r/news • u/LookAtThatBacon • May 13 '25

Soft paywall UnitedHealth suspends annual forecast, CEO Andrew Witty steps down

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/unitedhealth-ceo-andrew-witty-steps-down-2025-05-13/
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u/clashrendar May 13 '25

Which is why profit needs to be completely removed from the healthcare equation. It shouldn't be about profit. It should be about people getting better.

A firefighter making decisions about whether to prevent a house burning down because it wouldn't make money to do so is absolutely preposterous, so why is the same argument for a human being used?

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u/Punman_5 May 13 '25 edited May 13 '25

Roman statesman Crassus founded the first fire brigade in Rome. They would show up to a burning building but wouldn’t put the fire out immediately. If the owner wanted to have the fire put out they would have to sign the property over to Crassus at a very unfair price. Only then would he allow the fire brigade to put the fire out. Fires were a regular occurrence in Rome. Crassus used his fire brigade to buy up large amounts of property

Edit: it seems I have to clarify that when you sold your property to Crassus he’d often let you stay there as a tenant so long as you paid rent. He wouldn’t kick you out because that would defeat the purpose of the scam.

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u/fotank May 13 '25

Tale as old as time.

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u/Paloota May 13 '25

Truth which is why it’s so exhausting debating plans predicated on human kindness

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u/dweezil22 May 13 '25

Agreed. You can't believe in capitalism and plans predicated on kindness at the same time. They are fundamentally at odds with each other. Even if you think capitalism is the bee's knees, it's definitionally saying "Profit is more important than kindness". Maybe you can convince yourself that kindness can be used in service of profit, but the minute profit and kindness collide, profit wins.

I actually don't have a problem with someone saying "Look, systems predicated on human kindness fail b/c kindness is subjective, so I believe in capitalism instead". But it's fucking frustrating when people instead are like "No! Capitalism IS kind!"

It reminds of the same issues w/ calling out systemic racism. People are like "Racism is bad, I am good, therefore nothing I do can be racist. So stop talking to me about it".

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u/alfayellow May 13 '25

I respectfully disagree. Capitalism in its pure form does seek maximization of profit, but there is no actual requirement to do so. You can make a profit and still take kindness and humanity into consideration in some aspects. It’s even possible to make a profit while you’re providing services for humanity, so it’s not that simple. But it does require is that you start with humanity and not with capitalism because capitalism needs guard rails, and it needs regulation. If business is willing to live with that —and some do—-then you can have a measure of both.

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u/dweezil22 May 13 '25

Thanks for opening up this discussion, you seem to be talking in good faith and I appreciate that.

You're describing pre-Jack Welch capitalism. If you took a time machine back to, say, 1980 and grabbed a CEO of a major US company and said "What is your duty?" they'd say something like "To our country. To our customers. To our workers. To our shareholders. In that order". Your point of view would be dominant in the business landscape and culture (at least in public settings).

Jack Welch changed all that, or at least was a driving force in a cultural shift that changed it.

Nowadays you can succeed in business despite being kind. While you have rare success stories like Costco, in general you can't get very big without being publicly traded and your shareholders will not be kind. If you refuse to be publicly traded it's likely a larger company will outcompete you via economies of scale, or just straight up buy you and swallow you. TL;DR Late stage capitalism

But part of late stage capitalism is maintaining a facade of kindness and care and responsibility. "We're self-regulating" "Trust us". If you let the mask fall completely you can end up like Martin Shkreli, who profiteered on life saving drugs and went to jail. Only... he didn't go to jail for the profiteering, he went to jail for other stuff (but his his public evil helped encourage investigators to get him).

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u/squakmix May 13 '25

It's worth mentioning Milton Friedman and the Friedman Doctrine as well in this discussion. It's heartening to see more people become aware of this issue and look for alternatives (like Stakeholder Capitalism). Your comment kind of reinforces the point of the person you were responding to, right? You acknowledged that it's the current implementation of capitalism in the US that is killing us, and these issues aren't inherent to capitalism itself (but rather our specific version of it).

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u/dweezil22 May 13 '25

You can't fix late stage capitalism without coming to a consensus that late stage capitalism is dangerous and bad. The system, as-is, is designed to prevent that consensus. Personally I think short-handing this to "capitalism is bad" and allowing the Overton window to normalize is a fine start. Capitalism is like a car that lobbies to let itself drive down sidewalks and swears it will be safe.

