61–70 of 106 posts
Obligatory reminder that "negotiations" in this case just means that Medicare dictates a price.
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> Justice Thomas said (in 2001) that for the pay they receive no one would take the job if not for the gifts^H^H^H^H^H bribes. FTFY. As of 2022, the salary of a US Supreme Court Justice is $274,200 per year. The Chief Justice of the United States, who is the head of the Supreme Court, receives a slightly higher salary of $286,700 per year. Of course no one will take that job. How much does a banana cost again? $10?
How much could a good lawyer with a long and distinguished career make in the private market? That's how much we should be paying our judges. If you want the best you have to at least be moderately competitive with what's on offer. I have a similar opinion about legislators -- we probably want top tier doctors and executives and lawyers as our legislators. Being elected to office should not be a step down in their li…
That would maybe make sense if we were able to reign in their conflicts of interest. The private market would set a fiduciary duty on many lawyers in a number of capacities, but nothing like that exists for the SCOTUS.
As it stands now, there is no way to hold the justices (or really any elected or appointed official) accountable.
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Selling at an artificially low price will result in shortages. Always does. Short of nationalizing these companies, there is no way to "force" them to produce anything.
We are talking about prescription drugs here right? This isn't about something people want it's about something doctors are prescribing individuals for their health or survival. Regular supply and demand should not apply here. If it does this is an indication of another pharma industry issue -- creating consumer demand for drugs through advertising. Using goodRX has really opened my eyes to the shady practices of dru…
There is a whole class of ailments that people could cure on their own by getting to a healthy weight, exercising, and not eating garbage. But it's easier to ask your doctor for a pill.
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Sure, if you want much less innovation: "IRA means 40% reduction in new drugs over 10 years, report finds" https://bio.news/health/ira-impact-new-drugs-pharmaceutical-...
I don't think they're fighting to keep the price on rare lifesaving drugs. They are fighting to keep the price of insulin, cholesterol medication, blood pressure medication, and various other "public good medications" commonly used by medicare recipients as high as possible. Its the same tactic doctors use when dealing with medicare. I've been to several doctors that won't take it. The reasoning is obvious: your insu…
I don’t think it’s a “tactic”, at least in that it’s not a maneuver meant to get the other party to do something differently or win a battle or something, it’s just frequently not worth it for the doctor to bother with insurance, in many cases. The insurance companies can make it arbitrarily hard to get paid, and they’ve gotten so far up there on that abusiveness scale that in many cases, it’s better for sanity, business, focus, etc to just lose those patients that have that insurance.
Source: I’ve worked on billing for a small doctor’s office that eventually decided to drop insurance altogether for life enjoyment rather than monetary reasons. It was incredibly painful working with eg some of the Blue Crosses. It made us want to just not deal with them, regardless of the amount of money, and we eventually did, almost purely for happiness reasons. Not dealing with insurance anymore was a big quality of life improvement. The patients could still file claims themselves, which let the insurance purchaser experience the product, and we always steered people towards Aetna when they asked about less horrible insurance companies, away from Blue Cross and UnitedHealthcare.
An industry that heavily lobbied for a law which heavily boosts their profits wants to heavily lobby against the destruction of such a law? Shocked. /s Honestly I see no theoretical benefit to not allowing the government to negotiate. Maybe there is a practical one?
Sure, if you want much less innovation: "IRA means 40% reduction in new drugs over 10 years, report finds" https://bio.news/health/ira-impact-new-drugs-pharmaceutical-...
1) Explicitly fund research with public dollars, then, not make people who need drugs that aren't even very new fund it.
2) Stop paying to fund everyone else's research (I think this is about 90% bullshit, seeing as other developed countries have strong drug research sectors and I doubt that's solely because of their sales in the US, but even if it's not bullshit—why the hell would we do that?)
Every time someone tries to defend the status quo, they seem not to notice that they're defending a very shitty version of what they're advocating for, even if all their claims are true.
