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When did you realize the system is rigged?

Mr.Chaos

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Is the system really rigged? I mean for most people they are completely content with the script, most would cringe at the idea of having to work harder than you are "paid to do". Some would flat out rather die than go build a business after working a semi-stressful 9 hour a day job. I mean who would give up netflix and "orange is the new black" to become financially independent in 5-10+ years?

Is the system meant to contain? Yes, it is. However, the exit routes have always been available for those willing to go the extra mile.

Afterall, the system is what creates the consumer market.

Could you imagine if everyone was a "real" entrepreneur? Who would buy your fidget spinners?

Most likely your bosses, bosses, boss, the founder of the company, started off just like many of us, just an entrepreneur with a mission and drive to be different.

And soon hopefully quite a few of us here will eventually hire our own people and they too will complain about the system...but only a few will decide to escape it.

I am thankful to have immediate access to my companies director. I love to watch how he interacts with vendors and clients, even as an employepreneur I find tremendous value in how my company/bosses/managers operate and take notes daily.

Just my thoughts.
 
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BlokeInProgress

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When the company I am working in started removing people and we had to tell those who are getting fired some candy quoted statement. We had to strictly follow the script. Only those at the top knows why we are removing people.
 

Iammelissamoore

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Is the system really rigged? I mean for most people they are completely content with the script, most would cringe at the idea of having to work harder than you are "paid to do". Some would flat out rather die than go build a business after working a semi-stressful 9 hour a day job. I mean who would give up netflix and "orange is the new black" to become financially independent in 5-10+ years?

Is the system meant to contain? Yes, it is. However, the exit routes have always been available for those willing to go the extra mile.

Afterall, the system is what creates the consumer market.

Could you imagine if everyone was a "real" entrepreneur? Who would buy your fidget spinners?

Most likely your bosses, bosses, boss, the founder of the company, started off just like many of us, just an entrepreneur with a mission and drive to be different.

And soon hopefully quite a few of us here will eventually hire our own people and they too will complain about the system...but only a few will decide to escape it.

I am thankful to have immediate access to my companies director. I love to watch how he interacts with vendors and clients, even as an employepreneur I find tremendous value in how my company/bosses/managers operate and take notes daily.

Just my thoughts.

Absolutely hear you loud and clear on this.

Could you imagine if everyone was a "real" entrepreneur? Who would buy your fidget spinners?

Funny enough though, I often thought that even if everyone was an entrepreneur, maybe there WOULD indeed still be room for business amidst each other - e.g. Some businesses need to purchase raw materials to create their product, which means as a business, you'd have to purchase raw materials from another business to proceed. B2B is a reality.

Also, if I have a business and I outsource my marketing to another company/individual who is a marketing pro, then, that'd be a business doing business with another business. B2B

I know it's not that much an easy walk in the park, lol, but, I genuinely believe opportunities are around us every where, as you correctly said, and as A LOT of us are understanding through this remarkable forum - we have to go out, get it and make the great things happen.
 
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Christopher777

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And soon hopefully quite a few of us here will eventually hire our own people and they too will complain about the system...but only a few will decide to escape it.

There's a reason why people become entrepreneurs. I guess it's this ability to be self-aware and a propensity for self-improvement. We read. We question how things are done. We want to keep being true to ourselves. We don't care about how people judge us.

How else would you want to spend your time if you're wired that way or decided to be that way?

This is why we hate not being in control of our time. There is just no other viable option but to do things our way. It's like having your a$$ lit on fire.

On the other hand, the others have been under massive social conditioning. Couple that with a lack of self-awareness and a lack of self-development program, it's obvious why many get stuck in the system.

We had to break through and keep fighting that social conditioning too. Along with being a part of a minority.

So you see, that's what makes it hard for everyone.

Between the 1% and the 99%. The difference is in how reality is understood.

It seems to me that there is a glass ceiling to all this :

All it takes to break through is a true shift in perspective.
 
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Iammelissamoore

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There's a reason why people become entrepreneurs. I guess it's this ability to be self-aware and a propensity for self-improvement. We read. We question how things are done. We want to keep being true to ourselves. We don't care about how people judge us.

How else would you want to spend your time if you're wired that way or decided to be that way?

This is why we hate not being in control of our time. There is just no other viable option but to do things our way. It's like having your a$$ lit on fire.

On the other hand, the others have been under massive social conditioning. Couple that with a lack of self-awareness and a lack of self-development program, it's obvious why many get stuck in the system.

