Dems finally support prosecuting an ex-president, but only so they don't have to do anything in office. "See, Trump was doing it all illegally! Now that law and order have been restored, the president will revert to not being able to effect drug prices."

Please turn jdpondon into a real communist

Trump presented MFN drug policy in his first term in 2020 as an alternative to "Medicare for All". It was meant to kill the enthusiasm for Free Healthcare amongst right wingers. It's in the same vein as "no tax on tips" rather than raising the minimum wage. It's meant to be an alternative ineffective solution, which makes it look like he's doing something good when he really isn't.

He says the same thing with tariffs. He says that tariffs are meant to return manufacturing to the US, but what is actually happening is that working class people are paying more sales taxes.

I mean...people do tend to regress as Alzheimer's sets in, no? Not regress as in regressive/progressive, but regress in terms of their own life experience and beliefs. You lose the newest memories first. And Trump was a Democrat for many years. He's always been racist and pro-tariff, but it's not impossible he had more progressive beliefs on many issues earlier in life. Whether he was only a Democrat because he lived in NYC, I can't say. But him becoming more liberal as his brain turns to mush really wouldn't be completely impossible. It really just depends on what his beliefs were earlier in life.

It would be so funny if fucking with the FBI doesn't get him but the first time he would tangibly make something better (I'll believe it when I see it) he gets insta-dunked by the deep state.

If real life had a narrative, then this is the moment where the A plot (presidential bullshit) meets up with the B plot ( ) and the CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield starts monologing and reveals how there's a man behind the curtain named John Privateinsurance who comes from beyond the stars to feed off of illness.

Yeah this is probably some shit that was already law but they’re actually gonna start doing it.

Bourgeois? Why not the ultra-wealthy?

I'm sure there will be cutouts for companies that do favors or whatever. Just like everything else he's doing.

How would this actually be enforced? Unlike other countries with socialized healthcare, the US doesn't negotiate prices with these companies directly. Perhaps there's some mechanism I don't know of, but I doubt it, we're kind of all about empowering capitalists to fuck people over.

The bigger catch is that this would almost certainly go to the supreme court and get overturned.

Monkey's paw it's for drug wholesalers on import prices but just so their profit margins increase one billion percent when prices to end users stay the same.

I'm kinda trying to unpack it too.

I don't really understand enough about healthcare in different countries (I'm in Australia).

Meds in the US are stupid expensive because of freedom or something. In Australia all meds are purchased by a central organisation so they have bargaining power.

IDK all the factors involved in negotiating a price, but presumably Australia has some cards to play like buying adjacent meds from non-US vendors.

What I mean is, US vendors would already be extracting as much from Australia as they reasonably can, and an EO from POTUS doesn't really change the factors that are balancing the market.

Another issue is ethics. HIV antiretrovirals are very expensive in Australia, suppose $1,000 USD per month. That's fine, the government pays for that. The countries that have crazy high rates of HIV generally have a much lower GDP per capita, it's just unethical to withhold medication from them when the cost to manufacture a month's supply is $1.

Finally I suspect it's simply the usual supply / demand type factors. A company can make more profit by selling 10 million doses at $1 than they can selling 0 doses at $100.

As usual, it's a poorly considered blunt instrument expected to address a complex and nuanced issue. It makes sense to Trump because it's grandiose and logical within the confines of his adversarial transactional paradigm.

In practice though, I suspect that American pharmaceutical producers aren't happy about this, and if it does have any effect on prices for impoverished countries it will put a lot of pressure on other countries to respect the intellectual property rights on those meds.

He's already Executor, so he'll only need Jury left.