#price makers

[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

[bscotchbread]

girl in the painting, mary from ib

[huariqueje]

The Burden of Stuff - Nicole Price

British, b. ? -

Oil on french polyester , 100 x 80 cm.

[eossa]

Romantisch

Theme 14 by @eossa

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[hcnnibal]

please keep anon on more often i need to yell compliments at you across the internet

that piece you just posted? absolutely stunning. every time you post i tell my partner i just found a new favorite art piece. they are not amused when they ask if it's the blond men again and i do not respond, but their opinion in this matter is irrelevant

the composition the lighting the PERSPECTIVE everything is so perfect i am chewing my own fingers off

a1 being the martyr *and* murderer, the crucified on a cross made from another's blood

it's so fun imagining a2 putting the cross on a1's back. was it tender? a moment of connection and worship derived from violence? i like to think violence was a prerequisite for their relationship and perhaps continues to be.

when i first glanced at the art, i thought a1 was standing over a dead a2's body. thoughts still brewing on this.

tl;dr: giggling, twirling my hair, kicking my feet because your brain is so cool

flattery! blatant flattery!

[kkdreamboat]

thanks to the continued wizardry of my teammates the UI I've been designing for The Price of Flight is getting implemented! Really excited about how it's all starting to come together

No I can't believe this is RPGMaker either

[a-small-writer-in-a-big-world]

Realistically none of the 141 would be close to anyone of nobility

[turquoisefleur]

Mc: Tell me!! What movie were u watching Ursula!?

Ursula: "Fine! It's a love story between two humans. No monsters in it... It's called 'The Prince's Secret Pirate Romance'."

The movie:

[skunkes]

I miss selling things maybe i should crawl back to bigcartel

[wrylu]

price soup n simon

[evilweasel-cosplay]

WORM WORM WORM WORM!

I'm working on making Sherbert some siblings!

Snocone's fur is all cut out and I'm amazed I was able to get those stripes to line up on the face. Like it was an accident that I got Sherbert's stripes to line up perfectly. I'm not sure if I'll do more striped worms in the future just because its kinda difficult to line everything up but we'll see what happens. Snocone's owner did swing by today for a test fit and she said her glasses have plenty of room and its a good, snug fit. I also started patterning premade worm but I ran out of tape and paper to stick the pieces to. I also have a few friends interested in buying them and I plan on doing more premade worms next year. I plan on mainly using fun, funky furs since I think they're a lot of fun but not used often.

[mossytrashcan]

working on getting commissions set up 👊💯‼️

[creepyscritches]

Formulating a high level question on the financial side of medicine when my strength lies in clinical and only hearing crickets in the call when I finish like.......am I loudly stupid or does no one have an answer

[palossssssand]

If you're interested in more then one, vote for one and shoot a reply for any others! I've been rattling around some ideas and would love to see the ballpark of what people are interested in.

Some notes:

-Fakemon: Definitely Pipeye and Dipsco(with holographic effects!!), would be fun to have sticker sheets of the Gnourly and Trollicious line (cake troll line) or Grambler, Chalciduel, Ulidiiva, Curculixie, and Saturnoct (card suit bug split evo line)

-Slug city: I have icons of each of the characters that would be really cute as little mini stickers! Definitely in the future I'd love to make fullbody stickers of them.

-Splatoon weapons: Sticking my head into a niche here, would definitely be difficult since there's SO many weapons, and every weapon has a dedicated hardcore fan, but it would be fun and also I just want to see more bloblobber merch in the world

-Spyke: Obviously...I want more merch of my favorite guy, I think it'd be really cute to have a matching pin set of his icon + a sea snail. I'm totally open to other characters though BUT I wanted to see specifically if people wanted more Spyke. I actually have a pearlina sticker design that I collaborated with flintjupiter on twitter that I have to list once we decide on a pricing LOL

-More eldritch angels: I have a bunch of sketch ideas sittin' around! Stygiomedusa angel has been extremely popular and I'd love to make more designs along those lines. There's a few upcoming Ultrainfinitepit kickstarter campaigns that I'm keeping some secret ideas for but perhaps more deep sea creatures or bugs. I actually have a full set of sketches for angels based on the solar system, it would be a long project but ideally I would love to have a pin set and a looping pattern to make cool stuff out of!

-Nuclear throne: This game is still so near and dear to my heart, I'd like to do small icon stickers/pins and also make a looping pattern!

-Realistic bugs: Specifically, I want more stickers and designs of fly diversity, as an entomologist I feel like I don't see nearly as many cool flies! There are so many cool ones!

If there are any other themes/ocs/fandoms you'd like to see merch in, feel free to let me know in the comments! I listed these things above because they're things I personally think I'd enjoy working on, but I also never know what people would like. Currently, the only things in my shop are angel pin designs leftover from a collaborated campaign, and I'd like to expand to some more things!

[eossa]

Diamant

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More pictures below the cut:

[notquitedeadpod]

Are are we allowed to hang the nqd posters on our walls? Or is there a plan to turn them into merch?

Cause i really want to plaster my flat with them!!!

pls do as you like with them!!

the current merch situation is difficult - I have a redbubble with a few bits on and a teepublic with a few more bits. I'm not super happy with either option. I am actually planning on overhauling the merch situation over the summer as I've not looked at it since the end of 2022, but with a New Show coming out this year I want to be in a good position!!

likely it won't involve any of the current poster designs, though; I'm intending on having more handmade/bespoke merch which will be made in limited runs, but I am not yet sure how feasible this is going to be!

--- Eira xxx