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How about we dictate a price on whatever industry you happen to be in? Maybe your product cost billions of dollars to develop, but how about we force you to sell it to everyone for peanuts? There is no logical reason that pharma should be on the receiving end of all this hate. Especially considering that their job is literally to save lives.
> How about we dictate a price on whatever industry you happen to be in? Maybe your product cost billions of dollars to develop, but how about we force you to sell it to everyone for peanuts? If I work in an industry where human life depends on it, yes! I entirely agree . This is not a market to corner, regardless of your innovation and how clever you are. > Especially considering that their job is literally to save…
It means no one will do that work.
>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.
Justice Thomas said (in 2001) that for the pay they receive no one would take the job if not for the gifts.
With that being said, I’m not surprised in the slightest someone as corrupt as Thomas would have this opinion. Ginni Thomas and Clarence’s defense of her has forever tarnished the reputation of the Supreme Court and I don’t want to hear another word from his office. His replacement honestly cannot come soon enough.
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> What's the difference in lifestyle between 300K and 500K? 500K and 1M? Pretty massive, particularly when it comes to taking vacations and bringing friends who can’t afford them with you. $300k barely permits that domestically. $1 or 2mm lets you do that comfortably all over the world. Or, alternatively, single handedly saving restaurants you love or a buddy’s small business.
Why do you have to have ultimate power and oversight of an entire branch of government AND flit comfortably all over the world? Shouldn't ultimate power be its own reward? That and ten times the salary of most people…
I don't think SCOTUS judges need a multimillion-dollar salary. Just pointing out that low single-digit millions is well below the threshold past which spending becomes performative.
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Huh? $300k/yr will get you pretty much anything you want in Chicagoland. By standard consumption patterns, that's an $800k house. An $800k Chicago house is quite large. It's also a 4-bdr condo even in some parts of the Loop.
$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…
Someone with a $300k/yr income will end up with an extraordinarily nice home, by any standards, in Chicago.
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It may be idealistic, but I think that those elected to office or appointed to influential positions such as judges should do so largely out of a sense of public service instead of personal enrichment. For people who are motivated by greed or power, no amount of compensation will be enough, they will always be tempted to to increase their power and wealth by taking bribes or political favors. Pay them a respectable s…
I don’t understand this position. It feels to me like you’re proposing we financially exploit those who are magnanimous and duty-driven enough to tolerate public service. Do you have the same opinion regarding other organizations operating for public good, rather than financial self interest? For instance, what you’re saying feels logically equivalent to me to saying we should tax charities more heavily since they ar…
People who are drawn to positions of power and also highly motivated by personal wealth seem like particularly bad choices if you want to avoid corruption, so keeping the salary low may sufficiently disincentivise this sort of person from entering the public sector.
On the other hand, public sector work is harder in many ways, so not providing equal or superior compensation may discourage many people who are entirely scrupulous but not foolish enough to both take on the extra burden of public sector work and make less money at the same time.
> It feels to me like you’re proposing we financially exploit those who are magnanimous and duty-driven enough to tolerate public service.
I understand that it may seem foolish or unjust, but it feels unreasonable to me to suggest it’s exploitative to pay someone a 97th-percentile salary[0] just because it’s not commensurate with private sector peers in a highly compensated industry.
> For instance, what you’re saying feels logically equivalent to me to saying we should tax charities more heavily since they aren’t driven by greed, or that we should underpay active duty military personnel since they’re driven more by love for their country than by self interest.
The problem as it applies to judges and legislators is that they represent a very small group of people with the ability to make high-stakes decisions that impact a large number of people, and their decisions are enforced by the power of the state.
Charities don’t have the power of the state behind their decisions, and personnel within the military apparatus tend not to have much individual power, so the incentives for corruption are much more limited (and if it does happen, much less impactful).
> It seems to me that the current system isn’t working, and leaning further into the aspect that makes it not work is not a good idea.
Is there some proof that under-compensation is the main source of the corruption in the current system? I have no evidence either way, but my sense is that it is not.
[0] https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/ at $250k