They’ve made $ 359 Billion dollars profit in 2023 alone, increasing their revenue threefold since 2010. 80% of their revenue is from insurance premiums so clearly they’re over-charging and/or not covering as many claims as they should on a HUGE scale. This is pure exploitation and abuse.

When you exploit your customers like that in health insurance, it not only ruins lives, but also kills people. They can make all the mental gymnastics as they want, but the actions they’ve taken to increase their profits are literally killing people.

With 53 million customers, the number of people whose lives were ruined or lost by this blatant scam is in the millions. It was only a matter of time they’d end up pissing off a vengeful enough person.

Police are still at work on establishing a motive.

The funniest part of this is the “battle lines” being drawn on differing perspectives.

Usually it’s a culture war thing. Liberals say X, conservatives say Y. Vice versa also happens. Big sweeping statements are made over relatively minor events.

This time the best indicator of what someone thinks of this is how establishment they are. NPR and Fox News are both reporting this as a tragedy. Meanwhile basically every single culture war influencer under the sun is just like “yeah talk shit get hit LMAO”.

In real life, I have friends who aren’t celebrating this. Again the demarcation isn’t political, but philosophical. My friends who are inclined to follow the rules no matter what disapprove, and everyone else finds it sort of morbidly funny. Even then the disapproval is sort of a milequost “even if he had it coming, extrajudicial killing isn’t okay”.

Note that Kaiser, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Caresource are nonprofit. Also, integrated care organizations like Kaiser usually have lower denial rates in large part because the actual treating provider/doctor is an employee of the insurer, so there’s not going to be that tug of war between a fee for service provider wanting to make money on a treatment versus an insurance provider trying to deny coverage on that treatment.

Personally, I think integrated care is better, and this is one of the reasons, but I also think this particular statistic isn’t an apples to apples comparison between insurers.

If I were running Medica, I would retire and bribe my way into witness protection.

Or maybe I would Scrooge / Grinch Christmas morning my ass as hard as possible.

There’s a lot more people hurting out there. We need to do a lot better. Specifically, billionares and private oligopoly CEOs need to do a lot better. Past generations understood that. This guy paid with his life for not understanding it.

I hate victim blaming, but I can’t honestly call this asshole the victim in all this. The victims were a bunch of kids and parents and siblings whose names we will never hear in the news.