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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Again look at the second link from politifact, New York is arguably the best case scenario for this kind of policy because there's a very high per capita income and a high degree of wealth inequality. I prefer to err on the side of caution and specifically weight against my own confirmation bias. The more you support something, the more skeptical you need to be of yourself; any time something starts looking like a free lunch alarm bells should be going off, because there is (almost) no such thing.
I fixed it.
Edited by CaptainCapsase on Aug 21st 2020 at 8:12:40 AM
All of your links are broken because you're putting them in parenthesis, which gets parsed as being part of the URL and therefore breaks. You need to either properly pothole them or just put a space after the URL.
Also maybe don't tell people "just check the links" in response to the post where they tell you the links are broken.
Edited by NativeJovian on Aug 21st 2020 at 8:10:08 AM
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.Removing the parentheses on the RAND link didn't even fix it as far as I can tell.
Also, I did check the second link. I don't know how you're concluding that it supports New York; hell the only clear thing I can see there is that the study that does support the number was based on 2016 tax rates. I'm not even sure what the NY comparison is doing there, and about all it's fervently providing support for is that it wouldn't save a trillion dollars. Okay...?
Please spare me the moralising.
Edited by RainehDaze on Aug 21st 2020 at 1:13:52 PM
For ~speedyboris, since they asked in particular about DeJoy's House hearing, from What the Fuck Just Happened Today:
Postmaster General Louis DeJoy testified that he is “extremely highly confident” that mail-in ballots sent seven days before Election Day will be properly processed and counted. In testimony before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, DeJoy said the agency will continue to prioritize ballots over other mail, but urged the public to “vote early.” DeJoy also defended recent operational changes to the Postal Service, saying the effort is in service of making the mail agency run more efficiently, adding that the USPS will make “dramatic changes” after the election. DeJoy testified that he had never spoken to Trump about the Postal Service, adding that he also had never spoken to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin or White House chief of staff Mark Meadows about the changes. (CBS News / Wall Street Journal / New York Times / New York Times / Politico / Washington Post / NBC News)
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I'm not moralizing. If you come up with any answer when assessing a course of action you want to take OTHER than "it's marginally less terrible than all the alternatives" you need to check, recheck, and triple check your assumptions, because there's a good possibility you're bullshitting yourself with a simple solution for a complicated problem. That there's only two sources I can find that support this conclusion about MFA suggests that it's actually not very clear at all; 2 papers is nothing even in hard sciences where things are a lot less ambiguous than in economics.
Edited by CaptainCapsase on Aug 21st 2020 at 8:20:53 AM
Seriously, trying to reply to a post and then I check the page and another three lines have been added to it constantly and then again and they've been rewritten is confusing.
Now, the only point I explicitly questioned was the point about a "significant amount of people" in the middle class paying more. Both because of lack of clarity over significant amount, and what is meant by the middle class. So we've refined this down to "those earning over $120,000", and in political concerns therefore about 4-5% of the population, because worrying about the opinions of the people who already aren't voting for you at all is not the most productive use of time.
If those who can already afford health insurance wind up paying about the same, but the excesses of the system are constrained where people really get gouged and there isn't a constant "death or bankruptcy" choice, then I'd call it a plus. If it could be a starting point for trying to rein in illogically high charged prices too... I wouldn't put a fixed point on who should pay more.
I wonder what percentage of people's healthcare costs are in the form of co-pays and deductibles and all the other things that seem to defeat the logical point of insurance existing in the first place. And the sheer ridiculousness that is out of network problems—not as part of the current discussion, though. Just in general.
Edited by RainehDaze on Aug 21st 2020 at 1:30:58 PM
Okay. *cracks knuckles* Let's do this.
It is roughly true that universal, single-payer healthcare, to be paid for effectively, would slightly decrease the take-home pay of middle-class earners. Of course, the actual numbers would depend widely on how the taxes are distributed and the actual cost of care, among many other things, but let's move on. We have examples of countries with single-payer or socialized medicine taking more in taxes.
The largest reason for this may seem surprising, though. It's because employers pay a huge chunk of insurance costs for their employees (when they offer coverage at all). I don't remember the exact figures, but my company pays well over two thirds of my actual premiums. If businesses are no longer on the hook for that, shifting the actual burden of paying for it to the individual taxpayer, then of course a larger share comes out of their taxes.
