Health Giant Sutter Destroys Evidence in Crucial Antitrust Case Over High Prices
californiahealthline.org
californiahealthline.org
Until executives and shareholders feel real pain, companies can simply make their decisions based on cost outcomes. In most cases, the financial incentive to cheat and flaunt the law is just too great compared to the risk of penalty.
Throw some execs in jail, starting with the CEO. If CEOs are so valuable that they can be paid 100x median employee wage, then they should have some real responsibility. And penalize the stock in some way so the investors feel the pain. Sure, it's not their fault necessarily; but if you make the investors angry enough, they will demand proper behavior from the companies they invest in.
I'm not sure I agree with that premise.
The thing that has stuck in my brain for a while now that the way to solve this issue is with better whistle blower programs. In general, people (usually more than one) in the middle know what they are being asked to do is illegal (or highly questionable, like not disclosing a piece of data about a drug side effect) but fear being fired. Having $10M+ payouts for whistle blowing has the potential to remove that risk. I am making an assumption here that the whistle blower's identity would remain secret, potentially similar to witness protection. So where would the money come from? I think the right answer is the ability of the government to freeze assets (not monthly payroll) and make it so that executives selling stock once the investigation starts would be guilty of insider trading. The details are all solved here but it is meant as a jumping off point.
The biggest challenge would be getting this to pass as most of the companies that are guilty of these things are major candidate backers and pay for tons of lobbying efforts.
Nobody is happy with it, the people who are victimized by companies like Sutter aren't happy and I guess most folks that work at the Sutters of the country aren't happy either. They are just going through the motions in quite desperation because house payments but it sucks and what they are doing sucks and they know it.
It's kind of like the Soviet Union right before the fall. People knew there were deep structural problems, the plebs, the party officials, they had to have known. But for the time being they just kept going through the motions until one day the the farce just got too onerous to pretend anymore.
That day is about here I think. Or rather hope. The entire setup between government, insurance and corps like Sutter is very truly nuts and isn't serving the needs it was designed for. I don't think that's a fringe belief either but a growing understanding.
That makes the issue more resonant, because the deep corruption of the legal system and routine criminality of corporations cuts across pretty much every facet of life.
Intentional criminality by corporations should be treated exactly like intentional criminality by gangs, with the leaders rounded up and served sentences according to the scale they operated on. Anything in excess of a billion dollars of criminal activity should be a life sentence.
I somehow think compliance would be much better if executives were held responsible for it. But... That's how corruption works -- they're not.
If that's true, they can be required to show evidence of the rest of this routine and how it was possible for the mistake to happen. Apparently they havn't destroyed documents for at least 17 years so it doesn't sound very routine at all.
Unless a judge either throws a CEO in jail or applies a "death penalty" to a company, there is nothing to lose.
Because when we catch you, even if it were an “unfortunate mistake”, your company gets an automatic “unfortunate” finding for the plaintiff. Of course it doesn’t currently work that way. OTOH, the judge will probably be none too pleased. Perhaps not resulting in an automatic finding for the plaintiff, but I’d imagine defense has an uphill climb from there.
If they disposed of the smoking gun, I'd say a simple uphill climb is a big step forward for them!
Few years ago found an article claiming that the threat of prison keeps middle class people in line. Actual prison is needed for poor people. However wealthy people just the loss of reputation and law suits are enough to keep them in line.
It was written of a chief appellate court justice.
So?
If the penalty for default loss+judicial penalty is less than the smoking gun/slam dunk case penalty, it's a win.
This kind of misconduct needs to result in jail time and a felony for the CEO. It doesn't need to be a lot of jail time as long as there is now a felony on his record.
Let some CEO's get a taste of trying to live in our society with a felony on your record and suddenly companies will comply with judicial orders to the letter.
This is an antitrust case, not a “prices are high” case. The post title is misleading.
The US justice system is baffling.
The efficiencies gained by mega corporations aren't that big, we shouldn't let them use size complexity to obscure malfeasance.