Due to an uptick in posts that invariably revolve around "look what this transphobic or racist asshole said on twitter/in reddit comments" we have enabled this reminder on every post for the time being.
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Canonically Twilight Sparkle was so bad at running Equestria that she managed to balkanize it into three ethnostates, so there might even be an example in normal MLP.
you’re right on the money. anywhere that used to be considered “old west” is teaming with vampires. why do you think coffin maker was such a popular profession back then? also company towns had church’s to keep vampires from taking over the means of production. does this not get taught in american schools anymore?
Your comment is nonsense. If I was every US citizen, I'd be voting unanimously, deciding unanimously, etc. There would be no one to lie to. That being said, I'm heavily assuming that by becoming every US citizen, I'd be beholden to some asinine rule about not breaking up our glorious jailhouse of nations and to keep the US hegemony alive.
It's like... Extremely straightforward and spelled out. It calls out the tendency for people to get annoyed about "hypocrisy" online, when in reality they are just seeing two non-overlapping groups of people who seperately believe two points which contradict eachother. Which isn't hypocritical.
Like... Idk shitty example but "everyone hates violet (the new deadlock character) for being a quirky girl, but everyone LOOOOVES Paige for being a quirky girl"
Like no those are actually two seperate groups of people
It means that it's easy to see the various opinions you see online and think they're all coming from the same group of people, leading you to believe that "insert random group of people thinks opinion A and opinion B are both true even though they contradict each other".
This is due to the anonymity of the internet leading to less distinction between people, the existence of social bubbles, as well as news reporting on social media being incredibly biased, and human tendency to sort things into binary categories.
I think a good example is the price of video gaming. When an expensive game, console or PC part is announced, people rightfully point out that gaming is becoming unaffordable for many people. And very often someone replies "well they're only doing that because you keep paying, either stop complaining or stop rewarding their greed."
This conflates two groups of people: the people complaining about being priced out, and the people who can and do happily pay those prices. In reality these are two separate groups, but because they're posting in the same spaces, they get treated as one group.
The meme serves as a reminder to think critically when you encounter seemingly contradictory opinions online.
I mean, technically it does. The issue starts at the pharmaceutical companies, and compounds from there. Hospitals, etc actually add very little to the overall expense; shit's just really that expensive from the get go. You could let hospitals mark shit up the same percentage they do now, and only make the cost from the pharma companies lower, and you'd still come out orders of magnitude cheaper than things are right now.
are you against universal healthcare? because if yes, then you can present another reason for why you (and other americans) come to that conclusion.
and if no? then you aren't the topic of conversation. you're just saying "not all americans" when this post was very obviously about the ones who don't want universal healthcare. you involved yourself in a conversation that wasn't about you to say "this isn't about me" instead of just shutting the fuck up. you added no value to the conversation. i wanted to be sure before declaring your point worthless to the conversation at hand. now that I am sure it is: please shut the fuck up.
As you will see elsewhere, I replied because I do not believe Americans by and large believe their medicine costs as much as they are charged for it. I do believe they are by and large ignorant of the mechanisms and structures that dictate how much they will be paying for their medicine. This ignorance may fuel their belief that medicine must always cost this much, and the idea that having Universal Healthcare would in effect bankrupt the Government simply. Its not simple; people are complex.
see, that's a point worth entering the conversation over.
I would still argue that a "belief that medicine must always cost this much" and belief that "medicine costs as much as they are charged for it" are functionally identical at the level of the end consumer. It's a purely semantic differentiation neither our approach (educate) nor their effect (no universal healthcare) meaningfully changes.
Hello, YRUZ. You communicate with me in a way that comes across as condescending and dismissive, bordering on asshole-ish. I know we can become jaded by using the internet, but we should try to remember that there is a person with feelings and dreams and an entire life on the other end of your communiques, not just words on a screen.
I do not wish to continue talking to you, as I do not feel like I am being taken in good faith or approached in the spirit of understanding. I wish you good health and hope you have a good day.
Fair. I concede I'm being a dick here. My initial question was already written in annoyance and intended in bad faith and when it got misunderstood (and misconstrued), it just made me more annoyed.
You don't deserve the ill will I've brought to this conversation and I should have been more considerate. Also understand that I am writing this as I am still annoyed by this conversation, but I recognize that should not have guided my way of conversation as much as it did.
Often when people in the US show their thousand dollar prescription refills, I like to look up the PBS pricing for that item in Australia, and see how much the "private cost" is (i.e. with no government subsidy). Its usually 10x cheaper.
I would say that depends on if you want to correct modern wages to how they should be if they followed inflation since 1970, which would now be like a $65/hr $22/hr minimum wage. One can dream
Not true, that graph you are thinking of was referencing average wage with productivity(How much money someone is paying someone else to do something), when you compare median wage with productivity it pretty much matches.