We had to break through and keep fighting that social conditioning too. Along with being a part of a minority.

So you see, that's what makes it hard for everyone.

Between the 1% and the 99%. The difference is in how reality is understood.

It seems to me that there is a glass ceiling to all this :

All it takes to break through is a true shift in perspective.

Absolutely, perspective genuinely IS everything.

You know how our airwaves are crowded with all these judging shows - America's got talent, X Factor, Miss Universe, Miss World, then all the games - Sunday night football, Monday night football, basketball, this, that and the other, then general shows (they say entertainment) it's so crowded that it is strategically stretched out from Sunday to Sunday nonstop, simply to keep the comfort zone getting even more comfortable and the perspectives to remain the same.

To simply take a step back and recognise that "this just can't be all there is to life," is a HUGE step, what we do with it thereafter is the make and break of our livelihoods.
 
G

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Never saw the system as rigged, only as a game that I was playing well enough.

Unfortunately, now that I know better, I'm frightened by how fragile it all is. Hard to be mad at something about to break.
 

OldFaithful

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For me, the realization occurred after being laid off from a medium/large company during the recession and moving to a very small company. I didn't really understand that there was a script, per se, but realized that the path I was following would not end up where I wanted to be. At this small company I had exposure to the owners and saw their involvement (or lack thereof) in the day to day operations. It was the 2 owners of the small company that had the lifestyle I wanted, and I realized that if I want to get there...I'd have to own the company...not work in it.
 
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SteveO

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My father worked construction. He left when I was in my early teens. I started working in my early teens as that was the only way for me get clothes and spending money. There was very little attention paid to what others had as that just led to envy.

I don't think that there was ever a time that concern was given about the system. The pleasures in life were there for the taking.

I feel very strongly that we are in charge of our reality. It is easy to blame circumstances and others for our problems. In reality, we have few problems as most is blown out of proportion.

It is all in our perspective.
 

TonyStark

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Not exactly the same, but when I told my parents I was dropping out of college, they refused to pay for anything else, and were ready to kick me out.

In their eyes, it was better to spend 40k at a university, than to save that money for a rainy day.
 

Sean Kaye

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@Scot - Slight tangent, but I'm a small person, so it's the little things in life that make me snigger.

Every year or so, it brings me inordinate amounts of pleasure to watch the Australian Government bend over and rape the entire pharmaceutical industry. Some drug company says that they will not be selling their latest whizbang drug in Australia because the price the Australian government wishes to procure it at does not cover their costs.

In exchange, the Australian Government then identifies said drug makers three largest products by margin and suggests that maybe the price on that product will need to be adjusted downward significantly or perhaps it may even fall off the national program and be replaced with a third party generic.

Said drug company capitulates and goes back to whatever rock they hide under for the rest of the time.

As I said, I'm a small person so seeing that play out every couple years brings me joy because I'm a sad human.

Your comment about charging the sick person $1200 made me think of that.
 
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JordanK

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Over the last few months I have been studying and working to become a better copywriter alongside my college course in Software Development. I want to be able to target higher end clients and niche down into more reoccurring work and spending less time chasing contracts.

A friend of mine contacted me about a week ago and asked did I want to do venue security for a popular concert in the local area. They were short on staff and it was easy money (10 euro an hour *$12* for directing traffic while listening to music that I like) so I decided to do it.

Ended up working 11 hours the first night and a 20 hour shift the second night. Staring at a road sign at 5am in the morning with nobody around has a strange way of motivating you to work even harder in your Fastlane pursuits. What was even more worrying though was at one point I was stationed near the medical tent to assist the medics with drunk patrons. The biggest issue I found wasn't the drunk partiers but all the other security guys in there 40's and 50's coming in needing medical attention as they literally were working themselves into the ground. While it was a nice one off experience for me and some cash to add to my Fastlane soldiers it scared me to think that could be me in thirty years time if I don't take things more seriously.
 

MJ DeMarco

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When things that should be FREE because of my FREEDOM, there is actually license or a fee that I have to buy. If I don't, I am threatened with penalties.

Rights are confiscated by the government and then sold back to you as a privilege.

From trash removal, to having a chicken that lays eggs, to putting shutters on your house.

Freedom is a hyperreality.

