Biden Thread

[Montmorency]

Nah....in the end, Manchin is just another dirty corporate politician taking millions from lobbyists and business while screwing the people of this country in the process.

In my opinion this is a deeply-flawed attitude among much of the Left, this assumption that other people don't just believe things (which is, frankly, an assumption at least as common among the far-Right in my experience).

The theory that Manchin is bought off by right-wing lobbying groups entails the causal effect of an inducement in the first place, which is to say that Manchin was going to vote to implement Biden's agenda until he was brought against it. But why would Manchin need financial inducements (that he never even sees as an individual) to perform as he evidently already wants to and always has, in keeping with his whole political career, style, and orientation? And why wouldn't it be far easier to sway him with blandishments in the other direction, with the far greater fiscal reserve of the federal government at hand?

If Manchin were merely venal, a few billion dollars in infrastructure investment to his state would be enough to secure his vote. And in parallel, it has often been noted that if Republicans were merely venal then the country wouldn't be so dysfunctional and on the precipice of a delusional fascism.



You don't do that for the money.

Also look at Stephen Breyer refusing to retire because he fears his retirement will be the event that politicizes the Court. Look at all the garden-variety liberals out there who agree exactly with him (and with Manchin for that matter). Are they all getting an inducement? Well then, maybe if George Soros stopped wasting all his funds on protesters and climate researchers he could compete...


Here is what it looks like when it's for the money:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Earlier this week, the Food and Drug Administration overruled—to much criticism—its own scientific advisory committee and approved the Alzheimer’s treatment Aduhelm. The agency made this decision despite thin evidence of the drug’s clinical efficacy and despite its serious side effects, including brain swelling and bleeding. As a result, a serious risk now exists that millions of people will be prescribed a drug that does more harm than good.

Less appreciated is how the drug’s approval could trigger hundreds of billions of dollars of new government spending, all without a vote in Congress or indeed any public debate over the drug’s value. Aduhelm’s manufacturer, Biogen, announced on Monday that it would price the drug at an average of $56,000 a year per patient, a figure that doesn’t include the additional imaging and scans needed to diagnose patients or to monitor them for serious side effects.

The federal government will bear the brunt of the new spending. The overwhelming majority of people with Alzheimer’s disease are eligible for Medicare, the federally run insurance program for elderly and disabled Americans. If even one-third of the estimated 6 million people with Alzheimer’s in the United States receives the new treatment, health-care spending could swell by $112 billion annually.

To put that figure in perspective, in 2020, Medicare spent about $90 billion on prescription drugs for 46 million Americans through the Part D program, which covers prescription medication that you pick up at your local pharmacy. We could wind up spending more than that for Aduhelm alone.

Most of the costs will be borne by taxpayers. But Medicare beneficiaries will take an additional hit. Because Aduhelm is an infusion drug that will be administered in doctors’ offices and clinics, not taken at home, it will be covered by Medicare Part B—not Part D. Under Part B, beneficiaries pay 20 percent of the costs of their care, which, for a single year of Aduhelm treatment, will be at least $11,200. Although most seniors have supplemental plans to cover these out-of-pocket expenses, prices for those plans are sure to spike, whether they’re on Aduhelm or not. That would be quite hard on seniors, many of whom live on fixed incomes.

States will also come under pressure. Some patients prescribed the drug will be under 65 and won’t be eligible for Medicare. But they may be eligible for Medicaid, which state and federal governments jointly fund. Plus, about 12 million people nationally are eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid (they’re called “dual eligibles”), meaning that the states are responsible for covering much of their out-of-pocket costs. As a result, states could face hundreds of millions of dollars in unanticipated Medicaid spending.

That’s an especially big problem because, unlike the federal government, states aren’t allowed to run a budget deficit. To pay for Aduhelm, they’ll have to either raise taxes or (more likely, given today’s political environment) cut spending on education, infrastructure, and health care. That dynamic played out after the 2013 FDA approval of Sovaldi, a cure for people with chronic hepatitis C. Despite Sovaldi’s stunning efficacy, its price tag and the prevalence of hepatitis C in the Medicaid population posed severe budgetary challenges for states, many of which rationed access to the drug. The similarly priced Aduhelm is approved for an even larger patient population, but unlike Sovaldi, it’s not a cure. States could be stuck paying for a patient’s Aduhelm year after year, rather than simply once.

The thread is on point:

People keep looking for materialist reasons for these things.

What I've learned from 20 years in politics is that while corruption is a thing, most of the time people genuinely believe in what they're doing.

And many of them are vain, ego-driven and horribly misguided.

If Sinema were acting on behalf of corporate paymasters she would be much more circumspect.

She glories in this stuff because she has a libertarian individualist worldview, doesn't like party loyalty or partisanship and enjoys flaunting that as part of being quirky. /2

People keep hoping it's somehow deeper or darker than that because there would be order to the universe. But it almost never is.

Think back to high school. Think about the incredibly stupid reasons your friends did things.

Nothing changes from HS. Not even for Senators. /end

Coda: ironically, this means when it comes to picking primary candidates you should select less for structural things than for personality types.

Risk-taking team players make the best legislators. Careful operators make mediocre ones. Vain, quirky ones are the worst.

Manchin (and Sinema) has some level of party loyalty though, as he could become even more notorious, sought-after, and influential by keeping his affiliation mercenary - and thus putting the Senate majority in play. Another example of ideological and social rather than pecuniary factors at play.

@Montmorency

Our Bill of Rights prohibits Congress from making laws establishing a religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. Biden is free to worship, or not, as his conscience dictates. The voters are free to find this comforting, annoying, disqualifying, or irrelevant and may exercise their franchise with this assessment factored into their decision.

If enough of the public chooses to avoid the Catholic Church, over time that will have an impact. Feel free to call for the Church's castigation as a sexist organization -- you would not be the first. At a minimum, my daughter has beaten you to it.

What I'm really asking here is why is it now considered - as I perceive it to be - socially-proscribed for a religion to be openly formally racist, while this is not the case with open formal sexism? (I mean, I think I know the answer, but it's an interesting thought exercise in the primordiality of sexism.)

This appeal to trust the program is not an appeal to rationality, but an appeal to faith disguised as an appeal to rationality.

Trust what program? It's an appeal to recognize the illusory and knee-jerk nature of the plaintively-stated anxieties.