Coombs I look forward to the day we can accord similar gravity to deaths inflicted by policy and procedure.
I just had a look at the stats in order to write this post, obviously take these back of the envelope estimates with a grain of salt, but I doubt they are too dramatic.
UnitedHealthcare serves around 50 million customers, and since this murder occurred it has become notorious for having a claim denial rate double the industry average. The company is currently in the news for delaying or denying claims to stroke and fall victims, and for being sued for using AI known to be faulty to classify claims.
Let's hypothesise that every year, 10,000 customers of UnitedHealthcare are denied a claim that would otherwise pay for some standard medical treatment that would prolong their life by at least 1 year.
I'd say it's a fairly conservative figure, not unreasonable:
- the death rate is about 0.75% which would mean around 375,000 UnitedHealthcare customers dying per annum—giving a conservative baseline estimated number of moribund UnitedHealthcare customers at any time
- hypotheses:
- around one in three of these moribund customers makes a health insurance claim (125,000 claims)
- around one in three of those claims is denied, in line with the reported claim denial rate of 32% (~40,000 claims)
- around one in four of those denied claims would involve a potentially life-extending treatment … (~10,000 claims denied that would've extended life)
Off the top, that would be a minimum 10,000 years of human life foreshortened by UnitedHealthcare claim denial each year. Quite possibly more of course. I put it to you that I'm being quite modest here, and a fairer estimate would actually be higher.
If instead UnitedHealthcare performed at industry average levels on claim denial, and only denied 15% instead of 30% of its claims, its customer base would receive a hypothetical minimum 5,000 years of life extension.
Every year, mind you. So that's a conservative estimate of 5,000 extra years of life every year that could be lived if UnitedHealthcare was only as shit as the average health insurance provider, instead of a lot shitter. That's a hell of a lot more years than Brian Thompson had left in him.
Murder's no good, but a vast corporation that does nothing to moderate its profiteering at the expense of life and happiness is no good either.
I accept you can follow this kind of "systemic" argument into the weeds of cause and effect quite quickly, and run aground on questions of whether the kind of methodology I'm using to score the impacts of UnitedHealthcare's business practices is fair. In fact, that's just the kind of analysis insurers pay actuaries to do. However, on the face of it, CEO assassin Luigi Mangione seems to have picked out a target who really deserved it. I think it's very, very likely Brian Thompson personally signed off on decisions which led to a gratuitous, stochastic kind of human carnage.
In the absence of a workable political system and mass political power capable of bringing companies like UnitedHealthcare to heel, I'd say let the murders continue until CEO behaviour improves.