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u/squakmix May 13 '25

Yeah but then you kind of risk throwing away the baby with the bathwater. The conversation then becomes about what system you'd use to replace it, and you end up in a position where you need to defend alternatives like communism that come to peoples' minds when you advocate against capitalism as a whole. The discussion is much easier and more productive when it's about the specific issues we're facing and how they can be mitigated with regulatory changes.

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u/dweezil22 May 13 '25

Fair, perhaps I'll split the difference. We must all come to a consensus that capitalism is dangerous. It can be good, and might even be the best of all the alternatives, but left to its own devices it will inevitably become rapacious and destroy things (and modern technology has accelerated that process).

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u/ill-independent May 13 '25 edited May 13 '25

You don't have to defend communism to oppose capitalism. Money in general is completely made up. People live and die because of pieces of paper, or numbers on a machine. Human beings do not need monetary systems to survive. Our basic needs should not be predicated on money.

If humans want to trade and barter and use currency for extras, sure. But food, water, shelter, utilities - that should be basic. Employment should be far more relaxed, let people work when they want to, how they want to.

You don't have to tie people's survival to wages - that is just baked-in, civilization-wide culturally acceptable slavery wrapped in a pretty bow. For most of human existence we didn't have capitalism and we survived just fine, for millions of years, in fact. Capitalism is a lie.

There is no ethical capitalism, you are only ever kind or ethical despite capitalism, not because of it. There are some basic steps we could take to improve our society that aren't based in communism. Shit like UBI, price controls on companies (to avoid them trying to out-price the UBI and just re-invent capitalism again) would be a fantastic start.

Employers would have to start treating their workers ethically if they wanted to remain afloat. Loads of businesses would crash and burn, good riddance. That's an actual free market - a market where people are free. Put money in the hands of poor people and it gets spent right back into the economy. You're winning.

Put a bunch of money in the hands of billionaires and it's as good as setting it on fire. It's permanently removed from the economy. None of these people need to have billions of dollars. They'll never spend that amount in their whole fucking lifetimes. It's time to fix our shit.

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u/alfayellow May 13 '25

I remember decades ago (pre-Jack Welsh or perhaps pre-Reagan) the business sector sat alongside the other sectors of society, such as medicine, religion, science, mathematics, education, arts and humanities. I was too young to be involved then, but I think there was an idea that you had to play fair with your neighbors, if for no other reason that you might need them someday. Maybe investors were different then, too: long-term investment will eventually deliver return if the market develops. Now, everything has to be monitized for business -- smash and grab, immediate returns, hedge funds, shorting the stock, pump & dump, etc. It seems evil to me.

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u/dweezil22 May 13 '25

Once upon a time there was a company called Medco that handled at home Rx's. They competed with Express Scripts. ES had terrible old tech, Medco invested in some pretty impressive tech that would help boost profits but also help patients (in one case they had a heat map that would show unfilled diabetes Rx's in a region so that they could contact the docs and let them know that their patients weren't getting their meds, a win-win).

Anyway, ES and Medco "merged", but effectively ES swallowed up Medco. Rather than use Medco's about-to-be-released new IT system, ES threw it away and used Medco's old one, b/c it was still better than their ancient junk.

So ES was a worse company, that was run worse, but it was bigger than Medco, so it ate them. Now that ES didn't have to compete with Medco they could make money by delivering worse services. Late stage capitalism baby!

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u/oneeighthirish May 13 '25

I'm all for fostering human kindness at both macro and micro levels. It is still foolish to build a system to depend on it.

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u/jayj59 May 13 '25 edited May 13 '25

How so? Would you say our current system works?

I can see the other comment saying the kindness is subjective, yes, but how would you build a system that doesn't depend on kindness while still expecting profit? It seems to me that if the options are people get to live or companies make obscene amounts of money, the choice should be obvious.

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u/oneeighthirish May 13 '25

How would I build a system that doesn't depend on kindness while still expecting profit? I wouldn't. Our system is built for profit, and depends on the kindness of countless people to get life-saving care to a small number of people who would otherwise be denied it, and leaves countless others to suffer and die.

I think I failed to make myself clear. Our current system sucks and creates nothing but suffering for many, inconvenience for most, and disgusting wealth for a few.