In 2010 WellPoint was found to be automatically targeting insurance policies of women with breast cancer for cancellation, using any pretext. Angela Braly was the CEO at the time, now at ExxonMobile. WellPoint was the second largest health insurer in the US at the time.
This required a lot of business analysis and software development - and people had to realize what this code was doing. I’m guessing bonuses were paid on the back of the “savings” this generated.
At the very least, these folks need to have their names permanently attached to this atrocity. These weren’t decisions made by “a corporation” - these people sat across a meeting room table and actually concluded that targeting breast cancer patients was an acceptable means to an end.
Lori A. Beer was the CIO at the time. Now at JP Morgan.
For good reason, modern law systems rarely issue punishments that last a lifetime. People can and do change, and something stupid (and illegal) you did 30 years ago shouldn't be held over your head today. These are rare cases for the absolutely worst crimes. For anything else, you receive a punishment, be it money or months/years in jail, and after that, you deserve a chance to live a life without ongoing punishment. Beyond knowing what you did, and remembering the punishment, which for most people is already a burden heavy enough.
I wouldn't ban them from management, just garnish their wages so they can only earn minimum wage (or minimum living wage). Also, no property ownership beyond a single home.
I have no idea, I'm just saying it's a weird comment to make on an article where both the engineer behind the fraud _and_ the management faced consequences of their actions.
Depends where you are, I guess. In a prison-first rehabilitation-last country like USA, yes. In EU, many countries will close your criminal record after some years (7 in Estonia) at which point nobody other than law enforcement itself can see that you have a record. Not to mention that even if the crime you did was fairly recent, no company has the ability to check your background without your permission, and even then it is not something that is being done in the vast majority of places.
In other words, once you've carried out your sentence, in 99% of the cases it's done and behind you, and you can go on living a normal life without anyone else needing to know.
But if you're restarting your life after serving a sentence, if you're poor it will be very hard. If you have wealth you probably can easily put your crime behind you.
This is what people always say, but it sure seems like that guy was able to get a job as School Superintendent in Iowa. His past didn't get in the way of actually getting the job. It was only when ICE showed up that people noticed.
What horrible crime did that guy commit "firearm charge" you mean being told to put a hunting gun in the car then instantly ticketed for "improper storage" by a racist ranger? The horror.... So glad we got that one /s
This is dangerous because of how easy it is to abuse. Look at Türkiye where İmamoğlu was arrested and had his university degree removed on trumped up charges as he's a potential threat to Erdoğan's chances of re-election.
In Türkiye, certain crimes disbar you from running for election (and you're required to have a university degree).
Being struck off by professional organisations is a thing, though.
On the one hand I don't want the bar to this discipline raised. On the other hand, I don't want people like us (metaphorically) building bridges that tip every two hundredth car into the river.
An 18 year old (HS senior) and a 15 year old (HS sophomore) can have sex together and thats a statutory rape charge that will follow you the rest of your life.
And say its 2 17 year olds, and you take nude pictures to send to your partner. Now, having sex is legal here, but a picture? Thats possessing 'child sexual assault imagery'. Nobody would think 17 year olds are 'children'. Even the law routinely charges them as adults.
And getting a felony at all follows you around, unless you can pay the danegeld to have it removed. Of course, staying clean isn't sufficient. Paying $10k or more is.
In the US it is perfectly normal to impose lifetime penalties for crimes - a felony record can prevent people from voting, housing, employment, and when all those penalties fuck up their life, they are sometimes still barred from receiving welfare. It is only four years since the law changed to allow student loans for people with drug convictions.
And it is absolutely reasonable that a crime committed in the course of your profession could prevent you ever working in that profession again.
Being forced to change the profession is not the same as being in jail forever or being unable employable forever.
> Beyond knowing what you did, and remembering the punishment, which for most people is already a burden heavy enough.
Like, seriously? These people do not feel bad, there is no heavy burden. They are proud of how they earned money, feel like any prosecution is grave injustice and would do it again.
Widely immoral people, whether in politics or business, dont feel sorry for who they are. They made those decisions because there was no moral dilema for them.
They are proud that they earned money, the how (positive or negative) is completely immaterial.
Others who want to earn money and are likewise ambivalent about the means will see a felony conviction for causing grievous public harm in the pursuit of giant piles of money as an endorsement and hire the "reformed" exec at the first opportunity.
Sorry, but in this case I think 'lifetime' is very much appropriate. It's not like they're being sent to the electric chair. They were systematically ripping people off on what matters most to a person: their health. There is a good chance people died as a result of this. And since hardly any of these crooks ever goes to jail (but instead they get to do it again somewhere else) having their name out in the open for ever is very much appropriate.
