10 ms·
McKinsey and Company to pay $650M for role in opioid crisis
- firebot 2y agoI think the real crisis is that everyday people can't get pain relief cuz some junkies OD'ed. Wtf? We live in the dumbest possible universe of all possible universes.
- courseofaction 2y ago[flagged]
- bdangubic 2y agowhat kind of adjustment and who are adjusters?
- FireBeyond 2y agoYou and I destroying evidence when accused of a crime? Tampering, a felony in most states. Send emails to your team and clients that even explicitly says "We need to eliminate documents and emails about this as the US Attorney has already begun investigating us?" Oh well, no big deal, just have the company pay a fine. Adjust that, for just one thing.
- bdangubic 2y agosince it is legal for said companies to pay for the adjuster’s political campaigns the chances of this adjusting are not promising…
- Terr_ 2y agoI think it's a reference to the recent killing of that health insurance CEO, where some folks have taken to referring to the killer as an "adjuster." It's a play on words from the profession of insurance/claims adjuster, which is someone who who arrives to determine what happened and what damage the insurance company is liable for. Unlike the normal version, there's a very different twist on what kinds of damage, responsibility, and consequences are involved...
- sitkack 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_life They could figure out how to divvy up their 65 life sentences. Why do they get to pay their way out of this? > According to Kavanaugh, former McKinsey senior partner Martin Elling [2] "personally deleted various Purdue related electronic materials from his McKinsey laptop with the intent to obstruct future investigations." Corporate laptops are backed up, with backups offsite. I find it hard to believe that the only copy was on his laptop. From the tweet [2], which has a screenshot of an email presumably sent by Martin Elling, he looks to be directing everyone to start deleting criminal evidence. > McKinsey's payment, which includes $2 million paid to the Virginia Medicaid Fraud Control Unit, settles federal civil and criminal charges against the firm and includes a "deferred prosecution" agreement. Under the civil settlement, McKinsey is not admitting liability. A copy of the deferred prosecution agreement was not publicly available at the time of publication. Given the opioid deaths in 2022 alone, McKinsey should be dissolved and the responsible parties serving jail time. Can someone explain how this [3] is presented as a win, when only money has changed hands. They paid a fee for aiding in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. Does this ruling now shield them from any criminal repercussions at the state level? [1] https://www.cdc.gov/overdose-prevention/about/understanding-the-opioid-overdose-epidemic.html https://www.cdc.gov/overdose-prevention/about/understanding-... [2] https://x.com/CoruscaKhaya/status/1676330070472814593 https://x.com/CoruscaKhaya/status/1676330070472814593 Here is the original document referenced in the tweet, https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/opioids/docs/#id=zhlp0255 https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/opioids/docs/#id=zhlp... [3] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-resolution-criminal-and-civil-investigations-mckinsey-companys https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-... *edit, found this https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/MCK-RecordRetention_final.pdf https://www.industrydocuments.ucsf.edu/wp-content/uploads/20... which outlines at which times various McKinsey employees directed people to delete evidence.
- malux85 2y agoThey 100% should be put in jail, if fines are the only deterrant then they just become cost-of-business and dont deter anything at all.
- 2y ago
- roenxi 2y agoLeft hand. COVID proved that we could establish safety & efficacy of a medical treatment in about 12 months, to the point where as I recall a lot of the manufacturers have a legal exemption from any liability for damage done by vaccines. Right hand. There are these opioids have been around for decades and somehow they reached this huge level of damage. Largely the same cultures of people involved. I still think the authoritarian policies used during COVID were a mistake. The level of compartmentalisation needed to look past scandals like this one and still force people to trust big pharma unconditionally is pretty extreme. People should be allowed to make their own mistakes based on their own flawed judgement, rather than the flawed judgement of the likes of McKinsey & Perdue. It is bad enough when everything is voluntary.
- spamizbad 2y agoThat legal exemption was made possible by a law passed in 2005 which, at the time, was completely non-controversial. It's only after vaccines have become politicized that it suddenly became problematic for the government to take steps to protect its citizen's lives.
- wrs 2y agoThe public policy for individual pain management and the public policy for highly contagious diseases can be different, for logical reasons that I hope are obvious.
- roenxi 2y agoYeah, pain management is even more important and they got that wrong. COVID was just a flash in the pan then it seems to have settled down into the background as an issue, while chronic pain is an ongoing thing that is easier to study. So even if we assume that they weight their efforts by importance that isn't particularly impressive for the COVID authoritarianism.
