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California bans private prisons

theguardian.com

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Re: California bans private prisons

#251

Post by steephills »

ekianjo wrote: post #230
arcticbull wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to your $600 epipen. Seriously. Canada doesn't even have socialized drug insurance for prescriptions and it costs $100 and in the UK $38. Drugs would be, in a perfect system with no socialist intervention, priced at whatever value they provide you. If that's your life, it's very expensive. There's no room for mercy in capitalism. There's a reason Sovaldi is $84,000 and it's not because it costs a lot to mak…

> Canada doesn't even have socialized drug insurance for prescriptions and it costs $100 and in the UK $38 It's kind of easy for a country to dictate drug prices when they had no hand in developing them. Now show me a country like the US that develops just as many drugs. Ah, you can't, there is none.

According to this article, the biggest R&D spenders in pharma are EU firms:

https://www.evaluate.com/vantage/articles/data-insights/othe...

Re: California bans private prisons

#252

Post by crazy1van »

arcticbull wrote: post #215
imsofuture wrote: post #187

[flagged]

Capitalism is great for some things, and awful for others. Capitalism works best when there's no power differential between customers and service providers because the goal is to maximize profit. If my choice is to pay for cancer treatment or die, you can (and do) charge me literally whatever you want in a capitalist system. If I get no choice in which prison I go to, well, I get bilked. Basically anywhere you have n…

> If my choice is to pay for cancer treatment or die, you can (and do) charge me literally whatever you want in a capitalist system

One provider might charge a fortune. But then another will come along and realize he can get all this business by charging slightly less than a fortune. Then another comes along and charges slightly less. And so on until they are charging just enough to make a slight profit.

That’s how a healthy market works. But if you put up tons of barriers and rules about who can provide a service and how the service must be performed, the whole competitive system breaks down.

Re: California bans private prisons

#253

Post by thomasmeeks »

lanevorockz wrote: post #231
cwkoss wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prison profits are spent lobbying for tougher crime laws. Thus, unnecessarily harsh criminalization of behavior has a strong economic incentive. Having an incentive to turn citizens into criminals is bad for society.

I wonder if you can raise evidence of unreasonable imprisonment. I completely agree that this can create a feedback loop that would be bad, ideally we should have a much more sophisticated system of rehabilitation. Maybe the problem lies on the state being too incompetent to even set metrics for third parties.

Non violent drug offenses is the example you’re looking for.

Re: California bans private prisons

#254

Post by SimbaOnSteroids »

ekianjo wrote: post #230
arcticbull wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to your $600 epipen. Seriously. Canada doesn't even have socialized drug insurance for prescriptions and it costs $100 and in the UK $38. Drugs would be, in a perfect system with no socialist intervention, priced at whatever value they provide you. If that's your life, it's very expensive. There's no room for mercy in capitalism. There's a reason Sovaldi is $84,000 and it's not because it costs a lot to mak…

> Canada doesn't even have socialized drug insurance for prescriptions and it costs $100 and in the UK $38 It's kind of easy for a country to dictate drug prices when they had no hand in developing them. Now show me a country like the US that develops just as many drugs. Ah, you can't, there is none.

You might want to look at pharmaceutical companies by size and nation of origin. https://www.datawrapper.de/_/3qmpF/

Re: California bans private prisons

#255

Post by SolaceQuantum »

crazy1van wrote: post #252
arcticbull wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Capitalism is great for some things, and awful for others. Capitalism works best when there's no power differential between customers and service providers because the goal is to maximize profit. If my choice is to pay for cancer treatment or die, you can (and do) charge me literally whatever you want in a capitalist system. If I get no choice in which prison I go to, well, I get bilked. Basically anywhere you have n…

> If my choice is to pay for cancer treatment or die, you can (and do) charge me literally whatever you want in a capitalist system One provider might charge a fortune. But then another will come along and realize he can get all this business by charging slightly less than a fortune. Then another comes along and charges slightly less. And so on until they are charging just enough to make a slight profit. That’s how a…

That’s how a healthy market works. But if you put up tons of barriers and rules about who can provide a service and how the service must be performed

Sorry, are you referring to proving that treatments have effect, doctors being licensed, something else?

Re: California bans private prisons

#256

Post by reascenda »

ekianjo wrote: post #230
arcticbull wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to your $600 epipen. Seriously. Canada doesn't even have socialized drug insurance for prescriptions and it costs $100 and in the UK $38. Drugs would be, in a perfect system with no socialist intervention, priced at whatever value they provide you. If that's your life, it's very expensive. There's no room for mercy in capitalism. There's a reason Sovaldi is $84,000 and it's not because it costs a lot to mak…

> Canada doesn't even have socialized drug insurance for prescriptions and it costs $100 and in the UK $38 It's kind of easy for a country to dictate drug prices when they had no hand in developing them. Now show me a country like the US that develops just as many drugs. Ah, you can't, there is none.

