#Whiners

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Capitalists hate capitalism

As the Marxist agitator Adam Smith once said, “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.”

Smith understood that capitalists hate capitalism. They don’t want to compete with one another, because that would interfere with their ability to raise the prices their customers pay and reduce the wages they pay their workers. Thus Peter Thiel’s anticapitalist rallying cry, “competition is for losers,” or Warren Buffett’s extreme horniness for businesses with “wide, sustainable moats.”

These anti-capitalist capitalists love big government. They love no-bid military contracts, they love ACA subsidies for health insurance companies, they love Farm Bill cash for Cargill and Monsanto. What they don’t love is markets.

Case in point: pharma giant Merck. The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) includes a provision that allows Medicare to (finally) start (weakly) negotiating the prices it pays for (a tiny handful of) drugs. If you’re scratching your head and wondering if you understood that correctly, let me assure you, you did: the US government is currently prohibited from negotiating drug prices when it bargains with pharma companies.

In other words: Medicare simply pays a pharma companies — whose products build on billions in publicly funded basic research, whose taxes are reduced by billions in research credits, whose patents are backstopped by billions in enforcement — whatever it demands.

To do otherwise, you see, would be socialism. Markets are “efficient” because they “discover prices” through bidding and selling. In the case of publicly purchased drugs, the price that Uncle Sucker “discovers” is inevitably “a titanic sum” or possibly “add a couple more zeroes, wouldya?”

Enter the IRA. Starting in 2026, Medicare will be permitted to negotiate the price of ten (10) drugs. The negotiations will use the prices of other drugs from the dysfunctional, monopolized market as a starting point and go up from there. The negotiations go on for three years, and there are multiple stages where pharma companies can hit pause with court challenges:

https://prospect.org/health/2023-05-11-regulators-bungling-drug-price-reform/

The system will not consider the prices that Medicaid or the VA (which are allowed to bargain on prices) pay. Nor will it consider the prices that other governments pay — the US is alone in the wealthy world in offering the anticapitalist price-taking posture when dickering with the pharma companies.

But this isn’t enough for Merck. They are suing the Biden administration over the IRA’s drug pricing plan, arguing that it is an unconstitutional taking under the Fifth Amendment:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/06/merck-sues-biden-administration-over-medicare-drug-price-negotiations.html

Merck is represented by Big Law firm Jones Day, who made their bones by representing the RJ Reynolds from smokers with lung-cancer, arguing that the smoking/cancer link wasn’t scientifically sound. That’s not the only fanciful argument they put before a judge: Jones Day also represented Trump in his attempts to overturn the 2020 election (they also hired Trump’s counsel Don McGahn as he exited the White House’s revolving door).

As Ryan Cooper writes for The American Prospect, Merck’s argument is that the “fair market” value of its drugs can only be discovered if its single largest customer — Medicare — simply pays whatever Merck demands of it:

https://prospect.org/health/2023-06-08-merck-negotiating-drug-prices-unconstitutional/

They explicitly denounce the idea that a powerful buyer should use its market power to extract price concessions from sellers like Merck: “leveraging all federal insurance benefits (amounting to over half of the prescription drug market) to coerce companies to abandon their First and Fifth Amendment rights is a quintessential unconstitutional condition.”

Rebutting this argument, Health Secretary Xavier Becerra said, “negotiating for the best price is as American as apple pie. Since when is competition in this American system a bad thing? Why should we be the patsies around the world and pay the highest prices for medicines?”

The irony here is that Merck itself is a very powerful buyer. Whether negotiating commercial leases, raw materials or wages, Merck is ruthless in extracting the lowest prices it can from its suppliers. The company attained its massive scale the old fashioned way: buying it. By drawing on its nearly limitless access to the capital markets, Merck bought out dozens of its competitors:

https://mergr.com/merck-acquisitions

Anticapitalist investors funded these acquisitions in the expectation that Merck would be able to use its market dominance to pay suppliers less, charge customers more, and use some of the resulting windfall to corrupt and bully its regulators so that it could buy still more companies, charge still higher prices, and impose crushingly low prices on still more suppliers.

The IRA’s drug-bargaining provisions are extraordinarily weak. When they were first mooted in 2021, I talked about how Democrats were caving on muscular drug price controls that would benefit every American (except a handful of pharma shareholders):

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/18/bipartisan-consensus/#corruption

They did so despite wild, bipartisan support for imposing price discipline on Big Pharma, and ending the 300% premium Americans pay for their drugs relative to their cousins abroad. 95% of Democrats support strong price controls; so do 82% of independents — and 71% of Republicans:

https://www.rwjf.org/en/library/research/2021/11/healthcare-affordability--majority-of-adults-support-significant-changes-to-the-health-system.html

No one believes Big Pharma’s scare stories about how this would kill R&D: 93% of Americans reject this idea, including 90% of Republicans. They’re right — nearly all US basic pharma R&D is directly funded by the federal government, with pharma companies privatizing the gains:

https://khn.org/news/article/public-opinion-prescription-drug-prices-democratic-plan/

Despite the fact that really whipping the shit out of Big Pharma would be both popular and good for America, the Dems’ final version of pharma bargaining is a barely-there nothingburger where ten drugs will become slightly cheaper, after the next federal election. This is called “political realism” and it’s a fantasy.

