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.
We started paying attention now.
As for the US gov and institutionalized corruption I highly recommend Lester Lessig’s work around political donations reform as the first step to democracy in the US.
We the people and the republic we must reclaim is an excellent summary of the issue and the solution: https://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_...
When exactly was this magical past where things were better, I wonder?
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?
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.
Also, if I had it my way, no government person while in the employ of the gov, should be able to vote at the level they represent or work in. If they’re fed employees no voting in fed elections and so on. Yes, I know under our constitution this would violate their rights. But you know, one can wish. I see it as a conflict of interest.
But now it's time for external enforcement. There are too many justices who think that they embody law and order in themselves, and therefore no matter what they do they are obeying the law, since they are the law. Similar to most police forces these days.
I'm very happy to see this. And surely pricing transparency is good: we're gonna see just how this works.
Further I'm glad the US government is challenging corporate America. Corporations implicitly threaten the US public saying if minimum wage goes up they'll be forced to cut jobs. They implicitly threaten a leaner pipeline of drug advances if prices are negioated down.
Let's see how this cookie crumbles.
The US congress is explicitly tasked with the federal checkbook. Negotiating prices down is clearly in their purview and is consistent with agency they've always had. Has congress ever negotiated a price with defense, office supply chains? Has the congress solicited competitive bids on work? Then why not meds?
In fact, googling those last five words turns up an industry lawsuit alleging precisely that:
https://phrma.org/resource-center/Topics/Access-to-Medicines...
I am certain that some members of the Court will agree, and others will not. It will come down to a count of votes. And I strongly doubt that I will agree with the reasoning that justifies those votes, either way.
Same as for any other official: impeachment
Honestly I see no theoretical benefit to not allowing the government to negotiate. Maybe there is a practical one?
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 insurance company will just deny you and medicare will fight them to the bitter end on pricing.
Can you name a single large biotech firm that is going to produce a negative yearly profit because insulin is affordable? I sure can't.
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.
The only people you are protecting with this idea are the top 1% of the top 1%. We will always value medicine, but we don’t have to line the pockets of billionaires with our cash so they will bestow upon us cures from the ether.
I’d like the Times and the media in general to start reporting the names of the individuals participating in these efforts, instead of faceless corporations.
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.
If/when the US also stops paying, I expect drug development will stagnate a lot.
I do not get how they then turn around and insist on also having uncountable wealth. Surely there are a lot of people who would be content with just having unaccountable power? Maybe they should make minimum wage, while also having final say over what law is.
That's incredibly naive.
If anything politics and was dirtier in the past than the present. The media in the past did a great job of covering up things since they were so cozy with politicians.
Read about some of the politics of the 1800's in the US and it's far worse than today.
But you do you drug company.
"If you don't pay us through the nose with billions we'll stop developing drugs" seems like a rather odd argument; disallowing the government from engaging in the free market on price in pretty much any area it would set of all sorts of corruption red flags. This is why all sorts of regulation around public procurements exist in almost any jurisdiction.
If you need money to develop new drugs: fine, this is why things like grants exist. Right now the drug companies want to have the best of all worlds with none of the obligations and downsides: inflated prices from Medicare are just tax subsidies but without any controls or checks or anything.
My understanding (and I don't have the time to look this up) is that insulin is complicated. It's not a single thing - and variations are currently being developed.
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.
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 lives.
Positive contributions must not lead to “these people can hold those who have medical needs economically hostage.” Don’t like the deal, get out of pharma and let other people (operating under a different ideology on the topic) build.
https://time.com/6257866/big-pharma-patent-abuse-drug-pricin...
> Today, 1 in 4 Americans cannot afford to take their medications as prescribed. Too many seniors are having to ration their treatments to get by until their next social security check arrives. And contrary to what industry lobbyists argue, soaring drug prices are not the inevitable result of research and development costs to bring breakthrough drugs to market. It’s time to put this widely debunked excuse to bed.
https://www.i-mak.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Overpatente...
It means no one will do that work.
DARPA's mRNA research that directly led to rapid COVID vaccine development comes to mind. Cut out the middleman. Fund the research directly. We're paying for the end result one way or another (if not with direct government payment, with government payment to companies who are then taking profit, spending marketing/admin expenses, etc).
