UnitedHealth, employer of slain exec Brian Thompson, found to have overcharged cancer patients for drugs by over 1,000%
UnitedHealth, employer of slain exec Brian Thompson, found to have overcharged cancer patients for drugs by over 1,000%
The report is the latest indictment of America’s broken healthcare system.
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Headline is deflecting blame.
Slain healthcare CEO found to have been overcharging cancer patients by 1000%
I take more as Brian is dead but UHC isn’t. They’re still responsible for this shit despite his death.
Blaming Thompson for these prices is shifting the blame. Thompson was the CEO; he wasn't writing these company policies himself. He approved of these policies, but CEOs aren't hands-on enough to have this kind of impact on prices.
There are plenty of other ghouls at UHC who are actually more directly to blame for this. And, unlike Thompson, they can still be punished for it.
In the upper-class ideology of meritocracy, the CEO gets paid the really big bucks because he takes the risks, and he's ultimately responsible for the performance of the company. The buck stops at the C-level. Seems to me that if the benefits flow to the top, so should the costs.
That doesn't preclude punishing all of the ghouls, of course.
I don't disagree, I'm just saying that blaming solely Thompson would otherwise excuse the others who are arguably more responsible for engineering this hellscape. The sort of responsibility you describe is figurative, at best. You could say he took one for the team, but I think the whole team needs to go, all the way down to the waterboy. Otherwise you just replace one shitty coach with another and have the same shit team making the same shit plays.
I disagree. The highest leader is responsible for what people under them do. He knew what was happening, he could have taken action to stop it, and he did the opposite. This was a conspiracy to commit murder on a massive scale, and he was the most powerful conspirator.
I agree that we should also punish the others.
I feel like by that argument the Chairperson of the Board holds the most blame.
I mean, the real issue is the government allowing for-profit Healthcare to run rampant.
Everyone agrees that the government should take steps to prevent the badness, but the wording you use suggests that the companies aren't responsible for their own actions, and that's just not true. Every person, every company, they have a moral obligation not to be mass murderers, regardless of what the law allows for.
You're not wrong, but also history has shown companies will largely do whatever they're legally allowed to do (and usually many things that are illegal). Heck tons of companies still use child labor, they just look for places where it's legal.
My point was that you can't expect companies to act better, society needs to force them to. Moral obligations will typically only win out when they're written into laws or contracts.