- Dylan16807 2y agoGovernment rules around COVID were also a flash in the pan. On a per-day basis it was pretty proportional to the urgency.
- notatoad 2y agoi'm assuming the supreme court will void this one too?
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoMcKinsey is responsible for a lot of crimes, seemingly. Ultimately they just don't seem like a trustworthy company and I think they've avoided accountability by maintaining political connections (and donations). Another example of their untrustworthy practices - I recall accusations from a few years ago where they assured the US government that they were not doing work for the CCP, but then it turned out that they were (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/mckinsey-worked-chinese-government-assurances-us-senator-document-indi-rcna9053 https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/mckinsey-...). And then earlier this year at a US Senate hearing, it turned out McKinsey has once again been doing dirty work for the CCP by advising a large number of state owned corporations, who are involved in activities like building China's militarized artificial islands: https://youtu.be/tQ5kWfotE8Y https://youtu.be/tQ5kWfotE8Y
- tdb7893 2y agoEven amongst management consulting firms McKinsey is known as the unethical one. I know someone who worked for Bain and when I gave him shit for it his answer was always "hey, at least I don't work at McKinsey"
- milesskorpen 2y agoThey all do basically the same thing.
- DrBenCarson 2y agoMBB alum here-- Here's the thing: these firms are set up as partnerships meaning each of the partners (but really the senior partners) has their own little world enabled by their equity and voting power. They each have their own spin on the "values," risk tolerance, communication style, "followers," etc. Trying to paint the entire firm with the same brush is naive. Like anything else, there are good and there are bad Plenty of good smart people at each of these firms just trying to do good work and "make it." Then you have the sociopaths willing to trade lives for their own gain who have the benefit of hiding behind brand equity and human shields (aka the other partners)
- ClassyJacket 2y ago[flagged]
- loeg 2y agoClearly several orders of magnitude fewer humans impacted, if nothing else.
- sc68cal 2y agoMcKinsey makes something like 10 billion annually in revenue. This is a slap on the wrist. People need to be held accountable for these misdeeds.
- swasheck 2y agoyep. would rather it be a multiple of revenues from their role instead of a percentage.
- passwordoops 2y agoCriminal charges for execs and board members
- jmcgough 2y agoA slap on the wrist. After a half million Americans have died from a crisis they helped kickstart, they should be facing criminal charges and jail time. The rich and powerful once again are allowed to buy their freedom.
- rajup 2y ago> The rich and powerful once again are allowed to buy their freedom. Well... have you seen the news lately?
- dartos 2y agoOr… ever?
- ternnoburn 2y agoThe rich and powerful are pretty famous for not saving the consequences of their actions, I'm not sure what you are implying....
- TheOtherHobbes 2y agoHealth insurance and some elements of healthcare are literally farming human illness and death for cash. Opioids are just the most obvious and egregious example of how the system is abusively hostile.
- dartos 2y agoYeah, that fact is evident if you look at the news… ever… Hunter Biden pardoned, Trump’s convictions not resulting in punishment, high ranking executives getting bonuses for layoffs, etc…
- ternnoburn 2y agoRajup had posted about a CEO getting unalived, as an example of the rich facing consequences. I had misread your post as agreeing with him, like this Luigi thing was a continuation of a phenomena. My bad. I see you were disagreeing with the poster sarcastically.
- dogboat 2y ago[flagged]
- ALittleLight 2y agoIf the company was not meaningfully involved in selling a dangerous addictive substance falsely marketed that resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans then they should not face any penalty or fines. On the other hand, if they were, this is on a similar order of magnitude to American losses in World War 2, and their executives should be hung and company ended with shareholders zeroed out.
- p4ul 2y agoWith all the overdose deaths and the lives ruined by opioids, I guess I'm a little bit surprised this didn't result in criminal charges for someone at McKinsey. Surely there must be some emails or texts that are inculpating.
- rqtwteye 2y agoAs long as you hide behind a corporation, you can do pretty much whatever you want. Worst case, the company will pay a nominal fine as cost of doing business. And maybe somebody gets fired with a large severance.
- genocidicbunny 2y agoWell, until a good looking 20-something year old man puts a couple bullets in your chest outside an investor meeting.
- bamboozled 2y agoNot going to be "the norm" nor will there be an endless stream of vigilantes available to deter this level of sociopathy. Assassinations are obviously not the way we want society to work either, violence to settle grievances etc, no good. The only way I think we could hope to stem the tide of this level of corruption is through education. I believe it's really in the ruling classes interest to keep as people as dumb as possible though, so I don't think it will happen. Not sure what else the alternatives could be. Societal collapse?