You make it sound as if nothing will get done if poor corporations can't lock medical tech up behind economic gates. We can always go back to ruthless capitalism if pharma price controls don’t work.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8426978/
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...
If I don't have food I can't live.
There are any number of industries that people need to live. You really want Donald Trump (or someone just as crazy) dictating what the prices are for those industries?
Especially considering that their job is literally .. "preserved by natural monopoly and law, forever"
But realistically, from a moral point of view, they can't really walk away in the first place unless the government demands are ridiculously unreasonable (e.g. demanding a price lower than production). The only drugs subject to negotiation are those without generic alternatives (i.e. where a free market doesn't really exist), so stopping supply would quite literally kill people. This gives drug companies an enormous advantage in negotiations in the first place, so this kind of compensates for that.
Using goodRX has really opened my eyes to the shady practices of drug pricing. The same drug with or without insurance at different pharmacies can range in price by 80+% (often with the higher rate "discounted" for insurance). The drug companies are willing to be this flexible with the prices when dealing with retailers. In the case of a Wal-Mart or Costco the negotiations don't sound so different. So what's the difference with what's happening with the government? It's on public record not in a private corporate meeting room. The business side of Healthcare in this country follows protection racket economics and it doesn't look like this is going to change any time soon.
Hoping that such actors would appear when needed seems optimistic.
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.
I see private compensation for elite talent being completely out of whack -- the prices the public service must compete with -- as basically a separate issue.
Historically, a generous salary for legislators and various other high offices was part of the progressive/left platform in both the UK and France. They weren't paid before the 19th century, ensuring only the independently wealthy could hold those offices.
Pay them a respectable salary but you do not and should not try to match what the private sector pays. It not the same playing field and should not attempt to be.
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. It seems to me that it should be the exact opposite, and we should incentivize people to make sacrifices for the greater good.
Underpaying people who choose to enter a certain sector because of a personally held belief that they ought to be financially unmotivated, then ceding massive power to those people and allowing them to take bribes, seems to miss the forest for the trees.
EDIT: I’m also curious how you rectify your position with the empirical evidence that our current system, wherein public service is financially discouraged, has led to direct and indirect bribery and corruption in the legislative, executive, and judicial branches. 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. Maybe a more fruitful route would be reducing the power of individual representatives so that there is less incentive to bribe them, or outright banning the quid-pro-quo agreements that run rampant in our country currently, like prohibiting regulators from working for companies in the industry they regulated after their time in office.
Having it act like the same playing field got us in this mess. I'll note there are some supreme court justices who apparently don't take bribes or suggest their power should be supplemented by enough bribery to equal that of the best private sector lawyers and/or the best mob bosses…
2. Even if Justices were paid $10M, the corruption wouldn’t go away, because greed never goes away
Instead of focusing on the fact that justices are taking bribes because their salary is modest, therefore we need to pay them more, we should focus on nominating justices who don’t have such weak morals and ethics.
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.
- no security trading
- recuse if conflicted
- cleanup of political fund raising
- criminal penalties on violation
You want control and just compensation? Can do. But not without commensurate accountability.
And even if there is a difference, is that worth the opportunity cost of paying everyone else a little bit better?
It's not a very popular opinion, but there should be a maximum salary imo. Beyond a certain number money is a means of acquiring power and influence, and it feels wrong to reward people with that. Set a maximum to give people something to work harder for, but without inadvertently giving individuals the power to subvert democracy through money.
It's probably not even getting you comfortably into one of the better neighborhoods, unless your partner is the bread winner.
Chicago is one of the most affordable major cities in the US - and $300k isn't gonna do more than have you comfortably living in a small condo in the better neighborhoods.
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.
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
$274,000 doesn't feel like financial exploitation to me, even if it's below market rate.
Paying for friends to vacation with you is a very good one though. But idk, I feel like you can extend that so far that it feels like a copout. For example, maybe you can afford a nice home on 300K, but you can't buy your mom a nice home as well. And you can't pay your brothers student loans. And you can't gift them a car every couple years.
That's not your quality of life, that's paying for someone else to live the same lifestyle as you. At that point I'd just argue for raising wages across the board so that you don't feel the need to pay your friends, they just want to go on vacation with you.
