[Serious] "The ascent of billionaires is a symptom & outcome of an immoral system that tells people affordable insulin is impossible but exploitation is fine" - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. What are your thoughts on this?
As a type 1 diabetic this is very close to my own personal experience.
I was diagnosed when I was a baby; just 1.5 years old.
So I've lived with the condition for my entire lifetime, essentially.
Many people are unaware of what type 1 diabetes actually is, so I'll give a basic rundown just FYI.
Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune condition in which the immune system targets and destroys the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin (beta cells in the islets of langerhans).
Insulin is a critical hormone that allows the body to metabolize glucose for energy.
An untreated type 1 diabetic will die within a couple of days, without insulin.
Contemporary insulins (humalog, novolog, and lantus, etc) have been around for decades with only minor tweaks to the production of those insulins.
The price for a 10ml vial of humalog or novolog was around $20, over the counter, without insurance.
Those same insulins are now priced at \~ $300 over the counter, without insurance.
That's an astronomical price increase without any major change to the formula or production method used.
I may be off the mark here in just talking about the price of insulin and not talking about billionaires, but you don't need billionaires to understand just how ethically bankrupt our systems are when a product like insulin which is necessary for
survival is priced at a point of such staggering profit.
It costs something like $6 to produce a 10mL vial of life sustaining insulin, which is then priced at \~ $300.
People die because they can't afford to pay that.
It's just wrong.
I’ve never had to depend on insulin but I do have to take anti-rejection medicine every 12 hours for the rest of my life or else I will die, and it is expensive as hell and it used to be worse before there was generic tacrolimus.
I remember losing my job and it was a devastating blow, I was desperate to get my medicine and it cost over 3 thousand dollars for a one month supply.
It’s no way to go through life.
If everyone had experienced what I’ve gone through in my life there wouldn’t be a question in their mind whether healthcare is a right or privilege.
We need to pool our money and take care of everyone regardless of their financial status.
The problem with accumulating wealth at any cost is that it’s an extremely short-sighted view.
Corporations think in quarters rather than decades or centuries.
I’m not advocating for the Soviet brand of communism or whatever China is doing this week, but we need some long-term thinking that includes the good of the world and humanity in general, while also understanding that people are individuals, not cogs in a machine.
Also, monopolies need to be broken up and dealt with harshly.
No business wants to compete with anyone else, every business wants to become a monopoly and corner the market.
That’s why
there need to be safeguards.
Companies need to be made wary of becoming a monopoly.
That might force them to engage in some fair practices and care about consumers for a change
If you want to get a little more outraged - Sir Frederick Banting (Canadian) gave away the patent for insulin so that it wouldn't be expensive.
He is quoted as saying:
### “Insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world.”
Capitalism, or whatever you want to call our current economic system, does not prohibit free insulin.
Source: UK diabetic right here.
I think this is a US problem, not a fundamental issue with the Western economic system.
I don't think it's very true.
We have many issues, but billionaires aren't a major issue, they are just an easy target.
Billionaires are a popular target because they are visible and the idea of someone having 100 billion dollars evokes visceral disgust in anyone that's struggling for money, But there is nothing inherently wrong with people being rich.
Anything with a huge impact on the world will have positives and negatives, but I don't see Amazon, Tesla or Microsoft as being inherently immoral - and those ultra-billionaires exist because they created and grew those companies and have not had those companies taken away from them.
Capitalism must always be balanced by a government that is capable and willing to impose and enforce rules when what is in the best interests of the companies no longer matches what is in the best interest of the people.
In that regard she is right that we are living in a broken system.
You can point to corporate money as a huge issue, but companies will always act in their best interests and if our government is unable to make decisions without being influenced by companies, that is a failing of our government and those leading it.
However, the core issues that are hurting people are due to the industrial revolution we are in the middle of.
With globalization,
computers and ever more sophisticated technology, the world has changed dramatically over the past few decades, leaving many out in the cold.
This isn't the first time humanity has experienced such a revolution and life will have likely improved in many amazing ways by the time it is over, but when the fabric of society shifts so dramatically, there will be pain.
And that means there will be hurting people who are looking for someone to hand them a solution - historically that has meant politicians finding a group to blame, whether it is billionaires or immigrants or that other political party.
It is so much easier to point to the billionaires as the problem
than it is to find a solution to the fact that the American minimum wage makes unskilled labor uncompetitive in the global market while at the same time not providing minimum wage workers an acceptable standard of living.
That is a hard and maybe even unsolvable problem right now.
So we blame billionaires (or maybe immigrants, depending on your leanings).