Any plan for paying for universal healthcare in the U.S. must take this into account, either taxing employers an amount equivalent to what they were contributing in employee insurance premiums or some other similar solution. Heck, maybe employers could take what they're paying in premiums and give it to their employees. That would be nice.
Regardless, the entire argument is disingenuous, because if you add up the total amount people pay for insurance and the total amount they pay for healthcare and average it out, people pay less overall even if their taxes go up. If you go from paying $10K in taxes and $3K in uncovered medical costs in a year to paying $12K in taxes and $0 in medical costs, you're ahead.
It's just really difficult to explain math to some people. Slogans and propaganda are a lot easier, and, "You'll have less take-home pay," makes a great sound bite for right-wing organizations to put on the news to scare us.
Edited by Fighteer on Aug 21st 2020 at 8:43:45 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
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Pharmaceuticals isn't actually a phenomenally profitable industry beyond some particularly egregious cases. The numbers involved with pharma are huge-how can it not be when it costs about 2.6 billion USD to bring a product to market-but the actual return on investment in pharma is middling
, and you have to eat a huge number of failures for every success. The best way to trim fat there would be programs designed to improve Americans' health, ie policies designed to reduce consumption of unhealthy foods, increase exercise, ect. Examples of this include taxes or outright bans on excessive portion sizes for soft drinks, policies designed to make cities more walkable and eliminate food deserts.
Edited by CaptainCapsase on Aug 21st 2020 at 9:04:28 AM
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Yes, price fixing and price negotiations are other components of this. I was focusing specifically on the misleading assertion that "healthcare costs X per capita, universal healthcare costs X * [population], that has to be taxed, we're going to pay more".
Dude, if you're just going to quote right-wing propaganda, we have nothing to talk about. That is blatantly false, as shown by other countries that have much lower pharmaceutical and device costs and still have just as much innovation as in the U.S.
Edited by Fighteer on Aug 21st 2020 at 9:04:21 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
That's not right wing propaganda. I actually work in this sector, there's actually an ongoing crisis as the cost of R&D and new drug development is skyrocketing while profits aren't increasing to match, and this spans across national borders, contrary to the typical "big pharma bad" narratives.
Edited by CaptainCapsase on Aug 21st 2020 at 9:09:01 AM
Cut into pharmaceuticals profits and what gets slashed isn't marketing budgets its R&D., ie me. Sorry if I'm not interested, maybe it's just self interest, but I think it's really short sighted to take aim at the steadily dwindling profit margins of pharmaceuticals.
Edited by CaptainCapsase on Aug 21st 2020 at 9:14:08 AM
Sure, but the point isn't "Abenomics is great" it's that as Japan shows that we can afford more debt. Ergo debt-hawkery is completely irrational when we have actual problems to deal with.
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang![]()
The reason that companies like Alphabet and Amazon dump so much into R&D is because they have LUDICROUS returns on investment. Like double to triple that of pharmaceuticals. If you want to find a way to reduce drug prices without stifling innovation you need to find ways to reduce manufacturing and distribution costs, or increase the frequency of blockbuster drugs.
Edited by CaptainCapsase on Aug 21st 2020 at 9:34:46 AM
Here's a source regarding the current crisis in skyrocketing drug development costs
, it's actually at the point where in many cases we don't even break even on new drugs, especially given how many recent approvals are orphan drugs with a narrow market.
Edited by CaptainCapsase on Aug 21st 2020 at 9:26:56 AM
The largest single source of medical research in the United States is the National Institutes of Health, not any private company.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

404, page not available. Both links.
Anyway, checked in more detail and it's down to the top 10% of the population (
). Which is where this breaks down into electoral calculus: it's approximately a 50-50 split currently in voter income by party, with Republicans slightly favoured above these values (going by 2016 exit polls).
Most of these people do vote (80%+).
So, you're looking at about 4% of the population which is unequally distributed, and the question is: what amount of this bloc is voting Democrat in the current political climate and would swap to the Republican ticket, after having made all the assumptions about taxation that leads to this question. Quite possibly not much.
I don't see a value in constantly going "we shouldn't consider doing something of benefit to large portions of the population because of the potential additional tax burden on the upper 10% of the population even though they would also benefit".
Edited by RainehDaze on Aug 21st 2020 at 1:08:03 PM