U.S. health insurers and benefit plans alleged the consulting giant’s work for drug makers prompted them to pay for opioids instead of non-addictive and cheaper drugs
Consulting firm McKinsey & Company has agreed to pay $78 million to settle a lawsuit brought by health insurers and benefit plans over its involvement in the nation’s opioid addiction epidemic.
The proposed settlement was filed in a federal California court on Friday and resolved claims by the plaintiffs that McKinsey strategized and acted with opioid makers, including Purdue, to create and execute marketing and sales strategies to “maximize opioid revenue.”
The original lawsuit was filed by third-party payers such as private benefit plans, multi-employer pension plans and commercial insurers. They alleged these strategies harmed them by prompting them to pay for prescription opioids instead of safer, non-addictive and cheaper drugs, as well as the “addiction-related treatment that followed.”
McKinsey did not admit to any wrongdoing in the settlement. In a statement shared with The Messenger, the firm said “we continue to believe that our past work was lawful.”
78M seems low for that really
It is. I got to bear witness to this groups sham business consulting at Mallinckrodt. They are a huge proponent of overly lean manufacturing calling it “agile” when in reality it’s just artificial scarcity by a really poor made to order business model. Lower overhead (people and wip/stock supply) and increase prices.
They also make lots of money off this bullshit and should be barred from doing business in any FDA/DEA controlled environment.
Real talk here. My company used McKinsey in the utilities sector and they were paid millions to come in and lean out our processes. The result was that half of the consultants got moved to other projects, our internal processes got fucked with no clear improvement, and McKinsey walked away with millions. Their biggest contribution was death by PowerPoint.
Companies sadly do this all the time, Nintendo did it with games and the early Amiibo stock.
Yeah my point basically being they really don’t need professional help lol
It’s incredibly low.
Small towns crushed by meth need like 20M just to create programs and clean people up for a year.
Where there are thousands of towns that were devestated, and will need many years to heal.
It’s just a fee at that point. What is that, like 3 hours profit?
This is one settlement. The article says they’ve already paid almost $700 million to state Attorneys General.
The company should have all of its assets seized and be dismantled, the people who enabled it spending long sentences in prison
Its infuriating.
McKinsey is fucking evil. And if you ever think about voting for Pete Buttigieg if he runs for president again, he not only worked for McKinsey, he won’t say what he did there.
John Oliver did an excellent overview of McKinsey- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiOUojVd6xQ
He did ‘optimise’ the price of bread at a supermarket chain. Essentially calculating by how much to raise the price of an essential good before customers try to find alternatives.
They probably spent more on cocaine to celebrate their opioid successes.
Executives should be put in prison for this shit. Instead they get a relatively small fee which is just a “cost of doing business” to them.
Exactly.
I’d be OK with CEOs and other management getting these overinflated wages and benefits if their role actually encompassed being responsible for EVERYTHING the company does under their watch.
Now, they are only held responsible by shareholders for the finances of the company and everything else is just a cost calculation.
They are fined 78 Million, which means they probably made billions of these actions.
The fines should also be calculated as 100% of what they likely gained from their actions.
Those two together would change how corporations and their management do things drastically.
And I wouldn’t just make rules that define the CEO gets to go to jail, because then in the shortest time, they’d put flunkies in the CEO position, without any power, while the actual CEO gets another name label.
“Former McKinsey consultant” are the last words you need to read on anyone’s bio. Here, I’ll give you an example
Pete Buttigieg is the current Transportation Secretary and former McKinsey consultant… [STOP READING HERE]
Doesn’t matter what comes next, you already know everything that’s actually relevant to who that person is.
Such bullshit. McKinsey weren’t only helping push opiods, but they literally had the same advisors working with Purdue that were working with the FDA, and they explicitly sold it to Purdue that they would be able to help them get around the FDA to push the drug all over.
Let me find that cash in my pocket change.
