101–106 of 106 posts
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Are the drug companies forced to provide the drugs at that price?
No one is forced to sell drugs to Medicare patients.
But you do you drug company.
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$300k - after taxes - is not buying you a lavish lifestyle of in most major cities. It's probably not even getting you comfortably into one of the better neighborhoods, unless your partner is the bread winner. Chicago is one of the most affordable major cities in the US - and $300k isn't gonna do more than have you comfortably living in a small condo in the better neighborhoods.
A household income of $220k puts you in the 95th percentile of income in Chicago[0]. Is the bar for comfortable that you get to rub elbows with Bezos? [0] https://statisticalatlas.com/place/Illinois/Chicago/Househol...
I'm not sure why we think this is only something for people who rub elbows with Bezos or for people who bought a house 10 years ago.
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A household income of $220k puts you in the 95th percentile of income in Chicago[0]. Is the bar for comfortable that you get to rub elbows with Bezos? [0] https://statisticalatlas.com/place/Illinois/Chicago/Househol...
No, the bar for comfortable is being able to afford a decent place to raise a family in a decent neighborhood. I'm not sure why we think this is only something for people who rub elbows with Bezos or for people who bought a house 10 years ago.
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You get into Nanny zone and hiring out all your chores with more time available.
I used to that for the most part already on a third of the income (for a 2 bedroom apartment and no kids to be fair). Biweekly maid service where they clean the dishes, the house, and do laundry. It wouldn't be much more expensive to change that to weekly and include cooking too if you wanted. If you wanted to get a full time nanny though that's probably out of reach, but I don't understand why you even had children…
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$300k (household) isn't upper-middle, before the term became diluted to mean "middle, but with a little left over every month"—the upper-middle of Fussell's Class and The Official Preppy Handbook - Good private school for a kid or two (guess what one of the bribes to Thomas was...). Not gonna get away with much less than $25k/yr/kid, there, and it goes up from there. - Long vacations expensive places a couple times a…
I don't know anything about the broader argument here. I responded to a comment that said that $300k/yr would only get you a small place in one of the nicer neighborhoods in Chicago. That's categorically false. Mortgage calculators are premised on other expenses scaling with your housing cost, and capture the other bulletpoints ("country club membership", really?). Someone with a $300k/yr income will end up with an e…
Yeah, I know. I wasn't raised part of that class and don't hang out with many people in it, either :-)
Books I've read on the topic and the handful of people I know in it, yeah, that's just what you do if you're in That Set. Country clubs.
>Supreme Court might be sympathetic to some of the industry’s arguments No surprise here, the US Supreme Court is now just like the rest of the US Gov, they are very happy to take bribes. And due to how the US Gov is structured, no way to stop them from holding out their hand. So getting appointed to that Court is a great gig, you do not even have to care about the law these days.
The Supreme court is/will be bounded by the fact the inflation reduction act is law. This isn't like abortion where there is no federal law passed by congress and signed by the president. I'm very happy to see this. And surely pricing transparency is good: we're gonna see just how this works. Further I'm glad the US government is challenging corporate America. Corporations implicitly threaten the US public saying if…
In fact, googling those last five words turns up an industry lawsuit alleging precisely that:
https://phrma.org/resource-center/Topics/Access-to-Medicines...
I am certain that some members of the Court will agree, and others will not. It will come down to a count of votes. And I strongly doubt that I will agree with the reasoning that justifies those votes, either way.