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.
Biweekly maid service where they clean the dishes, the house, and do laundry. It wouldn't be much more expensive to change that to weekly and include cooking too if you wanted.
If you wanted to get a full time nanny though that's probably out of reach, but I don't understand why you even had children if you're just gonna pay someone else to raise them for you.
That's the way we _always_ implement change in America!
*Also, do you not like that the socialist merely _has_ two homes, or do you not agree with the reasoning behind _why_ they have two homes?
You can't possibly even know what socialism is if making such an airheaded comment.
The average $800k+ condo in the loop is 2 bedrooms.
Sure, maybe there's a couple rare 4-bdrm's for $800k - but there's a reason they are so much cheaper...
At the moment - there does not appear to be a single 4-bedroom listed on Zillow for less than <$800k: https://www.zillow.com/the-loop-chicago-il/?searchQueryState...
In fact - there's not one listed above $800k either...
There are only 3 3bedroom condos for less than $800k - and the average HOA would adjust the price to well over $1M - making them not affordable...
I would not say if you can find 1 condo in a decent neighborhood that's semi-affordable at $300k that somehow my point is refuted that $300k - after taxes - is really not that much money...
Where you'd probably actually buy, with $800k burning a hole in your pocket, is Wicker/Bucktown, Lakeview, Hyde Park or Roscoe Village. If you were price conscious, you'd buy in Lincoln Square or Jeff Park.
$800k will also buy you a pretty fantastic house in Chicago. Of course, it won't buy you a house in the Loop, because houses don't go in the Loop. When people in the HN demographic think about the parts of Chicago they think are high-status, they're not thinking like a typical house buyer, who has kids, cares about the local schools, and wants a yard. Those people are buying in Beverly, Portage Park, and Jeff Park. Houses there top out at $800k; I had a sinking feeling looking at Redfin listings there (oh shit, am I wrong about this?) untiL I realized I had to drop the lower limit way below $750k to see all the available houses.
I assume this thread is about how hard it is to survive in major American cities on $300k/yr. I think you're generally doing OK just about anywhere in the US at $300k/yr, but I assure you you're doing well in Chicago making that.
- 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 year (again...)
- House somewhere nice (notably, however, the public schools can be shit, which saves a little money here)
- Country club membership, or similar
- Don't have to do, at least, the ~50% of chores you hate the most (you pay to have them done). Ditto the worst parts of childcare.
- (optional, but recommended) Attendance of fancy functions (esp. e.g. charity events–what's the point of it all if you don't feel fancy?)
- Second property with housing on it (doesn't have to be lavish, but can't be quite as shit as a hillbilly fishing shack, which even poor country folk sometimes have)
- (optional, but recommended) Any money left over after that.
That's gonna be $400k+, household, in a cheap but not crazy cheap market (who wants to be fancy in truly bum-fuck nowhere? Though your vacation property might be there...) in 2023. Bare minimum ([EDIT] that won't get you much of the "optionals", I mean, and the rest is gonna be teetering right on the edge of having to start cutting items—and then, only if you're somewhere relatively low COL).
You aren't living, to a certain social class, if you start having to sacrifice much of that. That's how you're supposed to live.
Someone with a $300k/yr income will end up with an extraordinarily nice home, by any standards, in Chicago.
[0] https://statisticalatlas.com/place/Illinois/Chicago/Househol...
I'm not sure why we think this is only something for people who rub elbows with Bezos or for people who bought a house 10 years ago.
It’s in good shape, doesn’t need any major work and is in the desirable school zone.
The median condo is not particularly great - and it goes for ~$660k in most of the nicer neighborhoods.
The median house is well over $800k in the nicer neighborhoods.
And, again, Chicago is one of the most affordable cities in the US.
The standard message board tactic for wriggling out of this position is to define "the nice neighborhoods" in Chicago ludicrously narrowly, like the only nice places to live here are Lincoln Park and... well that's it. But even Lincoln Park is doable at $800k.
Yeah, I know. I wasn't raised part of that class and don't hang out with many people in it, either :-)
Books I've read on the topic and the handful of people I know in it, yeah, that's just what you do if you're in That Set. Country clubs.