Personal accountability with consequences that make fraud unpalatable means setting a high bar on white collar crime.
If you are saying that twentysomething founders should not be held accountable for the mistakes of their "youth," then you might be inclined hold the investors personally accountable for funding them--similar to parents being liable for their teenagers' driving mishaps.
I am disinclined to believe that Javice and his ilk are very much corrected by the Department of Corrections or later life experiences.
It's a bit disingenuous to argue "they shouldn't get life without the possibility of parole" when in fact most of this economic white-collar crime goes completely unpunished, or at best gets a fine targeted at the company and never at the individual people who committed the crimes.
What is disingenuous is claiming that putting a crazy punishment on the paper will change anything when absolutely nobody gets caught.
If you tear apart whatever guarantees human rights exist on your places just so your can impose unreasonable punishment to nobody, then don't act surprised when somebody else uses it against real people you sympathize with. (And yeah, if you are from the US or some other place where lifelong punishment is common, you should be fighting to fix this, not to add support to it.)
On the other hand, you could be pushing for those people being punished at all, by reasonable crimes that your law probably already recognizes or that could be added without rotting your society. But yeah, maybe that's too much.
To the contrary. I do find it a disingenuous argument to say "most of this kind of crime goes unpunished, so the cases we do punish, we have to punish for life".
The solution is not harder punishments for those that are punished, but punishing more of them.
Isn't that exactly how the criminal justice system works? Because you know you're not going to catch all the criminals you want the punishment to serve as a deterrent?
Punishing more of them is easily said, when the crime is much harder to prove than shoplifting for example. And I'm skipping the fact that the shoplifter will be represented by an overworked public defender while the exec has a team of lawyers lined up that probably are payed by the company that got richer off illegal behavior
Petty theft nets up to a year in jail, which is far more extreme than - relatively speaking - than handing out lifetime sentences for the damage being discussed here.
If the chances of getting caught are small, and the chances of being convicted are even smaller, should the punishment be harsher to have the same deterrent?
You do understand how the petty theft criminal represented by a public defender is at a disadvantage to the white collar criminal with an army of lawyers paid by the company?
"We should just catch more of them" is like saying we should just solve our energy problem by making nuclear fusion work. Sure, everyone agrees with that but that's just wishful thinking
No, it doesn't work. The US has been actively trying this in many states, so we have data on the relationship between deterrence effect and the likelihood*harshness of punishments - it turns out likelihood really controls the strength of the effect of deterrence. If you have extremely harsh punishments you DO incentivize doing a lot of damage to get away with it, and also incentivize repeat or exacerbated offending. (See: "might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb")
Uh you don't have data on that for white collar crime. If you do, please share.
Petty theft is done for different reasons to white collar crime. I agree with you that the punishment is not a deterrence for small offences.
I think there's a lot of deterrence coming from the Enron case where people actually went to jail. That's just too rare because you quickly get into questions of intent. And to prove intent is really hard.
Your note about 'proving intent is really hard' is kind of the underlying reason - white collar criminals tend to believe they will never be caught/convicted. So making sentences more severe for those who are caught and convicted doesn't actually impact those future criminals, because their calculations say there's no risk of it being applied to them.
I think this have to ve public Information, giving the right to decide to the next employer. You may employ them, other people may not. I would at least ask some questions.
Sanctimonious nonsense. The are plenty of kinds of crimes for which "modern law systems" commonly, and rightly, impose 'lifetime' penalties or restrictions. Restraining orders are a simple example. And C-suite assholes who commit fraud are rightly, and not rarely, barred from ever leading another company.
That's true. We judge people to be guilty and then they get a punishment. But after the punishment they have payed back their guilt and are now not guilty anymore, that's kind of the deal.
> These are rare cases for the absolutely worst crimes.
If "targeting insurance policies of women with breast cancer for cancellation, using any pretext" is accurate - I'm curious how that compares to the absolutely worst crimes to you.
Na, just ban all of them and all their families from ever having health insurance again so they can suffer the same fate they doomed others too intentionally . Make an example and all that.
It's counter-productive to punish someone for something out of their control. One should not be punished for his parents', siblings' or childs' actions.
We already have long-established legal precedent for dealing with such issues and much more. It can actually get quite complicated - which is why we defer to the experts and move slowly on such subjects.
