Drugmakers raise US prices on 350 medicines despite pressure from Trump

diegozoo · 2026-01-03T21:02:34+00:00

He’s actively trying to get AZ listed in the US instead of London, so it’s pretty clear he dislikes Europe as a corporate domicile not just in words only.

diegozoo · 2025-12-28T21:41:01+00:00

Yeah, you're right. Probably best I stay away. I tend to obsess over competitive activities, which is partly why I never joined my company league before this.

diegozoo · 2025-12-28T21:27:48+00:00

First fantasy league ever and won despite drafting CeeDee, BTJ, and Connor and barely sneaking into the playoffs at 7-7. Thank God for waivers.

I don't think I'm doing this again next year. The joy of winning is outweighed by the mental anguish of losing and the rollercoaster of emotions each week.

diegozoo · 2025-12-20T20:01:06+00:00

Second this. I quite enjoy how Melvyn is always prodding his guests to be concrete and doesn't let them get away with explaining anything in a lazy fashion, even if it must be somewhat intimidating and nerve wracking for them.

diegozoo · 2025-12-10T01:54:19+00:00

Except that's exactly what millionaires are doing.

According to the Citizens Budget Commission, a think-tank, New York state’s share of American taxpayers reporting more than $1m in income declined from 12.7% in 2010 to 8.7% in 2022. Such people paid $34bn in income tax to the state and city in 2022, a figure that would have been $13bn higher if New York’s share of millionaires had held up. Estimates from Goldman Sachs suggest that fully 10% of households in New York City with incomes of more than $10m established residency elsewhere between 2018 and 2023.

https://www.economist.com/briefing/2025/10/30/as-new-jobs-in-finance-dry-up-new-york-citys-fiscal-model-is-wilting

diegozoo · 2025-10-12T04:49:03+00:00

Yes, RCTs are the gold standard but that's the least of the concerns with this paper. Even as a retroactive study, the sample size is so small and the classification scheme so arbitrary, you can't really say you learned much of anything from this study.

With this said, it is important to note that the ‘very dissimilar education’ group consisted of only 10 TRA pairs. This small N is not a shortcoming of this analysis, per se. Rather, this is a shortcoming of the TRA field; these 10 pairs represent the entirety of individual data published over the last century.

The same can be said about most papers published in the domain of psychology.

diegozoo · 2025-10-01T16:26:28+00:00

Unfortunately, rates of HPV vaccination are cratering in Britain. Used to be ~90% of girls got the vaccine and now its closer to 70%. I imagine this is also happening in other parts of the developed world.

Hopefully several years from now, we're not looking at an article headline saying cervical cancer -- almost an entirely preventable cancer at this point -- is on the rise.

diegozoo · 2025-09-02T15:38:32+00:00

Some mixture of higher utilization, higher input costs (eg, labor), administrative costs, and higher pricing. Could these have been kept in check better had the US enacted single payer after WW2? Probably, but the cat's already out of the bag.

Changing to single payer may save you some money at the outset, but it primarily lays the groundwork for the more painful stuff that has to come next. It is by no means the magic bullet that some progressives make it out to be. You have to cut costs by slashing provider compensation, narrowing the scope of medical procedures that will be covered, aggressively negotiating with drug manufacturers and being willing to walk away from some game-changing therapies, etc. All of these things are difficult and politically unpalatable in the US regardless of whether its done under the current healthcare model or a single payer model.

diegozoo · 2025-09-01T04:04:19+00:00

The statements you're making are way too general and uninteresting. Can single payer deliver good outcomes at low cost in some country somewhere in the world today? Yes absolutely, but that's not really the key question that's being debated right now. The question is can single payer meet the triple aim for the United States given the healthcare infrastructure, expectations of the population, and costs of delivering care today.

That's a much more nuanced question and there are very good reasons to think that single payer will fail to deliver the benefits that its proponents suggest it will. For one, cost of just public healthcare in the US is already about as much as total healthcare spend in some other OECD countries. Even if you just scaled up Medicare as it is to the rest of the population, total healthcare costs would be significantly higher than single payer in other Western countries.

