https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33524399
People are speaking in broad strokes without bothering to look at the specifics of what was presented at the trial.
> Though they initially were divided, jurors soon agreed to acquit Ms. Holmes on the one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and three counts of wire fraud tied to patients, Ms. Stefanek said. She said the jury concluded that prosecutors didn’t present enough evidence to show that Ms. Holmes knowingly pitched a faulty product to induce patients to pay for tests.
I don’t know the word for it, but this fits a type of behavior I’ve observed where people will break a behavior into a series of actions and since each action on its own is not a problem, then the behavior represented by the set of actions is deemed not problematic. Her company sold a product alleging X performance when she knew that this was false. Her product was then sold to people looking for a product that had X performance specifically because it was so beyond what any competitors had come up with. It was not a commodity good that they just happened to have purchased from this one vendor and didn’t care about the fraudulent performance claims.
There is no way I could not see this as fraud. I don’t disagree with the facts you’ve presented, I’m making a value judgement
In a general sense, this is why there will always be the concept of a loophole, and there will always be those that take advantage of it. Going through every trick to reduce tax liability from millions to 0 seems like behavior that is defrauding the government, but no actions are actually provably defrauding the government.