McKinsey Advised Purdue Pharma How to ‘Turbocharge’ Opioid Sales, Lawsuit Says

Comparing 10 or so names in the source data with the Propublica data, often Propublica has identical amounts and trasactions as the Open data, a few times Propublica's dollar amounts and transactions are higher. This might be evidence to support arkades's claim, but I can't be sure since I don't know the exact methodology.

Your comment is little more than "whataboutism." The post is commentary on the nytimes story about how the Massachusetts Attorney General suing McKinsey and specific instances of McKinsey targeting a doctor's practice in their state. So yes there is good reason to single out McKinsey here as they are the defendant in a lawsuit.

>"are these articles focused on McKinsey because they are the most schadenfreude-inducing among big management consulting firms (akin to the media outrage directed at Facebook)?"

This is just an ad-hominem. Informing the public and reporting on issues affecting their society and community is exactly the role of journalism.

People hold these companies and their employees in such high esteem (to the point some people don’t thing articles should be published about their bad behavior, rather articles should be published about other firms hypothetically engaging in the same behavior if the companies in question didn’t).

At the end of the day the worlds biggest companies are willing to knowingly take money from foreign governments to illegally spread propaganda to influence elections, help firms sell drugs that literally end up killing people, and sell their own investment clients toxic assets while offloading their own position on the same assets.

You are right others may have engaged in the same behavior, but: 1. That’s not news worthy and 2. other firms likely would have actually suffered real consequences. Certain firms like Facebook and others continually receive bad press because they continually engage in bad behavior but keep on like it’s business as usual. In other words, the article is focused on McKinsey not because there is a grand conspiracy against McKinsey, but because McKinsey actually committed the bad acts the articles is about.

>"are BCG, Bain, the consulting arms of the Big 4 any more ethical in what they will or won't do for a paying client?"

This is literally asking "what about the other big 4 consulting companies?" There is nothing "misplaced" about my usage of the term here.

The article is about a lawsuit in which a specific company - Mckinsey is named as a defendant which I also stated. So clearly I have actually provided a reason for my assertion.

Lastly disproportionality of media coverage - of which the OP's does not provide any evidence of, does not make the lawsuit any less credible.

They were showing physician payouts from Medicare and presenting them as though they were salaries. Problem: some specialties carry overhead in their Medicare payout.

When your cardiologist prescribes you a blood pressure medication, that money goes to a pharmacy, not to the doctor. So your physician payout is X (cost of visit.)

An oncologist prescribing you a chemo infusion, however, has to buy that infusion from the pharmacy. Medicare then reimbursed doc Z (cost of the drug plus a couple of percentage points). Docs Medicare payout looks like Z; his take-home salary is actually about 0.03*Z.

The failure to distinguish between these meant that PP’s data massively over-inflates these specialties’ salaries. PP just presents them at face value.

Or another: hospitals rarely charge their publicly posted prices. The vast majority of their pay comes via rates negotiated with insurers. PP loves to post their public numbers and go on about high variance numbers without any recognition that those numbers are in no way pegged to the actual negotiated rates. PP presents them at face value.

Largely, PP just doesn’t ever seem to dig deeply enough to find the nuances and caveats in their data, to find how they relate to the actual underlying questions that they -superficially- seem to answer, like “how much are hospitals charging people for this procedure?” or “what kind of money are doctors taking home?”