Secondly, US healthcare labor costs are somewhat inflated because American medical associations limit the number of doctors that enter the market every year so that there is always a shortage, therefore driving up labor costs.
There's no fucking way the concerta I take every day to have my brain function correctly costs $1200+ a month to make. This is just an extremely rare case of health insurance actually helping me by paying that every 30 days.
That works out to about $4.95 USD if you have a concession card (which you get if you're a pensioner, on disability support/have a carer etc). Without a concession card its $46.99 AUD (~$32 USD), however most people will pay the medicare (our public health system) cost of $25 AUD ($17.50 USD).
God I wish I still had access to my concerta. After an entire childhood of my parents insisting I didn't have ADHD with absolutely no attempt to test me, I was finally tested and diagnosed at 19 years old on the recommendation of a therapist and a few friends and eventually was prescribed concerta after about 6 months of testing different medications and supplements.
Luckily, I didn't have to pay for my prescription thanks to medi-cal, but unfortunately at the end of 2025 they suddenly lowered the age cap for being on your parents' plan to 22 years old, so I was notified and kicked off AFTER the benefits window had closed for my workplace. So I've gone almost a year now with no access to medication or doctor's visits, and in that time a lot of the things concerta had helped me with have begun to slip. Luckily at the start of next year I'll be on work health insurance, but I'm going to have to find an entirely new set of doctors and probably have to sit through a bunch more appointments before getting re-prescribed.
Losing Medi-cal is a qualifying life event that lets you enroll in workplace benefits regardless of whether open enrollment is open. They didn’t let you?
It was a qualifying life event, but there are still stipulations to submitting those. I needed to submit the petition within a month of being notified that I was getting dropped, and my parents literally just forgot to give me the letter that was sent to our house until over a month after it had been sent. I basically got fucked from both sides.
I find it hilarious how every 4 weeks when I get my biologic infusion I get to see what bs random numbers they made up to "bill" my insurance with.
My infusion is around 700 dollars (USD) in other countries per month. The max price ive seen listed from other countries is like 12k (USD) per infusion, but many countries are between 400-500 (USD) cash pay. This last month my infusion center decided 45k made sense to throw on the "bill" lol
A few years ago I was quoted $30k per eye for a procedure that would save my sight - with good insurance. I went to Tijuana for it and was charged $2k total for both. The doctor was horrified to hear the price I was told I would need to pay. Apparently in the last few years the price has skyrocketed - $80k each and usually no longer covered by insurance.
The procedure involves getting some riboflavin eye drops and then staring unblinking at a UV light for 30 minutes. The bottle of drops cost my Mexican opthalmologist $8.
The "how will we pay for it??" crowd always seems to think our current healthcare system is 100% free and that you can easily just walk into any doctor's office and get treated
I work in something adjacent to this, this is basically not true at all and a catch 22. The main issue is that R&D has gotten much much more expensive year after year, most drugs don't get more than 5 or so years of commercialization before patents expire, and the US being the only market where you can charge something that allows you to make up for the 10 drugs that fail for every approved one.
Europe and the rest of the world are basically getting subsidized by the US healthcare and R&D spend, things could get cheaper if insurance gets streamlined and healthcare labor costs are brought down but is not as easy or plausible as most people think to have healthcare as cheap as in other places. Many of the things that would actually bring costs down are political suicide.
Things could change somewhat because of strategies used to reduce R&D costs such as big pharma buying small biotech's that achieve success in pre-clinical and phase I trials instead of spending time and money themselves finding drugs that work, and moving faster with admin stuff in order to bring a drug to market faster gives you extra time to make back the investment, which should somewhat lower costs. The FDA is also trying to reduce the time it needs to make all the paperwork to approve a drug but based on what people I used to work with tell me it isn't gonna work particularly well.
So I predict either Europe starts paying up the actual costs of healthcare or the US is gonna keep suffering from high drug costs.
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u/Misicks0349What a fool you are. I'm a god. How can you kill a god?18h agoedited 18h ago
The main issue is that R&D has gotten much much more expensive year after year, most drugs don't get more than 5 or so years of commercialization before patents expire, and the US being the only market where you can charge something that allows you to make up for the 10 drugs that fail for every approved one.
I mean maybe, but at the same time:
High drug prices are not justified by industry’s spending on research and development (R&D), argue experts in The BMJ today.
Aris Angelis and colleagues point out that from 1999 to 2018, the world’s 15 largest biopharmaceutical companies spent more on selling, general, and administrative activities (which includes marketing) than on R&D and that most new medicines developed during this period offered little or no clinical benefit over existing treatments.
By refocusing their spending, they say drug companies “could provide more innovative drugs at affordable prices” and they call for government action to encourage research and development oriented to public health priorities.
[...]
The biopharmaceutical industry has long argued that high prices are needed to sustain R&D for new medicines. And while the authors acknowledge that there are large financial risks associated with bringing new medicines to market, they say analysis of drug company spending relative to products raises questions about this claim.
