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

nytimes.com

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

#31

Post by whyisthewhat »

arkades wrote: post #9
amsilprotag wrote: post #8

I guess McKinsey erred in accepting the work from Purdue, but it seems like the consulting provided was obvious and likely overpriced. More at fault, in my estimation, is the AMA and other physician standards bodies. Propublica released a search tool [0] last year based on Open Payments Data [1] and the numbers are ridiculous. My small state shows 10s of physicians receiving over $100k over the recorded 2013-2016 per…

Know that Gell-Mann amnesia effect that comes up all over Hn? As a physician, former health insurance exec, and guy with a graduate degree in health policy: propublica deserves deep skepticism.

Very often "Gell-Mann amnesia effect" is invoked to mean "this story is complete rubbish" when what is actually meant is "I have a different, not necessarily correct, and very possibly self-interested interpretation of the facts"

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

#32

Post by arkades »

whyisthewhat wrote: post #31
arkades wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Know that Gell-Mann amnesia effect that comes up all over Hn? As a physician, former health insurance exec, and guy with a graduate degree in health policy: propublica deserves deep skepticism.

Very often "Gell-Mann amnesia effect" is invoked to mean "this story is complete rubbish" when what is actually meant is "I have a different, not necessarily correct, and very possibly self-interested interpretation of the facts"

In the interest of not getting unnecessarily combative:

I can't tell whether your comment was stated in a tone of "I generally think Gell-Man amnesia effect is misused on HN," or whether you meant it to directly criticize my comment.

Please clarify, if you don't mind.

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

#33

Post by anigbrowl »

fefe23 wrote: post #17

Please don't take this personally. We have a situation here that I have seen a few times and I need help understanding it. We have an article in the New York Times. Some dude on Twitter reacts to it. You link to the dude on Twitter instead of the Times. Why? Even worse, you did not even link to the dude on Twitter. You link to some unrelated "thread unrolling" service, carefully making sure nobody who did any of the…

* McKinsey may be a horrible company, but they didn't make opioids.*

For a nice fee, I'll draft you an actionable plan to commit the perfect murder. But hey, I'm not committing any myself and I can't help what people do with the things they learn from my super-specific and reliable murder consultancy services.

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

#34

Post by danieltillett »

The people I really think should be held to account are those that suddenly cut off all the prescription opioid addicts by changing the rules without putting in place treatment options first. To expect millions of addicts to not switch to street Fentanyl and end up dying in large numbers after being cut off from prescription opioids is criminal stupidity.

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

#35

Post by code4tee »

There seems to be a continuing chain of these damning stories about McKinsey and its quesrionable ethics. Seems like the New York Times has one now every few months. Has the firm lost its way or are lights just being put in places McKinsey would rather they weren’t?

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

#36

Post by [deleted] »

bogomipz wrote: post #18
kinkrtyavimoodh wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have noticed that most accusations of whataboutism are somewhat misplaced. It is not whataboutism to question why a certain company gets the brunt of journalistic targeting while similar other companies do not. If you disagree on the material claims, sure, feel free to point out your reasons, but accusing of whataboutism with just a vague defence of 'journalism', when it's clear that the field is rife with partial…

My comment is very clearly in response to the OP's questioning: >"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…

[deleted]

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

#37

Post by xxpor »

danieltillett wrote: post #34

The people I really think should be held to account are those that suddenly cut off all the prescription opioid addicts by changing the rules without putting in place treatment options first. To expect millions of addicts to not switch to street Fentanyl and end up dying in large numbers after being cut off from prescription opioids is criminal stupidity.

Two things can be bad at once.

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

#38

Post by [deleted] »

dawhizkid wrote: post #4

Is it really just McKinsey, or 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)? e.g. 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? The story would be more interesting if everyone outside of McKinsey refused to do consulting…

[deleted]

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

#39

Post by bogomipz »

zaroth wrote: post #26
bogomipz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My comment is very clearly in response to the OP's questioning: >"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 think you’ve totally missed the definition of “whataboutism”. When questioning the ethics of a specific firm in an industry, it’s relevant if they are behaving exactly the same as everyone else in the same industry. “Perdue chickens are kept in cages!” is flimsy journalism if every large scale chicken farm also keeps their chicken in cages, and the article fails to explain why Perdue is being singled out. Reporting…

>"I think you’ve totally missed the definition of “whataboutism”."

Not at all. Whataboutism is a variation on "tu quoque", the idea being an attempt to establish an equivalence between two disparate actions. The disparate actions here being McKinsey's active role in the opioid epidemic - the focal point of this article and the consulting industry's questionable moral compass. PWC, Deloitte and KPMG are not "also" pushing opiods.

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

#40

Post by klenwell »

arkades wrote: post #20
dhbradshaw wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is worth drilling down on. What types of errors should one expect and what are their causes?

Largely they lack context to interpret what they’re seeing. One that jumped out at me a while back: 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…

Here's the introduction at the top of the ProPublica page cited by the GP:

Pharmaceutical and medical device companies are required by law to release details of their payments to a variety of doctors and U.S. teaching hospitals for promotional talks, research and consulting, among other categories. Use this tool to search for general payments (excluding research and ownership interests) made from August 2013 to December 2016.

https://projects.propublica.org/docdollars/

That seems like pretty fair context. You seem to be referencing a different article about Medicare reimbursement without actually citing it. That's a dodge.

If the medical industry requires reams of context to understand its practices and pricing, it's largely because pharma, insurers, medical groups, and individual providers often go to obscene lengths to obscure their practices and pricing.

I'm not going to waste skepticism on ProPublica that could better directed at the American medical-industrial complex.

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