19424183_10207856873859629_4027062768988432489_n.jpg
 

Owner2Millions

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This is a interesting thread. To see others opinion on how government all over the world is crooked. Growing up in Chicago I never understood why I had to go to school for eight hours a day. Sit down and shut up was what teachers tell students in the CPS system(Chicago Public Schoo) but what the idiots that run the CPS fail to realize is that everyone doesn't learn the same. In addition as a boy sitting for a long person of time was hard to do. Then they give you all of these test to basically tell you that you are stupid. Not just written school test but testing your speech, your thinking, etc.... then we are told to line up for the bathroom in a single file line with our uniforms. Then we go to "lunch" the same way and eat. But what they mostly served was canned food that probably has been sitting for awhile. The food never look appetizing or smell good for that matter. So after lunch I'm going back to the classroom haven't ate all day. So you go home very hungry. Add in the fact you have a shit ton of homework to get done to prepare for the test so you spend 90% of your evening doing school work. I felt miserable as a kid. Wondering is this how life is suppose to be?????? Hearing people always tell me if you don't get good grades you won't get a good job. I decided to jump into the work force exactly when I could so at 16 I was working at Wendy's......I hated that shit with a passion. Then I started the cycle of jumping from job to job year after year wondering why every job is damn near the same thing.....around 23 I said F*ck this man.....there has to be another way. It felt like my life was in a endless loop. Then I came across MJ book, it felt like he was talking to my soul. A couple of tears came down my eyes because he brought up exact things I felt but I had nobody to really talk to nor did I have solutions to solve them myself. Now...thanks to that book some reading of my own and this forum I know what to do.....but it's much easier said than done. I WILL become a successful fastlaner but ditch the clock in everyday even when your knees are hurting or you have a bad back(family members complaints even though they continue to work everyday).


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
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Iammelissamoore

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Not exactly the same, but when I told my parents I was dropping out of college, they refused to pay for anything else, and were ready to kick me out.

In their eyes, it was better to spend 40k at a university, than to save that money for a rainy day.

Thing is, most of our family members and parents see the college degree as security for the rainy day.
 

jon.a

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It does seem like there could be a better yard stick than net-worth.

The day I hired a new accountant and he asked me, "Why are you paying so much in taxes?"

Long story short, he explained that because I qualified as an "accredited investor" in the eyes of the IRS, I had access to tax shelters that others didn't have access to. And that I could literally reduce my effective tax rate 10-15% by using these tax shelters.

I've since realized that there are several tiers of tax sheltering, many that I (and most others) will likely never have access to because they are reserved for people with much higher net worth than I have. I finally realized why -- besides just the additional knowledge you gain -- it's much easier to make the second million than the first. And why it's much easier to make the twentieth million than either the first or the second.

Accredited investor status also gives you access to investments that others don't have access to. For example, a good friend of mine recently sold his company for eight figures and started a new company. He offered many of our friends an opportunity to buy "friends and family" equity in the new company during his Series A venture capital raise; given the specifics of the situation, this investment is has a very good chance of returning 20-100 times the initial investment in a short period of time. Basically, it's a common way in the tech startup world to help your friends/family make a lot of money with relatively little risk.

Unfortunately, while he offered the investment to many of our friends, only those who were "accredited" in the eyes of the IRS were legally allowed to take advantage of the opportunity. For our friends who have a lot of money, this is a way of likely making a lot more. For our friends who don't have a lot of money, they are being stopped from taking advantage of the situation.

In other words, the system is "rigged" in favor of the wealthy to help them generate more wealth, and rigged against those who are not yet wealthy, keeping them below the threshold where they could start to more easily compound their assets.

This is the reason why I would tell every investor/entrepreneur I know to focus the first several years on building a big income (more than $200K per year) or at least $1M in assets -- once you hit that accredited investor threshold, you'll find that compounding your earning becomes much easier.
 

JWelch

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When things that should be FREE because of my FREEDOM, there is actually license or a fee that I have to buy. If I don't, I am threatened with penalties.

Rights are confiscated by the government and then sold back to you as a privilege.

From trash removal, to having a chicken that lays eggs, to putting shutters on your house.

Freedom is a hyperreality.

View attachment 15355
Like making the collection of rainwater illegal. What a crock of shit that is.
 

Ika

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When I finished school and started looking for a career field.

Beeing in the top percents (gradewise) of my year, and having read enough of the "follow your passion and find a job that you love" Ra Ra, I was highly optimistic to find a job that will make me happy.

But where to find it if you don't know yourself yet?


