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CEO of UHG Shot and Killed in NYC - WTF is wrong with you New York


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Posted
On 5/1/2025 at 3:30 PM, Brisketexan said:

Wait.  There are some people who think that Luigi was EVER going to get a fair trial?

brian-cox-laughing-at-you.gif

If the Memphis cops can get a not guilty, why not Luigi? Not that I think he should get a not guilty if he's guilty.

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Posted
On 5/1/2025 at 2:23 PM, bolverk said:

How, pray tell, does a paralegal at the New York County District Attorney's Office go about inadvertently listening in on a privileged conversation between a defendant and his lawyer? They need to walk us through the steps leading up to that "mishap."

I also wonder how the lie about the paralegal only hearing part of the call was discovered and what actions have been taken to prevent it from happening again. Are there remedies a defense team could seek for this accidental oversight?

Well, as you probably suspect, all prison phone calls are recorded, and there's usually ample warning that that is taking place.

I believe the best practice with prison calls to attorneys is to make arrangements beforehand that such calls a) are not recorded and b) don't take place "in public," ie common areas of the prison or jail, so there's no issue of invasion or waiver of privilege.  That should be SOP both from the lawyer's standpoint and prison/jail operations.

AFAIK, the prison call recording system keeps a database of all the recordings that prison staff and prosecutors can call up and listen to any/all prisoner phone calls.  The whole prison call thing is a bit scandalous, both as to privacy and cost, and also fairly sophisticated. A call with a lawyer should never be in that database.

So, I'd think a first level of blame would be with Luigi's lawyers for having a call over the standard call system.  And to some degree with Luigi himself.

But, if you're conspiratorially minded, the prison/jail was recording calls it should not have and making those recordings available to prosecutors.

 

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Posted

This is the insane world we live in: Treating consumers badly to boost profits is securities fraud, but treating consumers well and reducing profits is also securities fraud, because everything is securities fraud.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/08/unitedhealthcare-sued-by-shareholders-over-reaction-to-ceos-killing.html

Quote

 

A group of investors sued UnitedHealthcare Group on Wednesday, accusing the company of misleading them after the killing of its CEO, Brian Thompson.

The class action lawsuit — filed in the Southern District of New York — accuses the health insurance company of not initially adjusting their 2025 net earning outlook to factor in how Thompson’s killing would affect their operations.

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.

Bloomberg Law adds:

This was misleading, [the plaintiff] said, as it didn’t disclose the company was “no longer willing” to “use the aggressive, anti-consumer tactics” it needed to achieve its prior forecast as it was embroiled in heightened public hostility.

The theory is that Thompson’s murder caused UnitedHealth to become more patient-friendly, which made it less profitable, but UnitedHealth didn’t immediately tell shareholders that, so the shareholders assumed it would continue to be patient-unfriendly and profitable. Here is the complaint, which sort of combines (1) the allegedly patient-unfriendly business practices, (2) the murder and (3) the public statements into one broad critique:

Specifically, Defendants made false and/or misleading statements and/or failed to disclose that: (1) UnitedHealth had, for years, engaged in a corporate strategy of denying health coverage in order to boost its profits, and ultimately, its share price; (2) this anti-consumer (and at times unlawful) strategy resulted in regulatory scrutiny (as well as public angst) against UnitedHealth, which ultimately resulted in the murder of Brian Thompson; (3) animus towards UnitedHealth was such that, subsequent to the murder of Mr. Thompson, many Americans openly celebrated his demise, expressed admiration for his accused killer, and/or otherwise demanded that UnitedHealth change its strategy even if they condemned Mr. Thompson’s killing; (4) the foregoing regulatory and public outrage caused UnitedHealth to change its corporate practices; (5) notwithstanding the foregoing, UnitedHealth recklessly stuck with the guidance it issued the day before Thompson’s murder, which was unrealistic considering the Company’s changing corporate strategies; and (6) as a result, Defendants’ public statements were materially false and/or misleading at all relevant times.

So what was the securities fraud? Was it:

That UnitedHealth “had, for years, engaged in a corporate strategy of denying health coverage in order to boost its profits, and ultimately, its share price,” without telling shareholders that, but that strategy was unsustainable and eventually shareholders realized that (because of the murder) and the stock dropped? Or

That UnitedHealth stopped doing that, without telling shareholders that the change would reduce profits?

 

 

Posted (edited)
33 minutes ago, Vegas64 said:

This is the insane world we live in: Treating consumers badly to boost profits is securities fraud, but treating consumers well and reducing profits is also securities fraud, because everything is securities fraud.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/08/unitedhealthcare-sued-by-shareholders-over-reaction-to-ceos-killing.html

 

Man, this is one of those examples where shareholder suits and class actions in particular are pretty ridiculous. Just about any time a publicly traded company has a price gyration, particularly a drop, they get sued for securities fraud and/or breach of fiduciary duty.

