• Wertheimer [any]@hexbear.net
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    5 days ago

    Think about how fucked up this is: BlackRock owns UnitedHealth, profits when they deny claims, then sues them when bad PR forces them to approve more treatments. It’s like owning a restaurant and then suing the chef for making the food too good because it costs more.

    But this isn’t about burgers. This is about people dying.

    Imagine a borger

  • Arthur Besse@lemmy.ml
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    4 days ago

    This is a very misleading headline and blog post.

    Copy-pasting my comment from another thread:

    Here is an excerpt of the CNBC article about this lawsuit:

    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 linked 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.

    • invalidusernamelol [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      4 days ago

      It’s still a cynical lawsuit. The plaintiffs wouldn’t have cared how UH got the goods off they were able to. They only care now because they failed to secure the bag.

      Ideally lawsuits like this would be preemptive and be filed the second that an anti-consumer/anti-hunan corporate strategy is proposed. As it stands, filing something like this only after blowback is experienced just makes implementing those strategies and acceptable market risk, and not a total non-starter.