Don't blame billionaires, blame the government that isn't creating regulation to make life-saving medication affordable.
The Affordable Drug Manufacturing Act proposed allowing the government to produce medications like insulin to bring the price down.
You can have billionaires AND affordable insulin - anyone who tells you differently has an agenda or has lost hope.
Notice how insulin prices are only an issue in the US and not in most European countries.
That is because European politicians are usually not in beds (sometimes literally) with pharma companies and strong regulation is a thing.
But in the US regulation and taxes are dirty words, except for all the taxes and regulations you have.
I don't know how to feel about that.
As far as I know a billionaire's wealth is mostly tied to the value of the stock of their company that they own.
Bezos's net worth is the combined value of the stock he owns in Amazon combined with other assets.
The problem is that in order to be in control of the company, Bezos needs to own the most stock.
So I'm not sure if Bezos can just give away billions in the form of stock without losing control over his company.
And then taxes... how do you tax someone on the value of stock they own and how do they pay it?
Do they pay in stock?
I don't know.
He doesn't have a huge vault with billions of dollars in cash in it like Scrooge mcDuck.
So perhaps someone can enlighten me, would it be possible to make billionaires give away billions without it costing them stock and control in their company?
I am honestly interested in being educated on how this works.
The current system is short-sighted and doesn't take into account the obvious, natural tendencies of human beings.
For example, once you get rich you are naturally going to start spending a certain amount of money trying to influence how your business is regulated and how you personally are taxed.
The system should be immune to the lure of that money, either because it's illegal to take, or because it is ruthlessly tracked and voters are made aware.
What we have now is a system where the rich did exactly this: they paid for some influence.
With that influence they got the rules changed so they could make more money to donate.
Once
it became crazy expensive to win office, it was in the interests of both the rich and the politicians to change how it was possible to donate, and how donations were tracked.
So the rich have started to capture our democracy.
It hasn't worked completely yet, but the trend is there and it's getting worse every election cycle, whether we realize it or not.
Twitter isn't a good medium for addressing complicated issues.
And reducing issues to twitter sized blurbs is probably counter-productive.
People think about the poor in different ways.
Some think poverty is the individual's fault; if they just worked harder, stopped spending lots on cigarettes, drugs and alcohol, stopped having too many kids, and stopped having teenage pregnancies, they could lift themselves out of poverty.
Others think poverty is due to factors outside of one's control: if you can't afford an education and can only find minimum wage jobs, if you can't afford birth control (hospital births are expensive btw, and complications from delivery have killed millions of women throughout history), if you've got medical debt, if you can only afford a cheap car and have to spend hundreds or thousands on
repairs all the time, and if your life sucks so bad only cigarettes, drugs and alcohol can numb the pain.
Obviously both kinds of poor people exist, the lazy and the ones working 2-3 jobs and barely getting by.
They've existed throughout history and will always exist.
That doesn't mean we can't try to make things better.
Charities, nonprofits and government aid/regulations all do that.
If you wanna be a social Darwinist who says let the poor and sick die out because that's how natural selection works, that's certainly an opinion, but it's also beep up and plain evil.
Price
gouging on lifesaving medicine is just evil.
Something being legal doesn't mean it's not morally depraved -- slavery was legal and justified by certain religious groups.
Governments are supposed to protect the people and make life better for the majority; yes, they're full of corrupt, greedy, self-interested goons, but at least most countries haven't gone full dictatorship yet, and dictatorships have been toppled for all of human history.
A government's interest in nurturing the taxpayers provides services like transportation, infrastructure, minimum wages and better working conditions (compared to stuffing children in tight spaces to fix deadly machinery, at
least).
Why not keep goddamn insulin and epipens affordable for the masses?
Billionaires who get rich off others' misery are legal but morally repugnant.
Laws can govern what we deem morally repugnant, like child labor laws.
Reactions to laws can be unpredictable and contradictory to the intent (like British rewards for dead cobras in India leading to people breeding cobras, and when the reward was cancelled, they released all the cobras into the wild).
Putting price controls on medicines can lead to unintended consequences, like letting the insulin itself be cheap but charging a fortune for the bottle it came in.
That doesn't mean we can
just give up, though.
There are 33 developed or 1st world nations in the world.
America is the only one that doesn't have a single payer or universal healthcare.
All 32 others do.
This question is about a very American issue.
Literally all of Europe not have this issue.
So that's your problem- American's who are willing to allow the American way to live on.
May your day be filled with joy and happiness.
And please remember to like, share, and subscribe for more quality content everyday.