On Corporate CEOs

December 5, 2024 by Karl Denninger

United Health's CEO was assassinated in NYC by a man who, it appears (from the video footage of him doing it) was cool as a cucumber and clearly had made the decision to kill him and damn the consequences, whatever they might be. Of course a person who does something like this in such a fashion has to expect they're very likely to get caught and thus deemed it worth it -- whether that decision was the product of insanity or coldly calculated is of course at this point unknown.

UNH is an extremely large corporation, having its fingers in all manner of health-related insurance and operational aspects. They are one of the largest firms involved in what I have long-considered the largest racketeering enterprise in the United States by far, comprising fully one dollar in five spent -- that is, health care generally, and have millions of consumers enrolled in their "plans" along with over 6,700 hospitals. They claim to be the largest single health carrier in the US -- I don't know if that's true or not, but they certainly are extremely large and apparently are considered the "biggest by revenue", so there you have it.

Of course it would not be unfair to note that since Obamacare came into existence their stock has risen by more than 20 times, and thus its quite clear that contrary to the various claims by many (including Obama himself) that the federal "redesign" of health care "would be of benefit to everyone" that was a blatant and outrageous lie; multiplying the value of a public company by 20 is not some small amount and points to exactly what I've been talking about since before it started -- that the system was on the verge of collapse (I saw it personally as a CEO and more than once had to intervene in a screwing it was serving up on my employees when I ran MCSNet) and rather than fix it government, the medical, pharmaceutical and insurance industries all conspired to fuck everyone in the ass rather than stop doing what they had been for decades on an exponential basis.

We have no information at this point who was pissed off enough to do this and whether its related to the corporation or it was personal, of course. Its entirely possible this was related to something entirely personal.

However, this much is quite-clear: At some point if you keep screwing people in the ass they will have had enough of it and this might well be the result, especially when government and private actors get together to screw people in size and you prove through more than a decade of time that there is no voting out of it because there have now been both Democrat and Republican Administrations that have refused to prosecute anyone for rampant price-fixing and various forms of screwing up and down the line -- in fact the financial screwing and crappiness of coverage has gotten much worse.

Proof of the screwing is trivially found in every public health insurer's stock price. Show me the one that hasn't shot the moon.

You can't.

But you can't expect that you can screw people without consequence forever, particularly when the government refuses to enforce 100+ year old laws on a serial basis irrespective of which political party is in power, both at a State and Federal level.

Of course you won't hear that perspective in the mainstream media, will you?