News

They do great work, but they don't market and promote their successes well enough. I would prefer a society that favors humility more and therefore appreciate this administration's style, but it seems that a lack of hubris is now considered a fault in the public eye, on both sides of the aisle.

No, I feel the same way. It's just that they've also utterly sucked in some areas too. Regardless, you know I'm hella voting for him because wtf else am I gonna do? There's no choice in our political system so I'll do what I need to.

It really annoys me when they Biden has done nothing.

Then they're all, "well I didn't hear about it"

I get that the media and even the Dems suck at showing people what they've accomplished, but that doesn't mean they've done nothing.

No disagreements here. I am kind of shocked by this very non neolib behavior—the above as well as well as being the first sitting president to join the UAW picket line. I was a bit miffed about the train strike, though. But his administration lobbied the companies and got them their sick days they've been fighting for, for ages. Really didn't expect any of that.

Yeah he wasn't my first choice but I was fine voting for him and his administration has definitely beat expectations. Pretty nice what having capable people in your administration can do for your presidency. Not just scandal after scandal and departure after departure like the previous shitshow.

I wish media would give credit to the organization leaders responsible for these types of moves rather than crediting a homogeneous "Biden administration." The fact is that the administration does deserve credit for employing a number of "progressive" (read: competent) administrators, but those departments compose a progressive wing of the administration that is not on par with some of the overall administration's more centrist leanings.

Personnel are policy, something that the Biden administration has proved again and again since the 2020 election. Biden himself is a kind of empty vessel into which different wings of the Democratic party pour their will, yielding a strange brew of appointments both great and terrible.

-- Cory Doctorow

Every time there's a bunch of commenters talking about how little they like Biden (or his administration) for 'not doing enough', I know:

• that person almost certainly does not actually vote
• that person does not pay attention to politics, they just repeat what they've seen on social media, which is their own echo chamber.

How do I know they don't vote? Because they are too lazy to even be up to date via Google on the political opinions they post - they certainly aren't going to bother to actually leave their house and vote.

That said, the Biden administration might do well to be more bombastic with their statements about their successes. I don't love the idea that the merit of a success would need to be 'sold', but you have the GOP screaming idiot things all over the media sphere every single day, and that has to be competed with.

Amen to that. It's a shame the left doesn't have a shameless media ecosystem that can produce a 24/7 cacophony of propaganda to amplify this kind of stuff.

There would be a good governmental oversight: drug companies may no longer advertise their products to the public. I don't think anyone has ever seen a drug commercial in a positive light; if the drug was effective and worked well you wouldn't need to advertise it.

limit how much it can reinvest into drug development.

Also, the taxpayers are the ones who funded the drug development in the first place!

The commercials should be illegal to begin with. My partner is from the EU and when we were back in the US she was horrified by the amount of pharma marketing everywhere.

Um, not to mention this is specifically regarding TAXPAYER FUNDED drugs. We paid for them and they're price gouging and preventing people from getting access to them. It's so incredibly wrong.

Drugmakers have argued that seizing the patent for a medication makes that treatment vulnerable to competition, which can reduce a company’s revenue and limit how much it can reinvest into drug development.

I like how that's supposed to be a compelling argument against it, "But if we open it up to competition someone else will do it cheaper and better than us and we'll go out of business." Good! Fuck your company lol.

Also the taxpayers are funding the development, which is why the government can do this. If the public pays for it, they should be able to access it as far as I'm concerned.

So their argument is that they can't make enough money on their government subsidized drug development. Yeah ok, corpos, get fucked.

That would all be fine if they alone bore the cost for all that R&D. Clearly, thats not the case and they want to socialize the development and privatize the fruits of that development, in which case they are consequently invited to non-negotiably+kindly pound salt and go fuck themselves.

Maybe they could get more government funded money if they sold it at reasonable prices and kept coming out with new government funded drugs?

And now you have one step closer to negotiated price government subsidised medicine. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

If they are doing their R&D documentation correctly, the US tax code already allows for tax credits up to certain limits. In a lot of cases, it covers nearly 100% of qualified R&D coats.

But who are going to protect the poor CEOs?

protect the interests of American drug companies abroad

That's a nice sentiment, but the drug companies are voluntarily selling internationally at lower prices. There's no "protecting the interests" drone strike we can make when the big pharma is doing the rate setting itself (negotiating, true, but still a voluntary choice). The proper fix would be to mandate that any drug that had any Federal research may not be sold in the US for more than in any other part of the world and that fee may not exceed (make up a number) 10x the production cost, with distribution not allowed to exceed 50% of the cost of the retail price of the medication and delivery not to exceed 125% of commercial shipping rates.

Patents are written into the Constitution and are generally a good thing when enforced as they are written to be. The problem is the system has been so perverted and abused that it's a joke of what is supposed to be.