It really seems like it's only complicated because there are an awful lot of people who want to do as evil things as possible and not go to prison for it
Loopholes and lawfare are the tools of the corrupt
You'd think so, but no. Most of the complications come from handling edge cases where the innocent would get swept up, while avoiding exploitability. Making laws that actually do what we want is HARD.
Laws are like code: It only seems perfect until it meets the real world. And the complications only seem frivolous until it's your ass on the line.
A few million dollars would probably cover months in the ICU, so not exactly common. A few tens of thousands would be a more plausible ambulance ride to ER followed by emergency surgery and a few days in the hospital, which still isn’t very common. Carrying a pregnancy to term and delivery can be similarly expensive though.
Are you implying random programmers, administrators, and managers at insurance companies have generational wealth? Then why are they spending their time doing those jobs?
Ah, but the family of the canceled policyholders should suffer for losing their mother/sister/daughters?
Make decisions to harm others, don't be surprised if it blows back in kind. Golden Rule is there for a reason. Treat others as you would have them do unto you.
Those families are/were more than happy with the standard of life being raked in by their breadwinner's willingness to make the unilateral decision to indulge in institionally driven statistical murder. So yeah, as one who walked away from Omelas in that sense, I think I'm pretty qualified to say yes on this front. After a certain point, a wife or husband not asking "so what is it you do exactly?", does rather reflect poorly on them.
Remember, every person working for an insurer has unparalleled access to data on what the effects of their decision is going to be. You can't claim ignorance once you've seen the glorified spreadsheets that run these companies.
If you benefit from receiving stolen property, does the law force you to return it? One way of interpreting your scare quotes is that the executives turned a health insurer into a law violating company.
Obviously there are burdens of proof and this is most likely not possible to prosecute (it sounds like the health insurer has already shrunk and based on the date of the anecdote above, I’m guessing the relevant statutes of limitations have expired.
> If you benefit from receiving stolen property, does the law force you to return it?
The general answer to that is: it depends on a lot of factors, but sometimes yes and sometimes no. The specific answer varies between jurisdictions, I think even between different US states and certainly between countries. It's often relevant whether you knew or should reasonably have known at the time of purchase that the property was stolen.
well it depends, if you buy a car stolen from me, then i should get the car back, no matter what. if you didn't know that it was stolen, you have a claim against the person who sold you the car, but not me. but if that person can't return the money, then you are out of luck, just as when you are falling for a scam. not your fault, but your damage nontheless.
As I said, not every jurisdiction follows the rule you describe for all types of property and all types of illicit transfers. After all, innocent purchaser victims are just as non-culpable as innocent theft victims, and society doesn't always decide to prioritize the original owner's ease of having the maximum number of people to sue for recovery over the reliability of that jurisdiction as a place to innocently buy things without fear of unexpectedly being sued by a third party.
To be clear, I'm not expressing any kind of personal opinion here - I'm saying how the world actually works. Sometimes that matches what you are advocating, but sometimes not.
Of course, in both the mindset you advocate and in the other mindset, you have a claim against the person who stole your car, for sure, as well as anyone else who knowingly trafficked in the stolen goods.
Sometimes the relevant rules are different for real property vs personal property, and sometimes it matters whether the property's ownership has been registered in some register which the purchaser can verify before purchase. I don't think US car title records are generally publicly verifiable.
It's also usually relevant how the property was stolen - theft in the sense of actual larceny often has harsher consequences for the eventual bona fide purchaser (and more protections for the original owner) than if the property was stolen by fraudulently inducing the original owner to sign a deed of sale.
I'm avoiding giving specifics here because, again, the details vary by jurisdiction and by the particular facts and circumstances.
>It's counter-productive to punish someone for something out of their control.
For people in specific classes that benefit from networks and status: it is not.
It should be default. If you abuse your power and position, it should have cascading effects not just for you but people that benefited from it.
This idea that only one person at fault when there are 10's of people that hide behind the crime is just non-sense and has done immeasurable damage to society.
And I stress again: it should be income bracket/class based. The higher you are, the harder the fall.
Collective punishment also has done immeasurable damage to society and I'm glad that most reasonable systems of law do not consider it legal.
Go after the guilty party and revert whatever benefits they got. If money went to dependents, that money is to be seized. But those who received the money are not at fault per se. Unless they helped in the crime, then they are obviously guilty too, but not of receiving fund but for helping committing a crime.
Same thing happened to patients with AIDS, in the 1990s. It was disgusting. May still be going on.
People don't really care about drug addicts and gay folks, though (there's a fairly significant number of folks that think they "deserve" it), so it didn't get as much attention.
In the 2010s, we had a similar situation but it wasn’t illegal.
