When nearly 100 drugs became scarce between 2015 and 2016, their prices mysteriously increased more than twice as fast as their expected rate, an analysis recently published in the Annals of Internal Medicine
reveals. The price hikes were highest if the pharmaceutical companies
behind the drugs had little competition, the study also shows.
The authors—a group of researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and one at Harvard Medical School—can’t say for sure why
the prices increased just based off the market data. But they can take a
shot at possible explanations. The price hikes “may reflect
manufacturers’ opportunistic behavior during shortages, when the
imbalance between supply and demand increases willingness to pay,” they
conclude.
“There aren’t a lot of industries where if a manufacturer botches the
production of a product and is responsible for a reduction in supply
that they are able to profit from that… It is the federal government,
underinsured, and uninsured patients that are picking up the
tab,“ co-author William Shrank of the University of Pittsburgh noted in an interview with Bloomberg.
Their look into the connection between price increases and shortages
adds to a long-held observation among hospitals and analysts that such
shortages are costly. When a preferred drug is hard to come by, doctors
can turn to less-effective—potentially more-expensive—drugs, as well as
delay treatment or cut back on dosages. Together, with the hikes in
prices, those changes have led advocates to estimate that drug shortages
overall cost $230 million in additional healthcare costs each year.
To get a better handle on how the costs of drugs change under
shortages, Shrank and colleagues analyzed data on 617 drug formulations
for 90 different drugs that appeared on the Food and Drug
Administration’s drug shortage database between December 2015 and
December 2016. They then pulled pricing figures for those drugs from a
database of wholesale acquisition costs.
Overall, they found that the drug prices tended to increase by about
seven percent in the 11 months leading up to a shortage—but then
increased by 16 percent in the 11 months after a shortage. Moreover, the
size of that increase for individual drugs was linked to competition.
The scarce drugs that had three or fewer competitors collectively held
their price increase rates at about 12 percent before shortages. That rate leapt to 27 percent afterward.
On the flip side, drugs with plenty of competition (more than three
competitors) saw their rates increase by just 2.5 percent before a
shortage and a little under five percent afterward.
Modeling the pricing data, the researchers found that shortages
pushed pricing increase rates from an expected nine percent to 20
percent. For drugs with little competition, the rate increases from 17
percent to 30 percent.
To combat potentially exploitative hikes, the authors offer a recommendation:
If manufacturers are observed using shortages to increase
prices, public payers could set payment caps for drugs under shortage
and limit price increases to those predicted in the absence of a
shortage.
——————
The Law of Demand is literally day 1 stuff in any basic economics course
Imagine being a physicist and seeing a news article saying something like ‘scientific proof thin privilege exists! We applied the same amount of force to push two objects and the one with less mass accelerated more quickly, demonstrating that our oppressive society clearly has a long way to go toward fat acceptance’
Imagine if you read something like that every day
And at first you were like ‘this is a joke, right? Isaac Newton? F = ma? You guys are pulling my leg, right? Someone on your staff at your news organization has to understand basic high school physics, right?’
But they’re not pulling your leg, and in fact they get mad at you and tell you you’re a bad person who doesn’t care about other people if you try to explain it to them
baffling how much of this site is just conservative protestantism with a gay hat
you know what i’m in just enough of a bad mood that i’m ready to nail my grievances to the church door so let’s fucking go
black and white morality wherein anyone who doesn’t believe/think/live exactly as I do is a dirty sinner Problematic and probably a predatory monster
everyone is a sinnerProblematic but true believerspeople who activist the right way according to my worldview are still better than everyone else, and I will act in accordance to this belief in my own superiority to let everyone else know I’m better than them because I found Jesusam the most woke
casual and fucking omnipresent equations of womanhood with softness/goodness/purity/nurturing to remind every woman who isn’t/doesn’t want to be any of those things that they’re doing it wrong
aggressive desexualization (particularly of women’s sexuality, to the point where it may as well not exist at all) accompanied by pastels [not a criticism directed ace ppl having a right to sex-free content and spaces but specifically targeted at a wider problem resulting from the previous point]
YOU’RE VALID AND JESUS LOVES YOU and neither of these platitudes achieves a goddamn thing
historical context is for people who care about nuance and we don’t have time for either (see: black and white morality)
lots of slogans and quotes and nice little soundbites to memorize but does anybody actually study the source material with a critical eye to make their own informed analysis
the answer is no
I’ve been to bible study groups don’t @ me I know what the fuck I’m talking about
Good Christians™ Nice Gays™
don’t fraternize with/let themselves be influenced by non-Christians those terrible queers
all the media one consumes must be ideologically pure or it will surely harm the children
it is Our Sacred Duty to protect the children from Everything, thus ensuring their innocence/purity/etc until such time as they are idk probably 25 years old
literally just “think of the children” moral panic y’all can fuckin miss me with that
people who don’t conform to the dominant thinking WILL be excommunicated/driven from the social group, and any wrong treatment they suffer will be seen as a justified consequence of their wrong thinking
I Saw Goody Proctor With The Devil And She Had A Bad Steven Universe Headcanon
Thank you for breaking it down like that because so many of us have been saying it but to see a play by play breakdown comparison is just…Thank you.
