Good old BlackRock making the world a terrible place.
Seems that we have a very clear cause and effect pathway now, though, and blackrock has offered a solution.
Mario-san? HAAIII! Nani ga sugi? CEO no rieki yori mo anata!!
GUYS, this is fake news. Medium article is distorted view. Russian bots or other interested parties are manipulating your opinion about this sensitive topic. Do your own research stop believing every fart. 💨
Which part of it is fake?
What’s the Russian bot agenda here? Make Blackrock look bad?
Not OP, but I revisited the article after your question on their behalf. The biggest gripe I can find is the headline mentions they’re suing for United providing “Too Much Care” in quotes. It’s mentioned in quotes later in the article as well, which would make you think that is mentioned either in the lawsuit itself or in the original CBS article referenced by this article.
I’m too lazy to check the entire lawsuit, but checking the CBS article I didn’t see anything at all that mentioned “Too Much Care”. So yeah… OP got down voted a bunch, but they might have a point. This article does seem to be a bit inflammatory and is making claims that don’t seem to be backed up by the source articles.
Edit: Not sure about Russian bots and all that. Was just addressing the question about which part of this article is fake.
SO, Blackrock is suing because “the public backlash prevented the company from pursuing ‘the aggressive, anti-consumer tactics that it would need to achieve’ its earnings goals.”
The “anti-consumer tactics” would be denying coverage on providing care. So, United Healthcare care was providing more care, and making less profit as a result.
Now I think the lawsuit is aimed at the earnings goals itself, and the communications around expenses, not the expenses themselves. “Too Much Care” is reductive, sensationalized, but it’s not outright incorrect.
Remember that privatized healthcare is inherently broken, because your profit model depends entirely on denying people coverage.
a parasite company of another parasite company.
Which part of it is fake?
Here is an excerpt of the CNBC article about it:
On Dec. 3 — a day before Thompson was fatally shot — the company issued guidance that included net earnings of $28.15 to $28.65 per share and adjusted net earnings of $29.50 to $30.00 per share, the suit notes. And on January 16, the company announced that it was sticking with its old forecast.
The investors described this as “materially false and misleading,” pointing to the immense public scrutiny the company and the broader health insurance industry experienced in the wake of Thompson’s killing.
The group, which is seeking unspecified damages, argued that the public backlash prevented the company from pursuing “the aggressive, anti-consumer tactics that it would need to achieve” its earnings goals.
“As such, the Company was deliberately reckless in doubling down on its previously issued guidance,” the suit reads.
The company eventually revised its 2025 outlook on April 17, citing a needed shift in corporate strategy — a move that caused its stock to drop more than 22% that day.
The Medium post’s headline is not entirely false but its framing is sensationalist clickbait and misleads the reader: “BlackRock is Suing UnitedHealth for Giving “Too Much Care” to Patients After the CEO was Murdered” gives the incorrect impression that this lawsuit is demanding UnitedHealth go back to providing less care, but in fact the lawsuit appears to condemn their “anti-consumer tactics” while seeking damages from their “materially false and misleading” statement to investors in January.
The Medium article also lists only BlackRock as the plaintiff, when in fact it is a class action suit which presumably will include many far more sympathetic class members such as pension funds etc.
As far as I can tell, this is the legal document associated with the lawsuit: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.642027/gov.uscourts.nysd.642027.1.0.pdf
The most significant component of this claim is not the lawsuit itself (examples of frivolous lawsuits are common), but that BlackRock is the one suing. BlackRock doing this is the important and remarkable claim here.
I see no obvious connection between Roberto Faller and BlackRock. To me this looks like a frivolous lawsuit issued by a random inconsequential individual. So, then, framing it as BlackRock suing is blatant misinformation.
I could be missing something here, perhaps there is indeed a BlackRock connection that I was unable to identify. But that Medium article is certainly not explaining the connection. The CBS article does not mention BlackRock.
If there is no connection to BlackRock, then adding “BlackRock” to the title is not click-bait! It is a blatant lie.
This is an excellently written comment, thank you!
but in fact the lawsuit appears to condemn their “anti-consumer tactics” while seeking damages from their “materially false and misleading” statement to investors in January.
I’m going to have to argue a bit here because you’re describing the legal case correctly, but the legal case is not the same as the reality.
Healthcare investors are fully aware that they profit over denying claims. That is their business model. They make money by denying claims. They are invested in profiting by denying as many claims as possible. Sure, publicly they will condemn “anti-consumer tactics”, but at the same time they’re lining their own pockets with the profits of those tactics.
The “misleading” statement by Healthcare United was that the profit would continue to be the same. Because claims would be denied at the same rate. Why was the statement misleading? Because claims were not denied at the same rate, more claims were paid out than before.