I used to work for a large drug distributor both pre and during the opioid epidemic.
At the time (pre-SUPPORT Act), distributors weren’t required to notify the DEA about anomalous ordering so we didn’t provide data to law enforcement unless they sent a subpoena.
To increase profits, we identified our best customers of opioids and updated our inventory tracking system to send rebates and early warning notifications to providers so they’d buy more earlier.
Each provider has a sales rep (territory) mapped so we could figure out bonuses easily.
We the software engineering team were paid well for it, but not as much as the sales reps who got a percentage of the buy.
Judging actions taken at the time with the benefit of what we know now, is not a fair way to assess.
Sure we could say it was obvious they were pushing lots of pills. But this was a legal product.
Someone working for an NFL team trying to sell tickets , or for Starbucks trying to promote frappucinos, … these actions seem fine. We know the risks, but we acknowledge and move on.
But if it turns out that new data, 3 years from now, shows some huge uptick in head injuries among college players. Or high school. And we can attribute this to the influence of pro leagues, well…. The actions of the people participating in the enterprise now get considered in a different light.
Or if we gain new (as if we need it) data on the impact of sugar and caffeine on young people, then people who work for Starbucks or McDonald’s or basically any prepared food business, … we will judge them differently ?
People who decided to put lead additives in motor fuel had no idea that they would be causing brain disorders , generations down the road.
What do we do then? Refuse to take any action for fear of some possible future negative impact ?
It’s not appropriate to judge this way. We learn as we go, and we can say “if we knew then, what we know now…” but it’s not clear in the moment. A difficult line to draw.
> People who decided to put lead additives in motor fuel had no idea that they would be causing brain disorders , generations down the road.
In that case, they totally did. The people who pushed leaded gasoline knew it was dangerous, but they did it anyway! By the 1920s–30s, it was already well known in medicine that lead caused neurological damage, especially in children. Workers at DuPont and Standard Oil plants developed hallucinations, seizures, and many died. What's abhorrent was where industry executives and some government allies downplayed or suppressed evidence of the harms.
I was hoping to get some insight/context into how they actually feel about it, rather than guessing. You can certainly come to peace with a past decision, change your opinion later etc etc.
I think it's still controversial whether manufacturers of substances are morally culpable for the result of people wrongly using them. And while you could hold the marketing or executive team accountable for trying to get people addicted to heroin, I'm not sure the same applies to programmers of an inventory tracking system?
Controversial in general, maybe. In the case of opioids and the pharm industry, absolutely not. It's been well documented at this point that pharm companies were well aware of the abuse, and not only did nothing to stop it, but went out of their way to encourage it because sales were going through the roof.
In the case of Purdue and oxycontin, the culpability has in fact been established in court as well.
As for the coders, I find it hard to believe that they were so ignorant, naïve, or unintelligent that they had absolutely no idea what was going on. I just don't buy it.
Regardless whether the rest of society finds the programmers responsible, the integrity of that society depends upon programmers in such situations holding themselves accountable. Apparatchik or moral agent? That choice remains ours.
Patient took medication and were responsible for their health.
Doctors wrote the scripts and have the ultimate responsibility to the patients.
Pharmacies dispensed the medications as instructed by the scripts.
Big Pharma (Sackler) makes and markets the drugs.
Distribution is only responsible for making sure drugs arrive efficiently to their location. I would work for a drug distributor again if the pay were better.
Americans are always looking for someone else to blame for their choices.
Americans are always looking for someone else to blame for their choices.
A bit of an ironic statement, given that this post is you blaming everyone except yourself for the role you played in deepening the opioid crisis to increase profits.
I'm not American; I also wasn't blaming you for anything - I took care to avoid that!
I appreciate the reply none the less.
You mentioned targeted rebates, which feel a lot more "active". My personal ethical barrier seems to be where its a direct interaction with the problem domain. e.g. I'll work on a tool for email marketing, which incidentally gets used by gambling orgs, but I wouldn't work directly on say, Roulette software.
I worked at a health care tech company in Silicon Valley that actively defrauded medicare. When the medicare inspectors came the owner's daughters had a bunch of their friends from college (who didn't work there) sit at computers and pretend to be working, then they told the inspectors all these random people were registered nurses and full-time employees who were helping patients (and thus being billed for). It was a total sham.
I reported it and quit but they managed to stay in business and keep getting government contracts.
It's so funny af that when people from the hood are doing it they get locked up or worse, and when business people do it they might as well be the president.
I guess there are some differences though. When a new pusher shows up in your territory you sue him, not going for a drive by.