sipping tea and judging people as a group bonding activity
oh, man, speaking as a queer Christian who gets regular tumblr flashbacks to my childhood in the Bible Belt, YES
-belief that small snippets of text can be analyzed out context to understand the whole work/ judge the whole person -Desire for moral choices to be easy/ black-and-white leads to belief that it is possible to find a one-size-fits all answer to every situation -Literal, rather than literary analysis, with weird fixation on etymological roots that have nothing to do with source material -Belief that there is “one true interpretation” that is self-evident and will be understood by everyone encountering the same material regardless of background -Overwhelming, internalized sense of culpability for other people’s actions/integrity/souls -Overwhelming, internalized sense of personal guilt -Pressure to evangelize aggressively -Tendency to value broad ideals before individual needs -Hostility towards coexistence/tolerance/neutrality -Hostility towards lack of consensus in viewpoint -Knowledge as contamination -Guilt/contamination by proximity -Fixation on the sexual as uniquely dirty/sinful -Belief in “thought crimes” -Argumentation via appeal to higher authority/feelings of revulsion rather than internal, verbalizeable logic -“conversations” that are actually stealth soapboxes because one side isn’t actually interested in listening -“polite requests” that are actually commands because “no” is not considered an acceptable answer -in-group language -virtue-signaling and hostility towards the outgroup -gatekeeping -communities strongly built around the idea of being the world’s underdog -appropriation of other people’s persecution/victimization -treating the concept of oppression like a trophy -glorification/fetishization of victimhood
This
is, after all, the crux of the debate, and the prime paradox of liberal
internationalism. As John Mearsheimer wrote, “A purely liberal state is
soulless: it creates few emotional bonds between citizens and their
government, which is why it is sometimes said that getting people to
fight and die for a liberal state is especially difficult.”
One can see this in Europe, where the percentage of people who are willing to fight and die for their country varies
extremely between the conservative East and the liberal West.
Mearsheimer argues that in the clash of national sentiments and
liberalism, nationalism will always win, which will, in turn, lead to
hardcore liberals behaving like imperialists.
Because liberalism is radically individualist on the domestic front,
humans as social animals find that destructive. That either leads to
either ethnic or racial tribalism, or supranational empires, like the EU
or the Soviet Union. So, in a curious twist of fate, it leads to the
same old clash between liberal, or Marxist, imperialism and
nation-states that wants to break free of a borderless ideology.
Think about this for a moment. If someone is living and working in
America, where would you want his loyalties to lie; to the land that
provides him food, work, opportunity, and a good life, or to some vague
borderless internationalist idea, like liberal internationalism,
Marxism, or Islamism? Would you prefer your fellow countrymen to pledge
loyalty to Communist International, the Islamic caliphate, the United
Nations, or the European Union?
Movements—from #MeToo to Black Lives Matter to the Dreamers to the
stunning teacher strikes in red states—helped move opinion, not alienate
it. Bold ideas like Medicare for All grew more popular, not less, even
under scabrous Republican attacks. Progressives have made great advances
over the last two years. Now is the time to push harder, to challenge
those standing in the way, and to build not a restoration, but the
political revolution that has just begin.
you have been warned
“Now is the time to push harder, to challenge
those standing in the way, and to build not a restoration, but the
political revolution that has just begin.
“
or instructed
lead by Peterson, VDH, Steyn, the Federalist, Quillette etc.
No demands for arrests are issued or voiced, publicly. No expectation
for retribution is set-up. Follow-up is nonexistent in media. Police do
not publicize any arrests. If they make them, none are reported by
media.
No teachable moments occur.
Remember
words like, “Police are requesting the public’s assistance in finding
those responsible”? Or, “No arrests have been made, as yet”? Such
civilizing utterances have vanished from the nomenclature of media and
law enforcement, when discussing acts of trespass, vandalism, and public
disorderliness.
It is difficult to tell whether China’s push to
soften its image through movies, media and cultural projects has been
successful.
“Chinese soft power has not been that successful
outside of the developing world,” said Stanley Rosen, a professor at
the University of Southern California who studies Chinese society and
cinema. “If China does have any soft power, it’s probably because of the
success of their economy and the Chinese model that they’re pushing
very hard now.”
CultML 