- Sabinus 2y agoBut then someone has to sacrifice their life to create some justice. Much better for it to be a part of the system. Jail for criminal executives.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoAs killings get normalized they will be more difficult to be caught. Less point blank pistoling, more IEDs and long range rifles is our future imo. The veil has been pierced for at least some people.
- noisy_boy 2y agoUntil you have serious bonus clawbacks for every such case, it is just cost of doing business. Just increasing the fines won't do much, they will just fire more people citing costs and the market will applaud that with rising stock price.
- hsbshs 2y agoIts complex cause you cant really find one person to blame. What no one really says is we are struggling with complexity overload. And what complicates it is all the people's wealth and status accumulation falsely signals control. When they really have less and less control the more complex the system gets. When you look at pentagon leaders and afg/iraq or Wall St CEOs and 2008 gfc or the Pope and the peado army or linux kernel maintainers and serious security bugs found everyday the commonality is Complexity. No one is fit the more complex things gets. So even though we get Tahrir Square once in a while, decade later we still have Generals in charge. Scaling has become easy but scaling without unintended costs and consequences the past few decades have shown is complex.
- callc 2y agoSure, attempting to find one or a handful of bad actors to blame may not yield a sufficient result that could convince the public that justice was served appropriately. Yet, the complexity of how to blame should not absolve the crime. How should society collectively administer punishment to a large complex network of individuals with varying degrees of power and involvement? Reparations and the Nuremberg Trials / Tokyo Trial come to mind for WWII Axis powers. 500k deaths from opiods (taken from top comment) is comparable to the casualties from WWII, within a soberingly low amount of significant digits. Japan was occupied and could not have a military for some time. Curious if there are other ideas of how to tackle punishment of businesses (not Luigi'ing it).
- hsbshs 2y agoWell there is the Chinese and Russian example. The power just gets misused and creates it own issues. People want simple and quick solutions. And they dont like answers they dont want to hear. Specifically about what behavior is rewarded and incentivized. As Veblen pointed out a hundred years ago, the flaw with Marx is not that there are exploiters and the exploited, its that there is the Leisure class and everyone else who given a choice wants that lifestyle. The entire media and edu system promote consumption, wealth and status accumulation 24x7. When you are constantly hit with these signals punishing a few people here and there is just for show.
- bamboozled 2y ago“That should cover it”
- yalogin 2y agoWhat percentage of the revenue was this? The stock price jump alone would many multiple times this fine.
- motohagiography 2y agoThe word "overdose" has to be the best PR campaign of all time. it is an addictive poison.
- ungreased0675 2y agoWhat is this construct where someone can just pay money to avoid personal accountability for crimes?
- fooker 2y agoThe money is literally the accountability here. You could have other forms of accountability sure: freedom, life, and so on. For several reasons, we have settled on money as the preferred form unless the responsible party has a good chance of harming others in future.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- yard2010 2y agoThis is stupid because the marginal value of money is nothing when you have enough. So it's simply a get out of jail ticket we give to part of the society. The worst part IMHO.
- fooker 2y agoYes, it is stupid. Try to design an alternative though, go and actually give it a try. And you are immediately going to find several historical anecdotes where your idea had gone horribly wrong.
- dns_snek 2y ago> For several reasons, we have settled on money as the preferred form unless the responsible party has a good chance of harming others in future. Sorry, but in which universe? The people who're responsible for harming millions almost always get away with a fine that can be brushed away as the cost of doing business, and they almost always reoffend precisely because they never have to face justice. Meanwhile the working class people who haven't harmed anyone regularly get arrested and go to jail for nonviolent offences. If I made $50k a year and killed 1,000 people by poisoning their water supply, do you think I could escape arrest by paying a $1000 fine? Would you feel like that's an appropriate level of accountability if I knew that my actions were killing those people?
- infrawhispers 2y agoMcKinsey is a deeply unethical company that has skirted meaningful accountability over the last few decades. I highly recommend reading When McKinsey Comes To Town [1] - it really opened my eyes to how hypocritical and self-serving the culture is at the firm. Maybe a small aside..but it’s very interesting how we as a society took very little learnings from the Crack epidemic during the early years of the Opioid Crisis. It is frustrating how people would rather bury their heads into the sand and reaffirm existing biases vs interrogating the contributing factors. [1] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/634029/when-mckinsey-comes-to-town-by-walt-bogdanich-and-michael-forsythe/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/634029/when-mckinse...