For example, publicly available financial reports from 1999 to 2018 show that the 15 largest biopharmaceutical companies had total revenues of $7.7tr. Over this period, they spent $2.2tr on costs related to selling, general, and administrative activities and $1.4tr on R&D.
Most of the same companies also spent more buying their own stocks, a practice known as share buybacks, than on R&D during this period, note the authors, which raises questions about commitments to truly valuable and risky biopharmaceutical research.
The justification of high drug prices to offset R&D spending also ignores the sizeable public investments in drug discovery and development, they add. This means that society is potentially paying twice for new drugs, first in the form of publicly subsidised research and second through high product prices.
(from here, they're summarising a peer-reviewed article thats linked there, unfortunately its behind a paywall)
A lot of it is also that drug companies aren't exactly thrifty spenders, whilst some of the money that US consumers pay for pharmaceuticals does go to R&D I think its a leap for people (in general, not you specifically) to claim that this justifies high drug prices. Much of the profit earned from a single drug sale does not flow into R&D spending, and whilst it may be true that US consumers contribute more towards R&D through drug purchases than other countries do I think the claim that high drug prices are because of R&D should be treated as somewhat suspect, insofar as it doesn't tell us the whole story. Pharma companies are there to make a profit, and therefore a lot of the profit made via drug sales go into other profit-making ventures like advertisements, stock buybacks etc, and not directly into R&D.
Many of the things that would actually bring costs down are political suicide.
Like, say, subsidising R&D with taxes more to make up the difference? Yeah US voters would riot, honestly shit like this is a public good and should be funded governments more (not just the US government, of course). As far as I'm concerned its similar to Public Transport spending: we accept taxes funding public transport because we realise it is a public good to have it, but it's also because no one wants to pay $50 every time they step on to a bus to go to work. I don't see why it should be any different with drugs.
(If you live in a US state that doesn't have good public transport then replace "public transport" with "road maintenance" and "pay $50 every time they step on to a bus" with "pay a toll fee for every road the drive on".)
what an incredibly unnuanced take - yes, the cost of manufacturing that medication is significantly cheaper than the cost of the medication, but aside from manufacturing costs billions of dollars are being spent towards R&D on many different experimental drugs, with only 1 of 10 actually hitting the market - that singular drug needs to make up for the costs of all the other 9 that failed
at the same time, yes pharma companies are also exploiting this fact to charge exorbitant fees for medications and there should be price negotiations between the government and pharma companies - it's just that I think a lot of people overestimate how much money this would actually save
What are you even arguing? The post just said "the price you pay at the hospital isn't the price that the medicine actually costs" there's no estimation about how much it would save. You both agree that it would save money.
"there's no estimation about how much it would save"
maybe I'm just reading between the lines but imo the replier is pretty clearly implying that medications should be significantly cheaper than they actually are when the truth is that the savings would be a lot more minimal than expected
It's not really true that other countries really have it figured out. USA is the lifeline of the pharmaceutical industry. Medicine is cheap in Europe because pharma recovers R&D costs in the US, and sells to other markets mostly as an afterthought.
Due to the trump administration shenanigans, where they want drugs to be priced at the same price as in Europe, pharma companies are considering just giving medicine away for free in many of the cheaper markets in order to not lower prices in the US, because they flat out can't afford to sell it cheaper in the US.
R&D costs are getting more and more expensive every year, and with most medications barely getting 5 years for commercialization and having to make up for the other 10 drugs that failed, there is not as much leeway as people think. This is on top of the patent cliff that is coming in 2028-2030.
It could get cheaper if they figure out the insurance-hospital dickmeasuring contest, and lower healthcare labor costs. But healthcare and drug development really is just getting more and more expensive every year.
It's what's covering stock buybacks and dividends for shareholders and billionaire CEOs and shit, actually. R&D is billions of dollars cheaper than all that.
what other country has had this figured out? the way things currently are, Americans are essentially subsidizing the cost of all the other countries who "figured this out" with their increased prices - if the US government were to negotiate then prices would decrease somewhat, but then you're stuck with an option where it's only decreased slightly and Americans are still subsidizing the cost for other countries, or every country but the US will pay significantly more for future medications to even things out, and Americans will pay moderately less than they did before
in no case would the US government negotiating prices cause prices to drop as low as they currently are in other countries
R&D costs keep going up and up year after year, there is no other country that spends as much as the US in R&D by a long shot. The harsh truth is that much less treatments would be developed every year without the US spending as much as they do.
jfc you know that you're allowed to disagree with my opinion without wildly twisting my words, right? I am not defending the US healthcare system by any means - I hate the current system, support Medicare for All, and my comment even says that I support drug negotiations and think that they will lower drug prices somewhat.
Hate the current system, support M4A, but still run cover for the industry by parroting the same tired talking points about R&D like most of that work isn’t done by universities anyways.
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