The medium article is sensationalized, but it’s also reading between the lines of the lawsuit. The investors are not stupid. The investors know full well that you cannot maintain the same profit if you raise your expenses. Profit = revenue - expense. Denying fewer claims raised the expenses. To be mad that profit didn’t stay the same, they are actually mad that claim denials did not stay at the same rate.
I guarantee you this lawsuit is not about improving healthcare and getting ordinary people the care they need. This is just another game of rich people making money.
We saw what was a perfect three-word alliteration as found on certain shell casings for a healthcare CEO, but what comparable three-word alliteration would be suitable for an asset manager? I don’t know…
“Too much care” is great if you’re fine with passing up on the alliteration
I am also wondering that, you know, to make up something when the people who Extract all the value from society, Extinguish all alternatives to their monopolies are Eliminated.
That was so very well said! Yes, yes!
Hooray for laws that make it your legal responsibility to maximise profits for shareholders! Those are doing such amazing things for the overall public good!
/s just in case
I know it doesn’t matter because money, but in what world does Blackrock have any semblance of standing to sue?
If they’re shareholders, they probably have standing to sue over lost shareholder value or some such bullshit like that
according to the supreme court standing is no longer required
send more blue shells
Hello my American friends, as an observer from outside, it looks to me like you all need some of that “democracy” you’ve been bombing across the world for decades.
More than half of us agree with you but overcoming the inertia necessary to change our current condition of minority-majority rule is apparently going to take some kind of political (if not literal*) bomb.
*Not advocating violence, just feeling hopeless about the likelihood that we meaningfully change things at this point through anything short of an actual revolution.
Historically, it has been violent unfortunately, and I don’t see that changing in this situation. Just hoping the violence is aimed at the right people soon before more innocent people die.
I agree that your entire political system needs a massive overhaul. Far too many lobby groups are spending stupid money to make money, leaving the majority of Americans voices when voting redundant. I wish you luck but I can’t see an easy way out of this for you.
It’s very difficult to use logic and try to reason with hatred. Majority of people genuinely want to settle disputes peacefully but it’s getting harder and harder to deny that’s simply not going to work against a minority of loud, angry and ignorant people cheering on a demagogue.
Will nobody rid me of this meddlesome BlackRock CEO?
I have no love for him but the lawyers are actually arguing that UHC never disclosed that they would be denying rates at higher numbers than competitors. Meaning this article, according to it’s own cited source, is lying.
You know what would be really funny?
I fink I do !
damn that’s cryptic
damn I suck at this. A common chaffinch perched on a twig. I got nothing 😖
Is Mr Fink aware of the fate of the last CEO who tried to extract profits from those in need? Because I’m starting to think he and his lot are asking for a refresher on the matter.
I’m not got to name names, but I really hope certain people cease to exist because that would be hilarious.
Can you give me fake names in place of real names so that I can look them up?
Sweet. Get Luigi on the phone.
ethics and morality dont exists for BlackRock and the people who work for it. specially the people/lawyers/board members who do the dirty work and decision making to put this law suit into action. awful just evil awful wicked people at BlackRock no better then scum and bugs.
Don’t talk so rudely about scum and bugs please. They have more real purpose in this world than the people you mentioned.
A while back, I was watching a video about emergent behaviour. A fun concept. the idea is that under some rules, the way things behave ends up making their own different rules. Like how the rules of particle physics determine how subatomic particles behave, but when together they form chemistry, a different set of rules working on top of the lower layer. The same way as biochemistry becomes its own thing, and so biology is built on top of that, and on top of that we have ecology and then humans, and sociology, economics…
It left me with a question, a rather big and stupid question. We are intelligent, sentient, we are just a bunch of cells, intelligence has appeared in our layer. and my question was, can it appear in another? would we notice if there was an intelligent organism that uses our behaviour as its cells? I am not asking for sentient, because that is such a philosophical question which would be a massive tangent just to unpack.
For a while I was just wondering if it was possible, until I realized. They exist. Institutions. they are another layer of emergence, and they do have intelligence and behaviour.
You might say, that it is obvious they are intelligent, they have a CEO that makes decisions, therefore they get their intelligence from him and/or his advisors or advising teams. good point, exceptthe CEO is not the institution, he is replaceable, and the institutions themselves have built in mechanisms for it, to run efficiently. everyone is replaceale and for what? the survival ad near cancerous growth of said institution. Shareholders only care about numbers going up, and will fire anyone who makes any decision that questions it.
Aha, you will point at the shareholders, they are people, they make the decisions. Except most of them are not, they are other institutions, other corporations trying to keep the numbers up. trying to feed on capital.
This seems obvious. But I just providing another lens. Because now we can see their behaviour under a new light. Just like living organisms requre energy and its distribution to live. Institutions need capital, need people to work in there for them to exist, need people moving money around for them to exist.
And given the new lens we can ask different questions. Do they age, evolve, get diseases, do they have an ecology?
