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Time is a circle. That's why clocks are round.
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
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I don't frequently have these kinds of debates in public, but the closest I've ever gotten to talking a vaccine skeptic out of their position was when I came from the angle of, "these shots are free because insurance companies know they work, and they would rather eat the cost of 100 vaccines than have to pay for every hundredth person to be hospitalized with the flu for 3 days, which costs THEM $40k."
Yeppp, insurance companies want you to have to have health insurance, be perfectly healthy as long as possible, and die or recover quickly when you get something expensive like cancer. Vaccines are basically always going to be a good value proposition for them because most people should get them which spreads the cost of R&D and manufacturing out between most people in a way that hospital stays and designer drugs can'tm
Then they start going on about how the vaccine was rushed into production, and it didn't need to go through FDA approval, which like yeah it was, but that doesn't mean it's unsafe.
For the most part the FDA is a giant waste of time, yes they do prevent unsafe products from getting onto the market but 99% of the time the product is safe, and the FDA is just this giant ball of red tape you have to cut through.
It was rushed, yes. And it didn't go through the regular FDA process.
It did, however, go through the full FDA process. What they did was run stages of the FDA approval process in parallel that normally needed to be done in series. All the same steps were done, but they were doing stage III testing at the same time they did Stage II testing.
And, funnily, the vaccine which actually caused health problems wasn't an MRNA, it was a traditionally developed vaccine (the J&J shot).
Safe and effective are 2 different things that the FDA tests. Drugs aren't always safe and they aren't always effective. FDA testing forces pharmaceuticals to prove both things before giving their drugs to people.
It's a lot of red tape, but it's there because of things like Vioxx (an FDA failure and a result of "just trust us, it's safe") which ended up killing/injuring over 10000 people.
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.
All money out matters to an insurer.
Insurance is generally written on risks that are not hedgable. What they care about is making sure their risks don't all happen at the same time.
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.
CEOs still only care because they can get a bigger bonus.
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.