- NetOpWibby 2y agoNot nearly enough. Make it $650B and if they can't pay, break up the company.
- tiborsaas 2y agoPayment should not be an option. If people can be executed for a single murder then assisting in starting an epidemic with 640000 casualties (and also serious side effects) should kill the company. Revoke business licenses, seize assets, use it for damage control. "More than 645,000 people(opens new window) in the United States have died from overdoses involving opioids since the epidemic began" https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/maps/connect2health/focus-on-opioids.html https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/maps/connect2health/foc...
- blastbking 2y agopaging luigi
- croes 2y agoMcKinsey is also responsible for the delay, deny, defend tactic of health insurance companies. https://www.trialguides.com/products/from-good-hands-to-boxing-gloves https://www.trialguides.com/products/from-good-hands-to-boxi...
- xyst 2y agoNot enough. Executives and consultants need to be sent to jail and held responsible. For years, the government and court systems have been unable to punish these private corporations. At best, give them a slap on the wrist with these fines. People are tired of this bs. It's no surprise a large majority of the public didn't give 2 shits about a nobody health insurance CEO getting gunned down in the streets but rather unified around the idea of our shitty healthcare system.
- p1dda 2y agoI suspect McKinsey is responsible for most predatory behaviour related to Big Food, Big Tech and Big Pharma, just waiting for more of these lawsuits to surface.
- myst 2y agoI am surprised they are allowed to exist. They aren’t doing anything useful anyway.
- throwaway9120 2y agoWhy hold McKinsey liable for what Purdue Pharma actually did? Bad advice could have been thrown out by management, but instead, was accepted, and executed on. Shouldn't the blame rest on Purdue directors and the board?
- Rafuino 2y agoMcK, Bain, and BCG should all be burned to the ground and the ashes scattered to the wind. Hot take, I know.
- remarkEon 2y agoA little unrelated to this whole thing, which does hit me a bit personally since my cousin back in Iowa died of opioid-related dependency issues, but I have interviewed a lot of consultants over the years for various roles and they are without question the most consistently bad interviews. It's funny, when I was in business school years ago (please forgive me) getting a job at McKinsey or BCG was more or less the crème de la crème of post-MBA gigs. Now, when I interview these people it's so transparent that yeah they're very smart, but they literally know nothing. They've spent years cycling in and out of "client engagements", so they can give you a 30k foot view of what's going on, on a dozen different things, but when you try to dig into the details there's not a lot there. I'm probably casting a wide net since my sample size is large, and I'm sure there are great consultants at these places who have spent more than a few months on something, and could do good work in tech or hardware. But so far for me it's something like 1/70. Maybe I'm just that asshole interviewer.
- dcreater 2y agoI'm so proud of my decision making when I was younger to avoid this path though it was considered an elite path
- dmd 2y agoI am grateful for McKinsey and BCG because when I dropped out of my postdoc in 2009 and was looking for a job, I went to probably 20 or 30 of their lunch events at Wharton where I absolutely stuffed myself and my pockets, despite having no intention whatsoever of joining them.
- beepboopboop 2y ago> and my pockets Do they give money out at these lunches??
- dmd 2y agoNo I mean I literally stuffed my coat pockets with food! Sandwiches, fruit, cheese especially.
- sidcool 2y agoThis won't deter them. But something better than nothing.
- toofy 2y agoIt’s unforgivable that we treat slow motion murder by certain people as acceptable—deserving of nothing more than a fine.
- portaouflop 2y agoIs there any world crisis where McKinsey wasn’t involved/profited? Most immoral company on the planet smh
- LightBug1 2y agoAnd I bet, for many, when the dust settles, the McKinsey name will still be held in relative high regard, and the opioid affected victims, on the streets, in poverty, will be blamed for ... not pulling themselves together, or as being a drag on society.
- soysandwhich 2y ago[flagged]
- cyanydeez 2y agoCorporations need death sentences. Like the sandy hook parents getting cash for infowars but infowars being allowed to continue its antisocial existence because money is a super fungible commodity with no limits.
- sershe 2y agoI'm gonna sue Jack Daniels for hitting me with a trunk of a big ol' live oak tree He hurt me this morning with the bright sun light I'm gonna sue Jack Daniels for what he did to my face last night!
- ropable 2y agoAll that death and misery and no one even went to jail.