I started asking my parents how they found their job. I asked other adults. I asked people whose opinion I highly value.
Everyone gave me the same depressing answer:

"Oh, I never chose to end up here, it just kind of happened. I was interested in [X], so I went to the jobcenter and they sent me to a business that did a lot of [Y] and a tiny bit of [X]. Now I'm still here but most of the time I do [Z]. "

"That does not sound like the most efficient way to get a job that will make you happy. It sounds more like throwing a coin."

"Well, you see, every job has parts that you like and that you don't like."

"That makes sense - but wouldn't it be more efficient to pick a job that has a higher probability of having parts that you like?
Yes, all jobs have parts that are fun and parts that suck. But becoming a dentist will make me exponentially less happy than going into a creative field."

"Yeah no just pick a job. That's how everyone is doing it. And everyone is unhappy with their job, because it is still a job. So why should or could it be different for you.."


What I've seen is that most of the people play the game wrong.
But now I realise they are playing the wrong game.
 

Owner2Millions

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The day I hired a new accountant and he asked me, "Why are you paying so much in taxes?"

Long story short, he explained that because I qualified as an "accredited investor" in the eyes of the IRS, I had access to tax shelters that others didn't have access to. And that I could literally reduce my effective tax rate 10-15% by using these tax shelters.

I've since realized that there are several tiers of tax sheltering, many that I (and most others) will likely never have access to because they are reserved for people with much higher net worth than I have. I finally realized why -- besides just the additional knowledge you gain -- it's much easier to make the second million than the first. And why it's much easier to make the twentieth million than either the first or the second.

Accredited investor status also gives you access to investments that others don't have access to. For example, a good friend of mine recently sold his company for eight figures and started a new company. He offered many of our friends an opportunity to buy "friends and family" equity in the new company during his Series A venture capital raise; given the specifics of the situation, this investment is has a very good chance of returning 20-100 times the initial investment in a short period of time. Basically, it's a common way in the tech startup world to help your friends/family make a lot of money with relatively little risk.

Unfortunately, while he offered the investment to many of our friends, only those who were "accredited" in the eyes of the IRS were legally allowed to take advantage of the opportunity. For our friends who have a lot of money, this is a way of likely making a lot more. For our friends who don't have a lot of money, they are being stopped from taking advantage of the situation.

In other words, the system is "rigged" in favor of the wealthy to help them generate more wealth, and rigged against those who are not yet wealthy, keeping them below the threshold where they could start to more easily compound their assets.

This is the reason why I would tell every investor/entrepreneur I know to focus the first several years on building a big income (more than $200K per year) or at least $1M in assets -- once you hit that accredited investor threshold, you'll find that compounding your earning becomes much easier.

wow.......I didnt know that but Im not surprise....Thanks a lot for that piece of education. REP+
 
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MJ DeMarco

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When you realize a government agency can dictate how and where your baby gets treatment, if any, and if you have no rights to exhaust all options on behalf of your child until the last moment.
 

JoshA

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Specifically, when I started working with a ton of cs college grads in my profession of programming that were paying $200+ /mo on student loans and 99% of them couldn't code their way out of a wet paper bag. Meanwhile, all of the productive coders were college dropouts that were hobbyist coders.

When we bailed the banks out, that was my first insight that my 401k was probably not going to be there for me in the way that I need it to be.

In the last 5 years, I've really started paying attention to the guys that 50-60+ in my department walking around with the look of death on their face. They are really motivating me to get my shit together because I am not going to be stuck in a cubicle prison when I'm 50.
 

Sean Kaye

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When things that should be FREE because of my FREEDOM, there is actually license or a fee that I have to buy. If I don't, I am threatened with penalties.

Rights are confiscated by the government and then sold back to you as a privilege.

From trash removal, to having a chicken that lays eggs, to putting shutters on your house.

Freedom is a hyperreality.

View attachment 15355

I take the libertarian view of victimless crimes - they should not exist.

I once got stopped by the police for taking an on-ramp onto the Sydney Harbour Bridge that was dedicated for buses between 6am-10am. The "car" lane was right next to it but an entirely different on-ramp. No actual rhyme or reason for this division of lanes, there were no buses anywhere near me, but there was a police car parked in the access lane around the corner of the on-ramp out of sight pulling over cars.

$185 ticket, 2 demerit points for choosing the wrong lane.

I asked the police officer why that was a penalty and he babbled about the flow of traffic and trying to encourage people to take public transport - which is largely bullshit because the government makes a F*ckton of money off tolls on the Harbour Bridge and all the other toll roads in Sydney.