They mostly settle for decent, but not meaningful-in-a-big-way, amounts.  The only real winners are the entrepreneurial lawyers that brought them.

A facile response is to ban such suits.  Most large corporations would be highly in favor of doing so and are probably lobbying intensely for it right now.  Any such action needs to be carefully considered lest we get the "tort reform" result.

But they do, if not often, serve a purpose in regulating corporate behavior in ways that even an effective SEC cannot.  This is the type of suit that kept Elmo from getting his ridiculous comp package.  I'm sure that's a popular result and this may be a popular result.  The actual effect on corporate behavior is, I think, negligible.

Also, this gets into that whole lawyer ethics thing.  The real personal motivation for most of these suits is to make money for lawyers.  But, they follow all the rules and most of the precedents and serve the theoretical reason for their existence (curb corporate behavior) to at least a tiny extent.  And you can find other examples of such suits that serve to compensate the truly defrauded and actually punish or deter bad corporate behavior.

So, should we do something about these lawsuits and lawyers when their motivations and raisons d'etre are quite a bit less than noble, and risk the unintended consequences?  Or just let things chuckle along as usual?  That is a bit of a false choice, as there are tweaks that could be made that reduce the ridiculous, hopefully without also reducing the sublime, but there is always the risk of unintended consequences.

Edited by TwiceHorn
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Posted
On 2/5/2025 at 9:46 PM, atomheartbevo said:

Somebody’s bottom line appears to be affected.  Going after an Austin plastic surgeon and maybe others on social media.  @Ghost of LL and @TwiceHorn and @South Austin and others, thoughts?  It’s the law firm that helped get almost $800 million out of Fox News, so I wonder if this is going beyond one plastic surgeon.

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/business-and-practice/unitedhealth-hires-defamation-firm-to-counter-social-media-posts

UnitedHealth Group Inc. has hired a prominent defamation law firm to counter what it sees as inaccurate and irresponsible social media posts about the company’s practices.

Clare Locke, an Alexandria, Virginia-based boutique law firm, is working for UnitedHealth, the company confirmed. A doctor “is using her social media following to perpetuate inaccuracies, which is irresponsible, unethical and dangerous,” UnitedHeath said in a statement.

The hiring shows the biggest US health insurer is pushing back against public statements it views as false following the high-profile death of an executive. Clare Locke is best known for representing Dominion Voting Systems Inc. in a landmark $787.5 million defamation settlement with Fox Corp.'s Fox News. 

Social media platforms lit up with criticisms and even hatred of health insurers following the Dec. 4 murder of Brian Thompson, the chief executive officer of the company’s UnitedHealthcare unit, outside an investor conference in New York. Luigi Mangione, who had allegedly decried health industry practices, faces murder charges in Manhattan.

Elisabeth Potter, an Austin, Texas, plastic surgeon, claimed on Instagram Jan. 7 that UnitedHealth denied an in-patient stay after surgery related to cancer. “I had to scrub out mid-surgery to call United, only to find that the person on the line didn’t even have access to the patient’s full medical information, despite the procedure already being pre-approved,” Potter said in the post.

One of Potter’s attorneys, Jessica Underwood, said Potter received a Jan. 13 letter from Clare Locke demanding that she correct her posts, apologize to UnitedHealth and condemn threats of violence that the law firm said resulted from the posts.

But Underwood, of the law firm Nix Patterson, said Potter’s statements about the insurer were truthful. “Dr. Potter will not be silenced by UnitedHealthcare’s attempts to threaten and harass her,” Underwood said. 

UnitedHealth said in its statement that it had previously approved coverage of the care the patient received, including coverage of an overnight stay. “Dr. Potter’s claims that she was called out of surgery are false,” the company said. “There are no insurance related circumstances that would require a physician to step out of surgery and it would create potential safety risks if they were to do so.”

Clare Locke’s letter to Potter was signed by Tom Clare, who founded the firm in 2014 with his wife and former fellow Kirkland & Ellis partner Elizabeth “Libby” Locke.

Firm partner Jered Ede also signed the letter. Before joining the firm, Ede served as chief legal officer for Project Veritas, the conservative nonprofit that goes undercover to expose what it sees as wrongdoing.

The truth is an absolute defense against slander and libel. In my unfortunately extensive dealings with United I definitely believe that happened just the way she says it did

 

And as someone who did a necessary fracture surgery today that had been delayed for more than 2 weeks on a united patient, and who fully expects to get an initial denial for a surgery scheduled for this Friday, let me unequivocally say fuck United Healthcare 

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