News bits: Fibbing, COVID and drug prices

The ex-president aggressively fibbed --

no consequences are on the horizon 

CNN writes:

Newly released emails debunk Trump and allies’ attempts to blame the GSA for packing boxes that ended up in Mar-a-Lago. .... The email exchange between GSA officials and [Trump aide] Harrison is one of more than 100 pages of emails and documents newly released by the GSA that debunk claims from Trump and his allies that the government agency is to blame for packing the boxes containing classified documents that were later recovered by the FBI during the search of his Mar-a-Lago resort in August.

A spokesman for Trump did not directly address how these emails dispute claims made by the former president and allies, and instead attacked the Biden administration.

“A routine and necessary process has been leveraged by power-hungry partisan bureaucrats to intimidate and silence those who have dared to support President Trump and his America First agenda,” said Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich. “Why? Because Democrats have done nothing to deliver for the American people and they are left scrambling to fabricate a new witch-hunt to distract from their abject failures.”

That raises a thing or two. One, if Trump runs for president again in 2023 and 2024, he will be the Republican nominee. Most rank and file Republicans will vote for him despite his lies, crimes, treason and all the crap he has pulled. Most Republican elites will support their nominee. What does that tell you about most (~97% ?) of the GOP, e.g. pro- or anti-democracy, pro-or anti-truth, pro- or anti-rule of law, etc.?

Another thing, does anyone notice how Trump defends himself with blatantly obvious deflections, but that makes no difference to most Republicans? Most would still vote for and defend him if he runs for office again. Most who would not support Trump have been RFINO hunted out of the Republican Party.

COVID is partisan

New research from the National Bureau of Economic Research indicates that COVID deaths are higher among Republicans. The data was based on mortality data from 2018 to 2021 in Florida and Ohio. NBER writes:

Political affiliation has emerged as a potential risk factor for COVID-19, amid evidence that Republican-leaning counties have had higher COVID-19 death rates than Democrat-leaning counties and evidence of a link between political party affiliation and vaccination views. .... We estimate substantially higher excess death rates for registered Republicans when compared to registered Democrats, with almost all of the difference concentrated in the period after vaccines were widely available in our study states. Overall, the excess death rate for Republicans was 5.4 percentage points (pp), or 76%, higher than the excess death rate for Democrats. Post- vaccines, the excess death rate gap between Republicans and Democrats widened from 1.6 pp (22% of the Democrat excess death rate) to 10.4 pp (153% of the Democrat excess death rate). The gap in excess death rates between Republicans and Democrats is concentrated in counties with low vaccination rates and only materializes after vaccines became widely available.

That is more evidence that COVID vaccines work. It is also evidence that cult loyalty is killing Republican partisans more than necessary. 

Republicans want to repeal drug price controls

The Democratic bill that empowered Medicare to negotiate drug prices is being attacked by some Republicans. They claim it will slow drug development and/or reduce availability of existing drugs. Both claims are lies, including lies of omission. Florida Politics writes:

In anticipation of Midterm Election results, U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio has filed for a do-over of the legislation widely expected to reduce out-of-pocket drug costs for patients and lower Medicare costs.

Rubio has joined with fellow Republican U.S. Sens. James Lankford, Mike Lee and Cynthia Lummis in introducing the Protecting Drug Innovation Act that would roll back the feds’ authority to negotiate, set and control drug prices under Medicare.

“Democrats’ price controls will hurt Floridians,” said Rubio’s statement that his office released Friday. “There will be less innovation, which means life-saving cancer drugs may not be developed. There will be less production, which means life-sustaining insulin may be harder to find.”

With Rubio’s name on new legislation that would mean taking off the cap that limited seniors’ out-of-pocket drug costs to $2,000 a year, his challenger seized on the opportunity. Democratic U.S. Rep. Val Demings, running to unseat Rubio, released a statement Friday on the bill.

The Republican argument here is that lower drug prices will stop or slow development of new drugs. That may be true to some extent, but so what? First, most new drugs these days are me-too variants of drugs already on the market. When one looks at cost-benefit for new drugs, it is usually crappy. 

Second, if the private sector does not want to innovate without outrageously high profit margins, then let new drugs come from academic research. That would slow things down, but that's what we would have to live with. So far, one can strongly argue that the private sector is a failure in health care because the profit motive corrupts the whole health care sector, from drug companies, to insurance companies to actual health care providers. Everyone is chasing dollars first and foremost. Patients and the cost burdens on patients and/or taxpayers are not very important. We get poor value for our money

Another point: The price and availability of insulin has little to do with negotiated drug prices. There would still be profit in negotiated insulin prices, just not outrageous profit. Insulin, like lots of old but still effective drugs, has been on the market for decades. The insulin molecule as a drug is not going to change. There is nothing left to innovate. Despite no innovation, for-profit drug drug companies jacked up the price of insulin far more than inflation would dictate. That was greed pure and simple. Negotiated pricing would keep callous capitalist greed in check, but not affect the drug in any other way. 

So, if profits from negotiated drug are not enough for the private sector, then the government should step in a do the job the private sector is too greedy to do.

As usual, pro-business, anti-consumer Republican elites are lying about why they do what they do. In return, a grateful drug industry will dump cash into the politician’s accounts in return for their services in defense of the indefensible.