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What's prosocial about profiting in death?
Health insurance is a fleeting necessity. It's been useful as structural opposition to American single-payer, but AGI approaches as does the panacea, and the industry will cease to exist by 2100. Healthcare as a whole has to put a price on human life, health insurance does too, it's the cold calculations of what's needed to stay solvent and I would only say remain attractive to investors where this latter is necessary to the former. Not when it's simple profiting, and that's what's happening here, profiting in death.
There is nothing prosocial about that behavior. Civilization does have a long relationship with profiting in death, but the avarice underlying that is iniquity's millstone we trudge ever against. Great men have been driven by their want for something to make the most lasting achievements, but it is grossly reductive to categorize it as greed. If that is a fair term, then it applies truly to precious few men who have ever lived. Better to know those traits are found commonly, and those great men were motivated by something ineffable and gestalt, rather than mundane greed.
So to suggest, in this not being prosocial, that civilization was not raised on the line of people being murdered randomly in the street, is to view it in a hypermodern and wrong lens. Thompson was not a random person, he was a modern nobleman who led an organization that profits in death and reaped finally a historically appropriate reward. That historic archetype did fear murder in the commons, so whoever among them today who do not fear being struck down, or who did not, they are or were living in that hypermodern lens, and that's not civilization, it's castration.
AGI approaches, the panacea approaches. Some here, I hope all, will live to see the extinction of health insurance, but regardless, by the end of the century it will be gone, as will the majority of occupations in healthcare, and civilization won't bat an eye. In 200 years it will be a morbid curiosity of 20th and 21st century life, and probably considered in studies as part of humanity hurdling the real problem of the lost jobs and purpose caused by AGI. But those are the things that matter, not "lost" profit opportunities, and not a nobleman dead in the street.
This guy worked for an insurance corporation that had like an 8-9% net margin. That’s not exploitative. That’s not greed on a grand scale. The US public consistently rejected single payer at the ballot box. They are frustrated with the current system, but cannot propose an alternative upon which most can agree.
And you ask, How magnanimous is Lockheed-Martin? I tell you yea, they profit one cent off the dollar when Hellfire smites an apostate's wedding.
I recognize the necessity of health insurance, I endorse it verbatim as part of the bulwark against single-payer. I understand they have to make hard decisions, because healthcare is triage, and when resource allocation literally is life-and-death, cold calculation is required. This makes it better, it does not make it good. While I'm at it I guess I also should clarify that I see no good in a man being murdered in the street. This may cause deaths downstream, I assume no one's taking that CEO role now without United providing private security, that cost, likely trivial as it is, may be pushed on the consumer, so a rise in rates or claims denied and both lead to reduced life outcomes and death. On the other hand if it causes them to approve claims they otherwise wouldn't, we might see life downstream of this, but I'm not saying let us do evil that good may result. It was murder, and his condemnation will be just. I only plea to history in what constitutes "prosocial" behavior: Thompson was a plebeian who made himself a patrician, and civilization continued all the same through those periods where noblemen who profited from commoners' deaths still feared earthly vengeance.
It doesn't matter if it's 8%, the misdeed is not meted off the margin.
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I think it's not exactly useful to gauge a company's level of "greed" by its profit margin, particularly these huge companies. They are not tight ships running as lean as possible: they inevitably swell with thousands of useless, well-paid employees. Not to mention well-paid executives. These firms love to tighten the screws on their clients in order to avoid cutting the fat.
And of course using this as your proxy will make out better-run companies as being "greedy", and poorly-run ones saints.
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