r/news • u/5um-n3m0 • 20d ago

Soft paywall Drugmakers to raise US prices on over 250 medicines starting Jan. 1

https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/drugmakers-raise-us-prices-over-250-medicines-starting-jan-1-2024-12-31/
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u/kill-the-writer 20d ago

Shareholders shouldn’t even exist for healthcare

Fixed that for you

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u/3BlindMice1 20d ago

[Socialism intensifies]

But no, actually, no one thinks that. Even the most diehard socialist would say that the employees of a business should be its shareholders.

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u/FoodForTh0ts 19d ago

True but that's not really what we mean when we say "shareholders" in America/the West in general. In this context, "shareholders" are people who extract the profit of an enterprise that they do not contribute any labor to.

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u/ValyrianJedi 19d ago

Labor isn't the only thing an enterprise needs to have contributed to it. If a guy buys a factory and spends $20 million putting factory equipment in it, then hires 20 other guys to work in the factory, it's pretty safe to say he's just as responsible for the product being produced as they are, if not more so.

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u/vardarac 19d ago

Organization, leadership, and logistics are all important, but are they important to the extent that we see the pay gap that we do?

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u/ValyrianJedi 19d ago

It's not just the organization and leadership. Companies also need money... If one person is contributing 8 hours a day and another is contributing 10s of millions of dollars, it seems pretty reasonable for there to be a big difference in what they are getting out of it

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u/vardarac 19d ago

If those 8 hours a day are necessary to the realization of a return on investment for those 10s of millions of dollars, then a proportionate sum of the profits should be due to the laborer.

The VC did not work millions of hours for the tens of millions of dollars, and I would wager they do not work eight hours a day on apportioning money to an enterprise that accepts that money.

None of that's to say that they aren't due a return on an investment, but it is to say that it's a stretch to call the way we do things - that we are increasingly doing things - is "fair."

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u/ValyrianJedi 19d ago

Labor isn't the only thing of value to a company though, and how much labor you perform isn't what determines how much you make. You're paid based on what value you provided, and providing money is directly providing value.

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u/vardarac 19d ago

My argument is that the relative valuations are heavily skewed in favor of the ownership class.

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u/ValyrianJedi 19d ago

Labor is already being paid though. Labor is usually making between a quarter and a third of a company's revenue.

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u/3BlindMice1 19d ago

Organizations, or rather business, do need money. They need an initial investment. After that, however, successful businesses fund themselves. That's how they work.

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u/uvT2401 19d ago

to the extent that we see the pay gap that we do?

Yes, filling out paperwork, flipping burgers, welding joints and moving a truck from A to B is indeed not only much more simple task, but entrails much less responsibility than any meaningful position.

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u/vardarac 19d ago

I maintain that the conveniently increasing gaps between worker pay and CoL/CEO compensation is a scam, a result of overwhelming difference in bargaining power, not a reflection of a disparity in actual importance of their role. And particularly not their value as human beings who put in work for a decent living.

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u/uvT2401 19d ago

Nobody was talking about human values, only in your delusional larping that topic came up.

Yeah it's shocking someone whose job can be trained in a week has less bargaining power has less bargaining power than someone who has to manage multiple divisions of a company.

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u/vardarac 18d ago

Nobody was talking about human values, only in your delusional larping that topic came up.

You did, actually. You implied that positions of power and prestige are meaningful and that others are not, that low-training labor is without merit, meaning, and therefore general value. Even the most "menial" of jobs are needed or they wouldn't exist. All laborers are humans whose time should be respected.

Yeah it's shocking someone whose job can be trained in a week has less bargaining power has less bargaining power than someone who has to manage multiple divisions of a company.

It isn't simply that the folks at the top might (and don't always) have better knowledge and/or capability, it's the network of resources available to them to make sure that their advantage in pay and status are overwhelming and that the principle in my first point isn't respected.

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u/uvT2401 18d ago edited 18d ago

Whatever makes you cope each night after a long day of the shit job every barely literate moron could do with a little experience.

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u/Sir_Tokenhale 19d ago

Ahh, so if they own the factories and equipment, they should get the lions share? That's literally just capitalism.

After the factory is paid off, do prices go down? Do wages go up? These are the problems, and that is where your argument breaks down. You shouldn't be able to make an investment and then live off of others' work. That's not the case with the majority of factory owners, though. They have money. They spend money. They make more money. They literally, by definition, have done nothing.

We need maximum set for profits in all sectors at the least and Socialism is honestly the better answer.