The idea that limiting drug controls to the faintest, most modest measures would make them easier to attain was obvious nonsense from the start, and Merck’s anticapitalist lawsuit proves it. Merck will settle for nothing less than total central planning — by Merck. For Merck, the role of the federal government is to wave through a stream of mergers culminating in Merck’s ownership of every major drug; patent extensions for these drugs to carry them into the 25th century and beyond, and unlimited sums paid for these drugs on Medicare.

Given all that, there would have been no downside to the Dems passing an IRA that subjected the drug companies the same modest, commensense, market-based discipline we see in Canada, or the UK, or France, or Germany, or Switzerland.

But that’s not the IRA we got. Instead of defending a big, visionary program in court, the Biden admin is facing down Jones Day and Merck to defend the most yawn-inducing, incrementalist half-measure. What a wasted opportunity.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/09/commissar-merck#price-giver

[Image ID: A caricature of a businessman with a money-bag for a head and a stickpin bearing the Merck logo, standing atop a pile of bundled $100 bills. At the bottom of the pile, a frowning, disheveled Uncle Sam offers up a $100 bill.]

Image: Flying Logos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Over_$1,000,000_dollars_in_USD_$100_bill_stacks.png

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[sher-ee]

[headlight-district]

🇺🇸🇺🇸 ahh America

[blogtaculous]

Everyone wants to whine about kids but have you ever seen a child engaged in imaginative play? Didn’t think so.

[flamingpen18]

Whiners!!

Certain individuals here have been whining about not wanting to cook because it's way too hot in the house. They cooked last night over a hot oven. Their choice , of course.

So, I decided on BLTs for dinner. I even went so far as to buy the fully cooked bacon. No stove required.

What do ya know?!?! They're now bitching cus BLTs aren't filling enough but they still don't want to cook.

Go hungry for all I care. Mind you, they don't get sick from the heat like I do. Bunch of pansy-assed wimps .

[grazhir]

*rolls eyes*

And yet another person whining about my font choice at AO3.

“Fuck you,” is an appropriate response from me.

Don’t like my style, turn it off (and suffer from all my CSS disappearing). Not everyone loves Verdana and its garbage “smart quotes” — and not every OS can handle certain applicable fonts. You know, not web safe.

Hell, I use Cambria in Scrivener and it has them, they just aren’t as pretty.

Whatever this font is in the Tumblr editor? This at least has decent ones.

[obeymexdanganronpaaskblog]

due of this will you still continue the askblog and rp?

//yes yes! still continue idc what other people say about tumblr bugs, but still, I really annoyed of hate and whining posts about this website bugs, well for me, in my opinion tumblr is hated due bullies and snowflakes inside not because bad moderation, I researched that on google, and that true, I say this because I think no one or no group of peoples should have to be harassed because of it, so.... I hope with some of filtering that I do those annoying posts should go away, and I'll make sure nobody will object this, that's my opinion so hehehehe yeah, haters gonna hate, can't deny

~mod shoko

[maipareshaan]

Again i am sorry i acknowledge this is petty and i don't actually support but lol i love when heller proshippers get harrassed, i hope they get hate, i hope they get into a blocklist and i hope someone makes a anonhateblog for them again shsnsbbsbsvzgzdbb

[wall-maria-around-ba-sing-se]

The wider acceptance of Eustace Winner is already starting

[lordoflucky]

No wait, we can still salvage this- we can have Sebastian Debeste AND Eustace Winner hang on.

His full name is Eustace Sebastian Winner. His dad gave him the name Eustace (because he hates him), his mom choose the middle name Sebastian. Debeste was his mother's maiden name. After aai2, Sebastian chooses to go by his middle name and changes his surname to his mother's maiden to fully separate himself from his father- do you hear me we can still win this

[ami-ven]

Happy National Whiners Day!

[cksdays]

The Lights on Dewar

Look, don't knock those trying to do something good, k? #poem #poetry

The lights go up every year along the main street roadside. Decorated for some town pride (more…)

[zoe-oneesama]

A lack of confidence hits everyone a bit differently.

Episode 45 Part 11

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Season 1, Season 2, Season 3, Season 4, Season 5

Ep 41, Ep 42, Ep 43, Ep 44, Ep 46, Ep 47

Ko-fi | Patreon

[aquietwhyme]

Awww, these poor snowflake fascists don’t like jail, huh?  Poor babies.  I’d bet my entire bank account that most of these fucks have sat around smirking and gloating and making jokes about POC being raped in prison, or about “criminals deserving punishment” when the idea of treating incarcerated people like human beings with rights comes up. Whatever happened to “it’s not supposed to be a vacation” eh?  All the pathetic whining about “criminals” getting “free food and education”, which mostly doesn’t even happen anyway. Things look different when you’re the one being abused, I suppose. 

[shantechni]

This was such a little brother moment

[sher-ee]

1/3 of our country is in a cult haze.