The richest people I know talk to a range of people like personal assistants, but really the PA is valued for getting things done reliably and in the real world with any needed resources. Even calling in experts as needed - of course they may indeed talk to an AI too
The health insurance industry drives highly increased administrative costs - costs which the insurance companies are happy to foist off onto non insurance channels?
It "may be other than health care" but most (all?) other modern nations on multiple continents in multiple cultures spend less percent GDP on healthcare with longer life expectancy than the US
Every time Ive looked into it marketing is more than half of the costs of US pharma companies - and I would suspect even more as don't know if there has much work to unmask even more of that spending via channels that can occur in ways not obviously marked as marketing or at least are really not core to research and manufacturing.
e.g. is all the "discount coupon" pharmacy rigamarole considered marketing or administration.
This is not correct. Here's Pfizer's 2025 annual report [1]. Total expenses for the year were $55.1 billion. Advertising expenses were $2.7 billion of that, or just under 5%. R&D expenses were $12.1 billion, or just under 22%. They do have a lot of SG&A, but the large majority of that is not going to marketing.
Advertising is only a subset of marketing. From that doc, look at operating costs: SGA was ~$11B and R&D ~$12B - basically 50/50. Pfizer is very international, so is pretty difficult to break out US operating costs and what marketing vs R&D is for just the US. But one can also assume US marketing is higher than any other nation as direct-to-consumer advertising is primarily only allowed in the US.
No. Marketing is an issue but it's not the main driver.
Everybody else uses price controls to keep prices "reasonable"--the drug companies tolerate this so long as selling to the country exceeds their marginal cost of production. They count on the US market to recoup the $1B R&D costs.
Simply mandate that a drug company can't charge more in the US than they do in any other first world country. Major earthquake in drug costs.
The "discount card" bit is basically a reduction in revenue, it's neither marketing nor administration.
The Mad Max stuff is occurring at scale more due to unchecked governments, and governments that don't work for society than it is from insufficient surveillance
They probably omitted it because it is irrelevant. It says (according to the title of the Reddit post...the body has been removed) Meta is supporting laws to collect more data, which they profit from.
The Register article is about laws that were specifically designed to not give Meta and their ilk anything more than an unverified age bracket. The age reported is whatever the person who set up the account on the computer said to report.
It would be interesting to see a similar lobbying breakdown for the EU and UK. I bet it's still Meta with other right wing actors. The left rarely has the money for this kind of lobbying scale
IMHO, if QE solves the trouble, the Fed or treasury should be taking a bigger bite of ownership from the bailed out companies in exchange specifically to disincentivize taking risks with a bailout backstop.
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