They do age. They must grow and a bigger corporation might be stronger but less adaptable and less nimble. can take less risks, it has less space to grow and might only survive by buying off the competition. For example, we can point at Kodak, they could have developed the digital cameras except they make money selling camera film, not cameras. For them making any product that will hurt film sales was short term suicide. Digital cameras were unavoidable, they could have succeeded in the digital fight and come out on top, but trying was forbidden to them as any decision that would hurt them in the short term is beyond the scope of their actions.
Evolve? yes they do. in their own way. simply, any institution that does not grow as fast or as strong will simply die off. There is a lot of competition, and new corporations with different rules will try to take over and if they actually are better fit for their environment they will succeed. We can see the evolution of corporations within the last centuries with corporations getting more traits, all using new behaviours and try to survive copying from each other if they can.
Ecology? Just look at the markets, private equity are basically scavengers, some corporations feed each other, niche speciation, trophic cascades… all those concepts apply here in some way.
My point is, corporations are not people. They are their own creatures, which care for us. The same way you care for your own cells. Are you even aware or care that millions of your cells die regularly, for example in your gut or skin? no, the same way a corporation has absolutely no care for their workers.
This is just a lens, if you are a socialist you might think best to end them, which might work. Whatever institutions we make will likely have their own issues. A liberal might think that under these metaphors we might be able to tame them, which is possible. Except not fighting them is something corporations want us to believe.
I personally think we can consider domestication. by understanding them through this lens. One way to domesticate them is simple. Kill them. I mean the bad ones. Let them fail, and fear not for their death. If they hurt people, and there is a lawsuit, the punishment should be significant, enough to kill the company and ruin all the investors. This way surviving companies will be afraid and police themselves. They will only behave themselves as long as there are consequences for not doing so. If you try to domesticate animals you will put down those who bite and are dangerous. Another solution is that stakeholders should be entitled to shares, people who work or rely on the product should have a voice and more importantly a vote. Although then we need to look into what institution is deciding who gets shares.
BTW, this can be interpreted as a liberal believing that “Just one more reform, trust me bro”. or worse an ancap thinking we just need the right corporations. My version of a reformed capitalism would be so different it would be a stretch to call it liberal.
TLDR: corporations are not people, they need to be treated as such, and be forced to serve public interest. Even less considering them as a group of people.
There’s an entire field of organizational psychology that studies this phenomenon. I have a colleague who has her doctorate in it, super smart person. She gets so frustrated when she gets a call to help solve some org issue and nobody understands pretty much what you just described.
Changing reporting structures and titles only goes so far. At some point you are inside the system and have to observe its rules. Without changing some fundamental piece or pieces you’re going to come to a limit of what you can do. Ever suggest changing incentive structures to match desired outcomes? She has, and won’t be doing it again after being laughed off the job.
If you’re a publicly traded company in a capitalist country I would guess 65% of your culture and behaviors are immovable. And, as of late, I also believe that those 65% are the worst behaviors for humanity.
you cannot even attempt to change the system without friction from said system. however, we shouldn’t care at all if said system complains. those systems aren’t our friend. and we need to use them for our benefit, not the other way round.
Interesting take!
I’m not sure how well recieved it will be here on Lemmy, but it’s well reasoned and explained with clear references.
Even if others don’t agree with you, you’ve certainly earned respect for so cleanly writing out how you’re looking at this and why.
Personally, I think your answer aligns itself well with the classic solutions to these problems.
Machiavelli wrote extensively about what you’re saying in “The Prince” and came to a similar solution that institutions and any position of power over them needs to be completely transparent and open to critique. He pushed for heavy regulation becuase it’s the literal singular mechanism that pushes institutions towards benefiting the public instead of benefiting themselves.
The most interesting takeaway from reading The Prince in a modern context is how deregulation killed every system of governance we’ve tried going all the way back to ancient Rome.
Nero fiddled as Rome burned because Roman government was deregulated to the point an idiot could hold power over them.
USSR couldn’t keep communism regulated, so those that were stealing and breaking the system used their illegally gained resources to deconstruct the communist regime in its entirety.
Now, in the US we’re watching as both of these happen at the same time. A social system deregulated to the point several reality TV stars can hold the highest military and government positions while bailing out our Oligarchs so much they’ve evolved from “too big to fail” into “too big to stop.”
Tansparency and regulation are a necessity in any functioning society to prevent the minority of horrible humans among us from becoming subjugators.
actually, it seems it was well received by people who read it.
was afraid no one will read an essay here.
“too big to fail” should be turn to “too big to keep alive”
These emergent institutional entities are themselves the gut biota of Moloch.
I hope these people have the day they deserve
They’ll all probably get away with everything while also giving themselves more money due to Trump’s regime. They’ll all live to ripe old ages supported by profits that could’ve benefitted everyone, if they don’t cure aging for themselves before then to become absolute, not that their shitty nepo kids wouldn’t just replace them.
