Eristalis

It's insane that people seriously think this.

Millions of people have been killed, and millions of dollars have been extracted from the poor. There's a genocide actively taking place. Anthropogenic climate change is literally an existential risk. 150 million children are at risk of starvation.

These thing pre-date Epstein, have nothing to do with Epstein, and (with the greatest sympathy to his victims), are way more important than Epstein.

I honestly would rather they burnt the files so the issue could stop taking up news feeds that should be focusing on the far, far more extensive human suffering caused by the aforementioned wars, plagues, and destitution, which, far from being g a manufactured distraction are absolutely fundamental features of Neo-liberal economies.

What losses in revenue? As I said earlier, deaths an hospitalisations were overwhelmingly in older age brackets and poorer neighbourhoods. Companies were compensated for closures, and able to profit enormously from the 'supply chain problems' by price gouging. They made a fortune on the vaccine itself, not to mention the increase in future products off the back of the RNA research. What losses in revenue were on the horizon?

Health insurance costs in America have risen by over 130%, so there’s no evidence of insurance companies offering flu shots to save money, they just demand more premium to cover it.

Far more likely, in my view, is that taking regular vaccines has become a marketable product (for various reasons) which insurance companies have jumped on. Offer the shot, up the premium to cover it (plus a healthy profit). It simple market expansion.

If there’s a market (or one can be fabricated), then there’s a product to sell. If you can add a flu shot, up the premium to cover it, and not lose customers, then it makes sense to do so. Doesn’t have any bearing on whether it works. Same metric would apply to a medicine which did absolutely nothing whatsoever. As long as advertising it justified a rise in premiums larger than the cost of it, and customers don’t jump ship.

This is want I mean by comfortable narratives around medicine. If literally any other industry had added a service to their product, you'd assume it was simply something they thought they could market, and probably be suspicious that it was any use at all. But when a medical company adds a service (and charges more for it) people have to do this mental gymnastics to make the company's actions all for the best in the end.

I don't disagree with your description of events, but you're imposing a reasoning behind them for which there is little evidence. The idea I'm pushing back against is that vaccines (here Covid) and I suppose now Covid policy in general, resulted from some clever metric of keeping people alive because of their income generating value. There's no evidence government works like that, and masses of evidence that government decisions are in fact a mix of submission to industry lobbying, blatant electioneering, and simple incompetence.

Whatever the policies were, they would almost certainly have been whatever the loudest industry lobby, focus group committee, or egotistical politician wanted at the time. Not some sociopathic genius doing life-value calculus.

I'm not talking about the insurance, I'm talking about the people making decisions for that company. They will have a share portfolio which forma that major part of their personal income which will be hedged. As such, so long as the broad capitalist system keeps extracting wealth, they will keep earning. Their own company is often little more than a side project compared to their assets.

It's truly shocking to me that people are still falling for this notion of the wise, financially prudent, CEO - even after the 2008 crash and all the fallout. People are still invested in this mythology around how businesses work.

I guess with healthcare people need the comfort. After all, seeing medicine like any other product of modern industry is a pretty scary leap, so people have to build a narrative around it by which it's magically protected.

It isn't. It's the same as literally every other product on the market. You can wrangle it in as much storytelling as you like, but nothing is going to make production of pharmaceuticals any different to production of paint, oil, cars, tanks, and any other thing you can think of. The most profitable practice is chosen and that often is to the detriment of ordinary people.

Sure. The point is that they don't have to balance income and expenditure to ensure that. What they have to do is perpetuate the capitalist system. That needn't be by balancing their books.

Why would it matter to them whether they pay out for hospitalisation, or pay out for flu shots? The payouts don't matter. We saw that with the banking crisis. They're covered by bigger insurers who are covered by government bailouts because they're too big to fail. All that matters is that premiums keep coming in.

Insurance companies can write off excess payments anyway. Those making the decisions undoubtedly have hedged portfolios, so if the company they're working for goes under it doesn't matter as long as other companies in their portfolio benefit. Many will even take out short positions on their own failing company and profit from its demise.

Gone are the days when CEOs actually cared if their particular company's on-book expenditures matched its income.

Yeah... Only

1. Covid significantly affected the elderly and those from poorer neighbourhoods. Net draws on government funds, not net producers of income. If the government were being callous capitalists they'd have let covid rip and saved themselves a packet in pension payouts and welfare.
2. The government were widely criticised at the time for not doing enough (too late with lockdown, too lax with mandates). The government cannot simultaneously find it prudent to not care about covid and care terribly that it is kept in check. Their callous calculation should have come out with either 'save everyone' or 'let everyone die'. It can't be both.
3. Pharmaceutical companies made a fortune, as did anyone with shares in them. No one 'paid out' there was no trade off of expense against predicted income. The taxpayer paid for the research, paid for the shots, and paid for the shutdowns. The corporations didn't pay for anything at any time.

Yeah... Because the education system is so effective! We can for sure rely on it to make people smarter and not, for example, just churn out obedient, compliant workers for corporate machines.