> Refusing to pay for medical care is hardly murder. It’s a standard monetary dispute, and we have a due process for these.
> Maybe the courts are too inefficient to handle these disputes, but that’s an argument for reforming the courts, not for shooting executives.
You do realize that these companies lobby to make sure that it stays inefficient, right?
In the cases where they don't use the court system, they use arbitration, which is usually tilted in the favor of insurance companies.
If you want a fair shake at getting the benefits you paid for, you have to go through the courts. Given the nature of the subject of the lawsuit, there's a real chance that you'll be dead or bankrupt before you get your day in court. That's not a system that works. And when there are systems that don't work, there are on occasion people who will go outside the system to make their own. There is no scenario in which vigilantism is completely eliminated when you have people making massive sums of money off of refusing to do business in good faith.
More people need to read the cautionary tale of Ken Rex McElroy and the town of Skidmore, MO.
> If you want a fair shake at getting the benefits you paid for, you have to go through the courts.
Maybe I’m in the minority, but my health insurance makes it very clear what the benefits I paid for are. There’s guidance after guidance and tool after tool to help minimize any surprise costs.
Good for you, but there's an entire branch of the law profession dedicated to cases where that's not true and insurance companies have to be held to the letter of the contracts that they came up with.
> Maybe I’m in the minority, but my health insurance makes it very clear what the benefits I paid for are. There’s guidance after guidance and tool after tool to help minimize any surprise costs.
...and how has it gone when you tried to use them? Just as a personal anecdote: I once tried to get UHC to partially reimburse me for an out-of-network mental health expense. My policy explicitly covered such reimbursement (at a lower rate, of course). I tried for months to get the claim reimbursed. My employer at the time retained the services of a "healthcare concierge", and one of the main things they did was fight insurance companies on your behalf. That concierge service tried for six months to get a single claim reimbursed.
We all gave up.
It was such a small dollar amount; UHC likely spent more time and effort denying the claim than it would have cost to reimburse. It boggles my mind, to this day.
Just because your health insurance "makes it very clear what the benefits I paid for are" has no relation to whether or not they will actually pay those benefits out to you. If you haven't really experience this yet in America, I can only conclude that you are either rather healthy (and haven't used the benefits much), very lucky, or possibly both.
> Maybe the courts are too inefficient to handle these disputes, but that’s an argument for reforming the courts, not for shooting executives.
You do realize that these companies lobby to make sure that it stays inefficient, right?
In the cases where they don't use the court system, they use arbitration, which is usually tilted in the favor of insurance companies.
If you want a fair shake at getting the benefits you paid for, you have to go through the courts. Given the nature of the subject of the lawsuit, there's a real chance that you'll be dead or bankrupt before you get your day in court. That's not a system that works. And when there are systems that don't work, there are on occasion people who will go outside the system to make their own. There is no scenario in which vigilantism is completely eliminated when you have people making massive sums of money off of refusing to do business in good faith.
More people need to read the cautionary tale of Ken Rex McElroy and the town of Skidmore, MO.