Roche, Novartis, AZN, Novo Nordisk, Sanofi,GSK and on and on. You could hardly pick a worse sector than healthcare to make this kind of nonsense America first point.

Re: California bans private prisons

#257

Post by jacobush »

clarkevans wrote: post #51
blancheneige wrote: post #22

>Two of Ice’s largest immigrant detention centers in California Can somebody explain to a legal immigrant why The Guardian keeps omitting the illegal part over twelve times throughout the article?

Many immigrants (especially those from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) in ICE detention facilities presented themselves at the border and legally requested asylum. For more information on "northern triangle" and why these immigrants are fleeing their homeland, read https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/central-americas-violent-no... This is an ongoing and growing challenge for our immigration system. In FY 2017, as…

Wow.

20,000 granted asylum to the US in 2016.

70,000 granted asylum to Sweden in 2016.

Re: California bans private prisons

#258

Post by ska »

ekianjo wrote: post #230
arcticbull wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to your $600 epipen. Seriously. Canada doesn't even have socialized drug insurance for prescriptions and it costs $100 and in the UK $38. Drugs would be, in a perfect system with no socialist intervention, priced at whatever value they provide you. If that's your life, it's very expensive. There's no room for mercy in capitalism. There's a reason Sovaldi is $84,000 and it's not because it costs a lot to mak…

> Canada doesn't even have socialized drug insurance for prescriptions and it costs $100 and in the UK $38 It's kind of easy for a country to dictate drug prices when they had no hand in developing them. Now show me a country like the US that develops just as many drugs. Ah, you can't, there is none.

You really aren't making the point you think you are. We are talking about a drug discovered (Poland) more than 100 years ago, isolated (Japan) more than 100 years ago, synthesized (England, Germany) more than 100 years ago. Then wrapped in a device basically developed by the US army in the 1970s. So how does letting an mostly uninvolved private US company set prices arbitrarily lead to more of this sort of development? For completeness, I'll note Merck did real work in improving the delivery mechanism (after a couple of recalls), but the heavy lifting was as above. Merck is of course German, not US, but it went through one or two US companies before landing there, if I recall correctly, and then Mylan acquired marketing rights in the US. Without new development, Mylan ran the price up about 6x over the 2009-2016 years (to a margin of about 95%) , which is what caused all the pricing fuss.

More generally, while I know what you are getting at you have to be careful with this sort of statement "this is the only way to do the drug development" is a pharma industry talking point but it is largely bullshit (although not entirely, the model run in the US does make it quite expensive and that can't be fully supported the way it is on, say, generics pricing).

It is true that the US is more productive in this space per capita than most places (but not as much as many think) , but it is really difficult to determine if this is primarily due to fundamental capacity, or due to financial incentives...

Re: California bans private prisons

#259

Post by coryrc »

aqme28 wrote: post #244
coryrc wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're a major constituant of the Democratic Party and you don't get through the primaries without their endorsements, so their positions have much higher weight than your ballot. Private prisons aren't always worse: Florida study showing lower recividism in private prisons https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249718665_A_Compara... When you see "Private Prisons Are The Worst!!!" check the studies to see if the…

I understand that the prison guard lobby is terrible, but that's not the point. The question isn't "private prisons vs prison lobbying," it's "private prisons vs public prisons." Prison lobbying comes from both.

It's not the buildings that are a problem, it's the people running them. That's either the owners for private prisons or the prison guard union for public prisons. If you say "private prisons are bad for " but there's just as many problems (and mostly the same) with public prisons, then focusing your hate on private prisons isn't working on the real problem. The legislature sets the standards for both and could actually fix the situation, they have both the responsibility and the power to do so.

Re: California bans private prisons

#260

Post by arcticbull »

dlphn___xyz wrote: post #247
arcticbull wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to your $600 epipen. Seriously. Canada doesn't even have socialized drug insurance for prescriptions and it costs $100 and in the UK $38. Drugs would be, in a perfect system with no socialist intervention, priced at whatever value they provide you. If that's your life, it's very expensive. There's no room for mercy in capitalism. There's a reason Sovaldi is $84,000 and it's not because it costs a lot to mak…

why does the healthcare discussion always regress to capitalism vs socialism? everyone cites canada as the ideal model of social healthcare but forget to mention the long wait times and the fact that their population is only a fraction of the US. i think our system could use some tweaks but throwing it out altogether for a socialist program is not it.

No we cite the entire OECD except America each of which rank higher in healthcare quality by WHO standards and cost at most half as much. It’s like a poor student saying “just because I’m the bottom of my class doesn’t make me dumb” — in a way, no but in a much more relevant and important way, definitely. It shows relative to your peers you suck at the task at hand.

It comes down to this debate because the pro market people offer zero solutions other than staying the course and the course is straight down. Offer something better.

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