I don’t know much about them, and I am not for meaningless murder, so I would not support their deaths. I believe that you have missed a few questions of my own in your response, however.
Do you believe there are circumstances where someone can deserve death? And if so, what are those circumstances?
Punishment for abuse of power should be proportional to the power abused, these people had influence, but not as much as the CEO. Murder, or more aptly “assassination” is not something that should be taken lightly.
Does no one deserve death in your view? Or do only those that kill violently deserve death?
How bad does a leader have to be considered violent in your eyes? Would they have to command an army to kill innocent lives? Or do you think they would have to wield a gun themselves?
I think you may have missed the point, there are obviously costs associated with managing money (e.g. reasonable employee salaries), but “profit” should not come into play. As profit in this scenario is directly related to premiums paid to the provider that were not used to provide healthcare — the service those premiums were paid for.
That is a flaw in all “for profit” healthcare providers; however, policies enacted by Brian Thompson in particular as the Chief Executive Officer of United Healthcare made it one of the worst offenders.
Ethics are a very subjective measure, and I am not some kind of god that can say exactly what moral consequences resulted from the death of Brian Thompson, but the case for a justified murder here is very good under almost any philosophy most ascribe to.
As for your accountant, it may be possible to ascribe some of the blame of some deaths to them, but more likely than not, they are just a person trying to make it through the day at work, following orders from higher up. That obviously does not completely excuse them from their duties to their fellow man, but from what we know or can guess about this hypothetical person, they were not the ones making the decision to make the system actively worse for a majority of the people that they served. Brian Thompson did make those decisions, and from my point of view, got what he deserved.
80% paid out means 20% stolen.
So was the desk worker… Do they have the ability to make executive decisions for united healthcare? I think not.
Check out page 21 of the source linked below, the original claim is a quite a bit off, but United Healthcare did implement an AI system that increased overall denial rates, especially in the category of post-acute care (the kind of stuff people need after a major procedure to safely recover).
Profit (or loss) is the difference between the total revenues of a business and the total costs of a business. And although this is a somewhat simplified view of the facts, the profit in this scenario is directly representative of the amount of money people paid into premiums that was pocketed by the healthcare corporation rather than being paid out in medical coverage.
It is impossible to be objective when it comes to ethical dilemmas (an inherently subjective matter), but let me leave you with a couple questions: How bad does a person’s actions have to be to deserve death? How many people do they have to let die for personal (or corporate) gains?
The blame for the numerous unnecessary deaths United Healthcare played a part in can obviously not be ascribed to one person, but Brian Thompson was at least complicit in all of those deaths. He was the one with a lot of the decision-making power in all of those individual situations, and chose to strengthen a system that causes so much suffering when we have plenty of examples of a better way to handle these problems.
No, obviously not before he was murdered. When did I say that? With the facts we have now, it seems to me like he deserved the fate that was brought to him: death.
Is self defense a necessary component of killing then? Or do you think it is justified to kill to save another? A family member for example?