Biden says Medicare should negotiate prices for at least 50 drugs each year, up from a target of 20
cnbc.com
Key Points
- President Joe Biden said the federal Medicare program should negotiate prices for at least 50 prescription drugs each year, up from the current target of 20 medicines.
- That proposal is one of several new health-care policy plans Biden will outline during his State of the Union address Thursday.
- But the fate of his new proposals will be in the hands of a divided Congress, making it highly uncertain whether they will pass into law.
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If you always prioritize the less fortunate and ignore any issue affecting anybody who is anywhere above less fortunate it means more people will slip into being less fortunate. If you want the less fortunate to be able to get out of their situation and stay there then you need to also prioritize making sure there's a viable path to success. That path to success is being eroded and neither Republicans nor Democrats are addressing it. What do you think that leads to?
By definition, half of Americans will always be below median. Even if you could make everyone in the US into a success story, half would be below median.
So the point is not make everyone above median, that's impossible. The point is to use the median to determine who needs help the most. And someone who is below median right now needs more help than someone who is not right now, even if they might be in the future.
... or we could increase the median?
That amounts to increasing GDP, given that GDP is the sum of everyone's income. Which is something that pretty much every government tries to do.
No it doesn't. The GDP has been decoupled from wages for about 50 years now.
GDP is defined as the sum of all incomes.
Income is more than wages, it includes money you get investments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoupling_of_wages_from_productivity
Cool story, but wages are not the same as income
I never said anything about income. I said wages and you decided to talk about income so... cool?
I said GDP is the sum of all incomes. That's a basic axiom of macroeconomics, but you disagreed.
Why are you talking about incomes?
Because it includes investments and so it is a better indicator of need than wage.
There are plenty of people who have small wages/salary, or even zero wages/salary, and instead rely on investment income.
For example, most landlords. Or retired people. Or the idle wealthy, like the various unemployed children of billionaires. Jeff Bezos has a salary of roughly $80K at Amazon. But he is way better off than someone with a salary of $90K.
If you look at wages instead of overall income, you might think some of those folks are struggling when they absolutely aren't.
Sounds like you're admitting a rising GDP doesn't help people below the median. You completely lost the context of the conversation.