatment or meds either, private allows for some stuff like private rooms in hospitals, but it's not like private patients get treated first or something.
nichfra
There's some advanced treatments private usually covers long before public though. I.e. proton beam therapy for the longest time was only available to "self payers" and private insurance now it's finally available for everyone (in some cases). Because treatment has to be economical. And as for getting treated first, not for obviously immediately life threatening stuff but I needed a head MRI for familial brain cancer and it took 6 months of waiting on public insurance and 2 weeks on private.
FrankensteinUnleashed
When it was implemented, Health insurance worked like any other insurance. Insurance is a good idea, pooling people's money to help pay for the sickest among us, in the faith that once your turn to be sick comes around, you will be taken care of in the same manner as the others before you.
Insurance isn't a scam. Insurance FOR PROFIT is a scam. Its the FOR PROFIT that's the problem.
Source: My MBA and 10+ years working for a big-name Health Insurance Company
YoureWaifuAShit
hey maybe you're a ghoul
wabitgirl
Why?
hogeyegrex
Whilst technically correct, I can’t think of any good examples of nonprofit insurance companies. At least not in the US. If all insurance companies are for profit, then insurance is a scam.
walterPPK
Outside of the US there’s certainly some good examples. Australia uses that model for a lot of disability and veterans programs.
hogeyegrex
Good for them. We used to have a lot of nonprofit hospitals, but of course, those have all been bought up and turned into profit centers doling out $10 Tylenols.
There’s a fairly famous Oval Office tape of a representative from Kaiser trying to talk Nixon into supporting their venture. He was against it until the rep let on that it was basically a scam. Then he got behind it.
I suppose the government run stuff, tricare, Medicare, and the like might qualify, but they’re not really insurance.
hogeyegrex
Correction: it was a conversation between Erlichman and Nixon about the HMO act. The key bit:
President Nixon: “Say that I … I … I’d tell him I have doubts about it, but I think that it’s, uh, now let me ask you, now you give me your judgment. You know I’m not too keen on any of these damn medical programs.”
.....
Ehrlichman: “… private enterprise one.”
President Nixon: “Well, that appeals to me.”
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