Eristalis

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.

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.

Define anyone who disagrees with you as a fascist/Nazi, accuse them of being an alt for some douche. Rinse repeat.

It's pathetic. People disagree. It's what makes place like this interesting instead of a bland echo-chamber.

Here, the issue is not resolved by pointing to any instance of a call to violence, nor is it anything to do with The principle that one has a right to fight against oppression.

The issue is who gets to decide who the oppressors are. If it's decided by courts of law, or revolutionary councils (if we can no longer trust the courts) then we have progress. If it's decided by any Tom, Dick, or Harry with a grievance, we have mob rule.

As has been noted, I've just been banned from 196 for saying exactly that. I was also accused of being a Nazi.

So is violence now justified against me? Are you willing to stand by your position and advocate violence against me personally because I've been labelled a Nazi? If not, then we are in agreement - there needs to be more than the mere accusation of fascism to justify violence. And that's the issue here. Who gets to decide who's a fascist. Not whether fascists deserve violence.

This may come as a terrible shock to you, but...

People lie to you to get into power. They're not actually telling the truth on the telly, they're telling you what they think will get you to vote for them.

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.