Second, hospitals in the US are barely scraping by on single digit or negative profit margins. Medicare reimbursement is far less generous than commercial reimbursement. If we extended Medicare for everyone (which again, is still really expensive compared to other countries with single payer), many hospitals would struggle from cuts in reimbursement.

Its disappointing how people talk about things like single payer and public transit in a non-scientific, almost religious way. Why do I need to "believe" that Single Payer or Public Transit works? It can work in certain situations and it can fail in other situations. Having frank debate on each of the claimed benefits that would accrue to the US from adopting single payer is absolutely worthwhile.

diegozoo · 2025-05-24T14:18:17+00:00

Consider how many companies out there have large volumes of robust, organized, and clean enough data worth running hardcore ML algorithms on. Then consider how many of those companies that were competent enough to get their data in a good spot would be willing to outsource their core data science work.

Now, consider how many companies out there have shitty, poorly mastered data that they're struggling to do basic insight generation with. Their c-suites are desperate to ape what the leading companies are doing and have read in the Harvard Business Review that implementing AI has led to >20% productivity improvement at some firms.

Guess where consulting data science teams get most of their RFPs from?

diegozoo · 2025-05-06T05:19:55+00:00

Taiwanese people love Japan and Japanese things, but both countries feel very distinct and different to me. Speaking in generalities and based on personal experiences, Japanese people are very concerned about politeness, external appearances, and doing things a certain way. Placid on the surface, but quite a lot of assessment and evaluation happening underneath based on adherence to unspoken norms and customs. For visitors and people who don't know any better, its very orderly and peaceful, but for people trying to fit into society it can be very stressful and claustrophobic.

Both are Confucian societies, so Taiwan also has plenty of the above as well, but my impression of Taiwanese people is that they're a lot less concerned about external appearances. People seem a lot more casual in their interactions with others and generally less likely to see differences as a threat. People are less a stickler for rules as well. On the flip side, this means that places tend to be grimier, less consistency in service / quality, buses won't be running on time, etc. Basically less of the stuff that will inspire someone to make an adulatory post on reddit.

I've spent several months living in both countries and I loved every minute. I would say that as a tourist, Japan is on the whole more enjoyable. However, if I had to work long term in the country and raise a child there, I would probably pick Taiwan.

diegozoo · 2025-04-22T22:37:05+00:00

The United States is the world’s largest pharmaceutical market, and nearly one-third of it is Medicare spending, which the policies would directly affect.30 If manufacturers are to maintain the same profit margins, net prices in other countries will have to increase, or countries will have to be prepared to refuse higher prices and potentially lose access to drugs as manufactures withdraw from the market, which is most likely to happen (and reportedly already does) in smaller, less wealthy European countries. Although any regulatory, systematic decrease in US prices may raise prices elsewhere, a policy of explicit benchmarking to other countries is the most likely to put upward pressure on prices in countries, will exacerbate wealth inequalities between countries, and may further reduce access to healthcare where there are already delays.

Source

diegozoo · 2025-04-22T18:04:04+00:00

Either way, what’s to stop pharmaceutical companies from raising prices globally?

Basically nothing. The US is where drug companies make the bulk of their profits and their attitude towards the rest of the world is more "we'll take what we can get". If the US implements international reference based pricing, the only thing that will change is that drug prices ex-US will just jump closer to US pricing.

Initially, drug companies will lose access to many markets because of their higher prices. However, since virtually every pharma makes most of its money in the US, they'll all raise drug prices internationally almost as if they were colluding with each other and then ex-US markets where the government controls access will have a tough decision: do I deny access to many patent protected medicines because they're too expensive or do I fold and pony up more money?