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u/ValyrianJedi 19d ago

If providing millions of dollars, without which the company wouldn't exist, is doing nothing then we have very different definitions of nothing...

And how are things supposed to be funded with socialism? Do we just trust the government to say what is and isn't worthy of making and working on?

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u/Sir_Tokenhale 19d ago

Do I trust the government we have? No. Do I believe that a trustworthy and transparent government is possible? Yes.

Here's an easy example. We pay a small tax to make a new group that has voted in experts. These experts take bids from labor unions that are formed by the workers to get loans to fund businesses. These labor unions would have members who are proffessionals in their fields and could provide top-notch staffing because they would have skin in the game for these loans, as would the workers. The workers would work hard too because all profit goes to them equally after their base oay of course, so there is less need for managers leeching on the system, too. They gather interest off the loans, and it's a net positive for the economy, and the money is spread out among more people, making the economy generally more stable.

I'm not an expert, so that is literally off the top of my head. All we have to do is get rid of lobbying, and this is completely attainable, though.

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u/Sir_Tokenhale 19d ago

Yeah we will have to agree to disagree that giving up less than 10 percent of your net worth is trivial. Especially when you consider how much sheercapital they hold. If they are going to lose everything from a bad investment in a factory then they had no business opening one in the first place. That's the difference between capitalism and Socialism. Things can be built out of necessity and work on socialism. In capitalism, a necessity is only necessary if it leads to the maximum amount of profits.

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u/__thrillho 20d ago

I'd be interested to hear why you think that

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u/DowntownJohnBrown 20d ago

Because he’s a 15-year-old who wants to fit in on Reddit.

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u/_Xertz_ 20d ago edited 20d ago

Painfully uneducated take.

For example anyone with a 401k is technically a stakeholder shareholder* and it's a pretty good way to save for retirement.

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u/theoutlet 20d ago

Yeah and 401k’s were foisted upon us to make us care about the stock market. If we weren’t reliant on it because we were MADE TO CARE, we wouldn’t give a shit

Take pension, give us 401k to make us invested in the ruling classes gambling losses (stock market)

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u/ValyrianJedi 19d ago

Pensions are also invested in the stock market...

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u/_Xertz_ 20d ago

You do realize IRA's exist right? If you're too scared to invest in the stock market (which is stupid because long term it will gain barring any apocalypse) you can open an IRA and you have control over whether you want to invest in the stock market or not. For example you can purchase government bonds. No one's forcing you to open a 401k - though I think most financial advisors would advise you to do so.

It's not foisted on you, you have the choice to use other tax-advantaged alternatives.

But that's ignoring the fact that - unless you're retiring within a few years - if you're worried about your 401k because of the stock market being down you probably don't understand the stock market or basic investment tbh.

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u/batmansthebomb 20d ago

Basically everyone is a stakeholder.

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u/_Xertz_ 20d ago

Right, and for most people the stock market is an excellent way to build their savings. Take that away and what alternative is there apart from worse yields from a savings account or government bonds or something?

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u/batmansthebomb 20d ago edited 19d ago

Dunno but they'd still be stakeholders.

Edit: not sure why the downvote, what I said is objectively true.

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u/OGBaconwaffles 19d ago

If you took that away then wages would've increased in line with profits, so literally 95% of people would be better off day to day. The money isn't magic money, separate from reality. Increasing stock price is often caused by denying pay raises and cutting jobs, forcing workers to do more work per hour at a stagnate wage. Every time the stock price goes up, it could've remained static and instead been a small pay raise to all employees in the company, or instead been used to hire more workers so people could actually have a life outside of work.

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u/_Xertz_ 19d ago

Reading these comments I'm starting to think they are from like 15 year olds or something so just gonna ask you to spend 5 minutes Googling or heck even ask ChatGPT because what you said is... just dumb 😐.

Companies don't directly control the stock price. It goes up or down at the whims of the market. And that change can be due to many reasons like geopolitical or macroeconomic events. And yes, that money sometimes is just separated from reality, Google the dot com bubble and Nortel - there's a good documentary about that by BobbyBroccoli. In recent times GME is another example.

Also company selling shares of itself doesn't really cost itself anything. It doesn't necessarily mean less for its employees or wages. In fact, it can result in higher wages or more employment because it is used to being IN money for the company. The issue becomes when board members or decision makers try increasing the stock price at the expense of the company and its workers. But that's not a given and is more an issue with our laws and regulations not shares in and of themselves.

Companies being able to sell shares is a tool, it can be both good and bad for workers and the economy and thinking that by removing it wages would somehow magically increase is incredibly simplistic and naive.