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.
Why are you framing this like an either/or situation?
When talking about things that cost money, it’s always either/or. If you spend $X someone in the top 50%, you have $X less to spend on those in the bottom 50%. And personally I prefer that Democrats generally prioritize spending for the bottom 50%.
Democrats also support things that help everyone and don’t cost the government anything. For example, the ACA banned insurance companies from rejecting people with pre-existing conditions, banned them from raising premiums on sick people, banned them from dropping people in the middle of treatment. Those were all major problems before the ACA, and the ACA helped everyone by fixing them.
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