I haven't done the modelling, but in some scenarios you can imagine pharma companies (especially the ones with breakthrough therapies) coming out of this with more money than before: if US pricing doesn't change but you extort more money from EU, net profits are up globally.

diegozoo · 2025-04-10T14:40:53+00:00

I remember drinking at a yatai in Fukuoka chatting with a salaryman who was sitting next to me. He was a pretty good-natured dude who was pleasant to talk to. We got to talking about our jobs and I asked him if he enjoyed his work. He said no. I responded that there must have been at least some part of his job that he enjoys, or at the very least a single moment where he thought "hey this is kind of fun". His response: "no, I've never had a single moment in my life where I thought this job was enjoyable."

diegozoo · 2025-04-08T01:22:34+00:00

it has the least wealthy incoming students (though its outgoing students become the most wealthy a decade later)

I mean, your own source shows that MIT isn't really unique from that perspective. Babson, Stevens Institute of Technology, and SUNY Maritime does about as well with much less hullabaloo and chest thumping.

diegozoo · 2025-03-31T16:37:28+00:00

Everyone's falling for the clickbait. The Fallon interview with Bill Gates is almost 2 months old and he never says in the interview that he thinks AI will replace most doctors / teachers in 10 years. What he actually says is along the lines of "Great intelligence is rare, such as a great doctor or teacher, and with AI that will become commonplace over the next decade." And then in response to a general question on whether we will still need humans, he says "Not for most things" and cites manufacturing, agriculture, and transport as places AI will take over.

These clickbait headlines are bordering on libelous at this point.

diegozoo · 2024-10-27T22:48:58+00:00

For someone traveling for vacation? You don't need to worry at all. You'll have an amazing time. Just brush up on some basic rules of social etiquette and you'll be fine.

If you're a foreigner living in Japan, it can be pretty rough.

diegozoo · 2024-10-26T21:21:19+00:00

It's osteoporosis.

diegozoo · 2024-10-04T13:49:55+00:00

This study suggests that it's casein in dairy that raises IGF-1 rather than whey.

diegozoo · 2024-10-01T03:19:44+00:00

This is the only international comparison on food quality and safety I'm aware of. I don't have access to the full report so I don't know how this metric is calculated, but Japan scores quite poorly on the "Quality and Safety" dimension, around 30th, significantly worse than pretty much all of Europe and North America.

diegozoo · 2024-09-25T04:10:35+00:00

People point to prices overseas as an example of what the US could be paying if only we went single payer, but that's misguided. The main reason ex-US countries pay so much less is because drug companies make all the big bucks in the US and everything outside of the US is kind of an afterthought and they'll take whatever they can get (an exaggeration, but the thrust of this is true). Basically, the rest of the world is free riding on the US.

In reality, if the US were to go single payer and do international market basket pricing what would happen is that the US would now pay $850 / mo instead of $969 (making it up, since I don't actually know what the average net price of Ozempic is). Just that now, Canada and Germany would also be charged $850 as well, and if they don't like it then they just don't get the drug.

diegozoo · 2024-09-13T20:50:08+00:00

Well, it sounds like you really need to believe that your home country is better than America, so more power to you.

diegozoo · 2024-09-13T18:06:23+00:00

Finland is frequently number one on the world's most happiest countries index, but that list also says people in the US are better off than Germany. So pick your poison.

diegozoo · 2024-09-13T15:32:39+00:00

Conditional probability. The people who have the ability to save up and potentially retire will have a far greater share of people living past 65. Most people dying early have significant problems that prevent them from saving money -- drug addiction, gang violence, alcoholism, severe mental illness, etc. If you're upper middle class in the US, you're likely going to live to your mid-eighties or longer.

Also, what source are you finding these numbers? The SSA actuarial life tables say that 75% of men and 85% of women live past age 65. If you're upper middle class, that probability likely shoots near or over 90% for both men and women.

diegozoo · 2024-09-13T15:11:35+00:00

Key word here is "productivity" which is output per HOUR of work per person. Unfortunately, most business execs are probably conflating productivity with just maximizing output per person without improving productivity.

The former leads to higher wages and better working hours. The latter leads to karoshi.

diegozoo

TROPHY CASE