>>520843163 (OP)
I don't provide any moral endorsement of killing the CEO of a multinational corporation as a means to solve any specific perceived "problem" with the way they do business.
At the same time, nothing about it surprises me.
If memory serves, over the period in which Brian Thompson had served as CEO, United Healthcare's company-wide claims rejection rate went up something like 2.5 times.
That's downright amazing, isn't it? That that many fewer of United's policyholders were getting sick and needing treatment under Thompson's tenure. That guy should get a raise.
Sorry, but I don't think so. Hospitals and doctors had deemed the procedures and treatments medically necessary, but United wanted to pinch pennies at the expense of people who had been dutifully paying them premiums every month for decades on end.
It's part of the morally, and apparently physically hazardous route of maximizing profit at any cost when the stakes are life and death.
United cut costs, and plenty of people's parents, spouses, friends, and probably children died as a result.
If a company made a bureaucratically-driven business decision that left one of my loved ones to die helplessly, there's a good chance I'd shoot someone involved too.
That said, I don't know if or even think that the CEO of the company was the appropriate choice, because at the end of the day, he is very much an employee under the purview of the board of directors.
The foremost societal problem with board-run, publicly-traded companies is diffuse accountability.
There are between 25 and 50 people making the decision that United did to ramp up coverage rejections to make more money.
Indeed, you will find a greater frequency of this kind of committee decision-making that purposefully creates diffuse accountability in industries whose participants more frequently and closely court moral hazard.
United's board voted to take this path, and the CEO who was directed by the board to oversee it, ended up as the fall guy.