The Punchline That Isn’t Funny

BlackRock will probably win this lawsuit. Or settle for millions. Either way, they’ll extract value from a system designed to extract life from patients.

They’re not just suing UnitedHealth — they’re suing the very idea that health insurance should provide health insurance. They’re fighting for their constitutional right to profit when people die and lose money when people live.

Welcome to American healthcare, where caring too much is a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Dear Sweet Mother of God, this article does not hold back on the biting truth.

It's a worthwhile read with only one small mistake contained within:

Luigi Mangione didn’t just kill a CEO

There is no reliable evidence to suggest Mr. Mangione killed anyone. And I, for one, remain convinced he did not do that deed.

Reminder that capitalism is a system where companies cannot afford to consistently do the right thing. Therefore Capitalism must be abolished entirely.

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.

We need more luigis

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.

send more blue shells

2 of the worst companies out there fighting, get the popcorn ready

Did you know? Blackrock is the corporation that all evil corporations in fiction are based off of.

You know what would be really funny?

Sounds like they're admitting the CEO murder brought about a good change. We should do it more often 🙂

Will nobody rid me of this meddlesome BlackRock CEO?

Sounds like the black rock ceo needs a visit by the Mario bros.

That's a thing you can sue for?

ITT:

So this article cites a CBS news article which says:

"In the proposed class action lawsuit filed Wednesday in the Southern District of New York, investor Roberto Faller alleges UnitedHealth "artificially inflated prices" when the company initially forecast earnings per share of $29.50 to $30 in December. UnitedHealth then reaffirmed that outlook in January, despite mounting a backlash following an October Senate report on its high rate of claim denials and, later, the December killing of its CEO.

Faller's complaint comes after UnitedHealth cut its 2025 forecast for adjusted profit per share to a lower range between $26 to $26.50.

Attorneys argued that the company's statements on performance expectations last year and earlier this year were "materially false and misleading" because UnitedHealth didn't tell shareholders "it would have to adjust its strategy, which resulted in heightened denials compared to industry competitors.""

So I guess it's okay to just completely lie now, huh?

I hope these people have the day they deserve

Who is the CEO of Blackrock?

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

Man I am so glad that the chancellor of germany is the head of the german branch of this evil piece of shit company.

Good old BlackRock making the world a terrible place.

There's this rule that says a business will never make less money to provide better arrived. They will charge us more and deny claims to compensate.

Why should the customer pay for the business to weather ups and downs.

Take pge. Hey burn half of the north bay down and then charge people more on their bills to prevent future fires. They were pocketing the money for years which caused the fires.

This country has really reached its end.

I'm not got to name names, but I really hope certain people cease to exist because that would be hilarious.

I wish a big ass fucking meteor would finally make humanity go extinct. Tabula rasa

Any attorneys willing to weigh in, hypothetically, about if BlackRock wins, whether this would open them up to suits from UHG benefit members?

My thinking is if BlackRock wins and UHG goes back their old denying claims ways, could a patient who doesn't get necessary care OR family members if they die due to a denial sue BlackRock with an argument to damage and harm from BlackRock's actions?