This is extremely common throughout the world for businesses that sell alcohol or variations on gambling - and while I don't necessarily think the advertising should be _illegal_ (in those cases with non-controlled substances at least), I've always been shaken that the many people involved in it don't seem to see how it could be immoral.
If you think about it enough, most industries are doing terrible things. Work for an auto company? Thanks for the CO2 emissions accelerating climate change. Work for a consumer manufacturer? Thanks for the plastic waste choking oceans and landfills. Defense contractors? Thanks for enabling wars and killing innocents. Banks? Thanks for enslaving folks to debt and perpetuating economic inequality. Tech giants? Thanks for surveilling billions and eroding privacy on a massive scale. Social media platforms? Thanks for amplifying misinformation and fueling mental health crises. Fast fashion? Thanks for exploiting sweatshop labor and polluting waterways with toxic dyes. Pharma companies? Thanks for price-gouging drugs and prioritizing profits over access. Oil and gas? Thanks for fracking communities into environmental ruin and lobbying against renewables.
Almost everyone is contributing to terrible activities. Just different degrees of bad.
What is your point, besides potentially making yourself feel better about your industry? Those "different degrees" are what it's all about. They're the whole point.
Yes, voluntarily working in an industry where that "degree" is undeniably magnitudes higher than average just for personal gain, does make you quite the awful human. And "helping maximize the number of pills pushed to confirmed opioid addicts" is indeed a large number of standard deviations of "terrible" removed from the work the average person does.
Yup, working on recommender sysrems at places like Meta is
also quite high up there. Luckily the number of people who do this kind of work is minuscule when taken as part of the global population. Even more luckily, thousands of people on HN alone will forego such jobs even if it means earning less. I've done so myself.
The question was how GP felt about their particular unethical act, and it's consequences which likely includes multiple deaths. Since you are not GP, it seems unlikely that you can answer this question.
I fail to see the relevance of bringing up a different, and also unethical example, but I'll answer anyway. If GP said that they used to spend their time optimising software to be as addictive as possible in order to drive people into gambling addiction, destroying their lives and taking all their money while doing it, I would ask the same question.
It's a very smooth gradient from optimizing a sales funnel to writing gambling software. I don't know where the line is, but in both cases you're exploiting human psychology to make more money.
And its also why some of the anarchist folks I hang out with say there's no ethical consumption under capitalism. And definitely in areas, they're completely correct.
I tend to agree too. It’s incredibly hard to do much in the US without bumping into some ugly part of capitalism because the ugly parts constitute the majority.
It is not much different. I would not worked for gambling company either. In fact, gambling companies have to pay more (and do, there are open positions) because their pool of potential employees is smaller.
The exact same question can be asked to developers who help target gamblers with attempts to push them deeper into addiction.
It's probably slightly worse because opioids actually kill people whereas gambling just financially ruins them (which can lead to suicide, but still I know which I would pick).
But it's only a slight difference. I don't think people who work at predatory apps/gambling systems should be able to sleep at night either. Not all gambling though; I don't have any objection to occasional sports betting for example.
But if you work for one of those pay-to-win apps and find some customers are spending thousands of dollars on it (whales), you know you're being immoral.
> Not all gambling though; I don't have any objection to occasional sports betting for example.
The “occasional” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I associate sports betting with the much more dangerous side of gambling than any kind of P2W system.
How is it different from smuggling fentanyl or taking hostages for ransom?
There will always be someone willing to do the work if the pay is good enough.
The former almost certainly causes much less societal damage than working for a pharma company that strives to get the whole population addicted to opioids, due to the scale constraints that come with running an underground business vs. an "above board" one.
Why do you think that gambling companies pay above the industry average for the required skillset?
Because luckily there are many other people with me who won't work for them, so they have a smaller pool of candidates and need to pay more.
Whistleblower protections need to be steel-solid. Then maybe just 1 person with a spine might be enough to get the story to the press and/or prosecutors.
> This required a lot of business analysis and software development - and people had to realize what this code was doing
Too many people are trained to not rock the boat and not ask questions. I'm always "that guy" in pretty much every meeting I'm in. Some people like me, but many don't. It's tough. On the occasions that all my questions are already answered or I have nothing more to say it's obvious how relieved people are. It would be so easy to just be a yes man and please people all the time, but I just can't. It's easy to see how selecting for people who aren't like me would lead to an organisation that is essentially psychopathic.
Seems like a trend because you happen to focus on the gender being “interesting” - in reality we’ve always had fraud in tech and men have certainly led a ton of it.
I guess my point is: why is gender at all relevant here?
