Fight For Reproductive Freedom? She and her fellow congressional democrats didn’t do a lot of that when she was a senator and could actually legislate. Like for example codifying Roe v Wade into law before it was too late. They just fundraised on saying they would.
When would they have done this? They’ve had majorities on paper but not enough to overcome the small fraction of Democrats that would likely lose their seat for such a vote. They got the ACA passed by a razor thin margin and even then it wouldn’t have passed if they didn’t make so many concessions on women’s healthcare.
Guess what gives you a shitload more votes and thus congressional seats than pretending that it’s 1992, that 99% of the population is between the most conservative democrat and the least conservative Republican and that everything except the tiniest incremental improvements are impossible?
Inspiring people! When Obama first ran for president, he ran as a progressive and won in a landslide. He won re-election by a much smaller margin in spite of the incumbent advantage after governing as a Clintonite neoliberal for 4 years.
The most consistently popular national level politician is Bernie Sanders. Before he entered politics, Vermont was one of the most conservative states in the country, but he inspired people and actually changed things for the better and now it’s one of the most progressive ones.
If they would stop living in the past and by the beck and call of their owner donors, the DNC could cause a similar transformation nationwide!
They wanted the issue. They wanted women in conservative states to suffer the repercussions of overturning Roe, knowing it would motivate voters to turn out to the polls. And the strategy has worked so far.
Edit: I don’t even know what you’re downvoting. The Democrats have been running on abortion rights in every election, and have done fuck-all to actually protect and preserve those rights. Those are objective truths.
You don’t think the leaders of for profit entities capable of curing cancer… get cancer? Their moms, dads, kids, siblings, etc. are just “exempt from cancer” because… reasons?
The way you can tell if something like curing cancer is currently within our capabilities is by looking at the rich and powerful. Are they dying from it? Are their loved ones dying from it? Then they want a cure, and if it existed they wouldn’t be dying of it.
There won’t be a “cure” for cancer because cancer is something like 1200 different diseases with different mechanisms and prognoses. We have cures for a lot of different cancers, and treatments that can extend and/or improve quality of life for people with cancer. Some types of cancer are worse than others. Some are more difficult to treat, some we may never cure.
The company that develops a pill you can take to eradicate all cancer would have the most profitable 10 years of sales for any pharmaceutical company. If they could develop a vaccine to prevent cancer, the researcher who gets the credit will be added to annals of medical history.
It’s silly to think that there’s more profit in treatment than cure. You can charge whatever you want for a cure, and you put all of your competitors selling treatments out of business.
It’s silly to think that there’s more profit in treatment than cure. You can charge whatever you want for a cure
You can charge whatever you want for treatment too, as big pharma has so clearly demonstrated with their extreme profiteering.
The difference is that you can sell the the cure once per patient and the treatment for a lifetime. To think that the former is more profitable than the latter is what’s silly.
Especially when you consider that it’s a lot easier for the majority of people in the world to pay $100 20 times than $1500 once and people whose job it is to maximize profits know that.
Listen, I’m not defending big pharma. I agree that they engage in profiteering and would let your grandma suffer to make a few bucks.
My point is that nobody is directing funding away from a cure on the theory that the long term treatment is more profitable. Firstly, because the industry isn’t that coordinated or controlled. Pharmaceutical companies answer to shareholders and directors, across dozens of companies across the world. There isn’t a back room where a cabal of big pharma ceos gathers to direct medical research. There may be trends in the industry, but those are more reactive than proactive.
Second, medical researchers have a lot of autonomy in deciding what to research and where to seek funding. Some look for promising areas where they can move the ball forward, others look for profitable areas of research, and still others are hoping to win a Nobel prize. Their motivations may or may not be altruistic, but they are not monolithic either.
And that brings me back to my original point. Even if researchers are driven by profit, and there is a coordinated effort to steer funding to the profit driven research, you cannot make a blanket statement that treatments are more profitable than cures. The cancer patient with no insurance is going to be just as dead whether the treatment costs $100 a week or the cure costs $1 million once. And for that matter, why would you assume they don’t sell both? The payments will come in the form of tax dollars and insurance premiums, and if they can’t afford one, then they get the other.
The last thing I’ll point out is that we have many cures for cancer. We have developed surgical treatments, radiation, marrow transplants, and chemotherapy. We’re investigating viral gene therapies and immunology therapies. Curing all cancer is hard work, and there is much more to be done. And there are doctors, hospitals, and medical manufacturers making a lot of money doing it. They invest in all research, for the same reason soft drink manufacturers make sports drinks and bottled water. The irony is that the fight against cancer is driven by capitalistic incessant need for growth.
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