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Comment by rolph | Hacker News Reader

"It is illegal to file DMCA notices if you don’t own the copyright (or at least have a good faith belief that you do). The idea that UHC now owns every depiction of the guy accused of killing their employee is laughably frivolous and one hopes that its legal department understands this and these requests are coming from a third party troll impersonating the carrier."

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I wouldn’t be surprised if their legal theory is that they will win the rights to Mangione’s likeness in a future civil suit. If a judge is willing to claim to believe that, then I could see an injunction being issued.

Does that sound ridiculous? Sure, but we’ve seen some absolutely crazy stretching of the law these past few years.

Can a corporation CLAIM civil damages over their CEOs murder ? I'd think that would be his "estate" perhaps ? (Far from being a lawyer)

> Can a corporation CLAIM civil damages over their CEOs murder

Maybe not murder. But if Mangione is inspiring death threats against others, maybe.

IIRC a landmark trial in early post-WW2 years resulted in it being impossible for third party to own complete rights for someone's natural likeness or other natural features (like voice, which was specific case involved).

So they can't win the right to prevent distribution, they can win the right to use the likeliness, but for distribution they would need to have active contract with Mangione that they are representing him for that, which I somehow doubt being the case.

"I'm going to own it in the future" gives you exactly zero rights over something today.

But IANAL, so what do I know.

But it may convince the court to side with you on a seize and desist sort of a motion.

IANAL either though

Perhaps they legitimately bought the rights from the original producers? Doesn't seem impossible, although would certainly be a strange strategy to say the least.

> idea that UHC now owns every depiction of the guy accused of killing their employee

Hmm, no evidence this is happening, but could Thompson's family claim ownership of his likeness?

Wasn't UHC the company that decided to deny claims with an AI that was wrong 90% of the time? I assume they did do this. False DMCA claims are nothing to them.

Yet another egregious abuse of a law that has zero real consequences for a false report. I wonder why this happens so often?

Insurance company employees have among the lowest productivity to pay ratios of nearly any industry. They harbor a workforce that is low skill, low effort, and high profit, largely via nepotistic hiring.

Insurance companies have low profit margins, 2% to 3% in most cases.

UNH is worth more than 5x its nearest insurance competitor (Elevance) because of its large healthcare provider arm, not because of its insurance business.

Otherwise, they are all sub $100B businesses, which indicate not a lot of juice to squeeze.

I agree they’re not especially big in terms of profit. However, that doesn’t mean they are not evil. These companies increase profit margin by denying coverage. They try really hard to pretend like they are providing a particular service level and will happily collect your money with that expectation. And then, at a later point, they deny coverage, often in a fraudulent way, in order to create their higher margin. To me the low profit margin is therefore not really relevant. If they provided the product that everyone expects that they are paying for, their margin would be lower and that is exactly what should happen.

How much lower can profit margin get than 2% before a business stops being a business and becomes a charity?

Why would it even have shareholders at that point?

Surely, even someone who hasn’t operated a business can see why revenue should exceed expenses by a couple percent to survive volatility, much less make it worth investing in.

Maybe it should be near 0% for this business because that is the end result of competition and a functioning market. Or maybe they should just become better at operating more efficiently. But what they shouldn’t do is artificially create profit margin by stealing from their customers and handing them death sentences instead of providing the care that is paid for. When you deceive and defraud customers and literally cause them harm when they’ve paid you to avoid harm, that does seem evil. That’s what I’m pointing out.

The business model contains dark patterns incentivizing patient deaths in many cases. It’s not that they’re turning a profit, it’s that they’re profiting off of death. If it was a break-even org (I.e. non-profit), people would likely have less of an issue with it.

The regulations on profit margins incentivized maneuvering to higher prices to increase absolute profit

7+ different publicly listed companies and myriad mutual/non profit companies as well as self insured businesses all colluding to pay more so they can collect higher premiums?

And simultaneously, health insurers denying coverage left, right, and center to pay less so they can profit more? (See adjacent comment by blackeyeblitzar)

Make it make sense.

There’s definitely precedent for public companies (even international ones!) colluding to artificially increase prices in a sector. Also a hilarious movie with Matt Damon.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysine_price-fixing_conspira...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Informant!

Has there ever been precedent for companies to collude to increase the prices they pay their vendors?

I’m seeing a lot of big claims, but no evidence.

My guess, stated without evidence:

1. Profits are capped as a percent of health care expenditures.

2. Employers (and people in the Marketplace) purchase insurance mostly based on price, which incentivizes lower prices.

3. (I'm guessing) Medicare advantage pays a flat annual rate to insurers.

4. Insurer denies large claims on Medicare Advantage accounts, turning annual rate directly to profits.

5. Insurer's denial of claims for other classes of policy lowers the price of the policy, increasing competitiveness.

6. Providers fight with insurance policy and fall back to billing patients, who can only pay pennies on the dollar.

7. The providers raise future rates to compensate for the costs and losses incurred by denials.

7. Increasing prices for all customers yields the desired absolute profits, without penalizing the company doing the denials.

> regulations on profit margins incentivized maneuvering to higher prices to increase absolute profit

Source?

(On one hand, it makes sense. You see the same effect in fixed-price contracting with mandated margins. On the other hand, higher prices seems to describe the providers. Not insurers. If insurers wanted to boost the cost line, they'd approve every claim.)

I saw it in a vision.

How do I get a low skill high pay job? That sounds awesome.

> How do I get a low skill high pay job

Why are you assuming high pay? Claims adjusters make like $50k per year for semi-skilled work.

Where I live that's a pretty good salary.

Source?

Not denying what you're saying, just curious about the data.

Just personal experience and that of people close to me. Sorry, I have nothing concrete to offer here.

>Wasn't UHC the company that decided to deny claims with an AI that was wrong 90% of the time?

Source?

  Source?

Google it. UHC's use of AI was very much in the news and in fact an article about it was posted to HN back in November.

So far as I can tell the "90%" figure was from the complaint in a class action lawsuit filed in 2023, and there's no indication how the plaintiffs arrived at that figure.

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/class...

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