Pissed off, I drove to my office, jumped on my computer and decided to just pay the fine right away to avoid thinking of it. About three weeks later in the mail I get a letter from the Office of State Revenue with a cheque for $185 explaining that the fine I paid was invalid. I called up a friend of mine who worked at State Revenue and he said there was a problem with the ticketing collecting system that if you paid your fine before the Police had an opportunity to enter the details, it invalidated the ticket with an incorrect ID #.

It was like poetic justice - bullshit fine invalidated because honest tax paying citizen dutifully paid the fine too quickly.

Sean 1 - Stupid Laws 0
 
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luniac

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After i got my "big break", going from Fresh Direct Freezer Worker to Litigation Support Analyst.

3 weeks into it something smelled real fishy to me... i felt miserable, i thought i needed to get laid... and then i still felt miserable...
and then one day on my way home from work, walking to the train, staring at the sidewalk in front of me, i realized that plain and simple... i f*cked up.
My whole life was leading up to this moment, i was meant to become an office drone. and i said F*ck that and became unscripted .
 

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When I realized there's no Santa and that it was my single broke mother delivering presents. I was about 5.
 
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Scot

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@Scot - Slight tangent, but I'm a small person, so it's the little things in life that make me snigger.

Every year or so, it brings me inordinate amounts of pleasure to watch the Australian Government bend over and rape the entire pharmaceutical industry. Some drug company says that they will not be selling their latest whizbang drug in Australia because the price the Australian government wishes to procure it at does not cover their costs.

In exchange, the Australian Government then identifies said drug makers three largest products by margin and suggests that maybe the price on that product will need to be adjusted downward significantly or perhaps it may even fall off the national program and be replaced with a third party generic.

Said drug company capitulates and goes back to whatever rock they hide under for the rest of the time.

As I said, I'm a small person so seeing that play out every couple years brings me joy because I'm a sad human.

Your comment about charging the sick person $1200 made me think of that.

The reason why drugs cost that much in the US is because no other country will pay for them. Socialized healthcare cannot afford to pay for research and development. So countries with capitalist healthcare have to foot the bill. The United States healthcare system subsidizes the price of drug development for the rest of the world.

No one pays cash price for drugs. If they cannot afford the drug, most drug companies give the medication to them for free. Over half of my drugs prescriptions are free.

And let me know when you find a way to foot the $2.56 billion bill to develop a new drug with $5 generic pricing.

The Cost of Developing an FDA-Approved Drug Is Truly Staggering, Study Shows -- The Motley Fool
 

Duane

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I think the biggest thing is that I had no idea what I was capable of. I severly undervalued my potential until I came across the millionaire fastlane .

When I went to school I knew exactly how much I would make. Start pay for my degree is $60k, average pay is $100k. When I got my first internship, there was a potential job offer after completion for $75k/year with a $15k annual bonus. At the time I thought this was amazing money and there wouldn't be any way for me to make more money. This job was at a coal plant.

The switch for me was when I actually worked that internship. I hated it. Being in a tyvek suit in a boiler in the middle of the summer in Florida, I thought I was working in hell...

There had to be a better way to make money. What all of my other colleagues would have died for, I quit shortly after getting it and started researching better ways to make money and ran into MJ's book.
 

Sean Kaye

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The reason why drugs cost that much in the US is because no other country will pay for them. Socialized healthcare cannot afford to pay for research and development. So countries with capitalist healthcare have to foot the bill. The United States healthcare system subsidizes the price of drug development for the rest of the world.

No one pays cash price for drugs. If they cannot afford the drug, most drug companies give the medication to them for free. Over half of my drugs prescriptions are free.

And let me know when you find a way to foot the $2.56 billion bill to develop a new drug with $5 generic pricing.

Pharmaceutical companies ROUTINELY spend twice as much on sales and marketing as they do on R&D - J&J spent $18B on marketing last year but only $8B on R&D. Novartis, GSK, AstraZeneca, etc... Roche is the only one that generally doesn't.

Roche operates on an 82% gross margin. Novartis is a laggard at just 65% gross margin.

Your whole thesis is wrong - why would these smart, well-run companies choose to sell their drugs in foreign countries if they weren't profitable? Why would Novartis set up shop in Germany or Australia when they are getting about 20% of the price they do in the US?

R&D makes up about 15% - 20% of a Pharmaceutical company's expenditures.

They are charging you more because they can get away with it.

There's a drug by Novartis (Ilaris) that they sell for $16,000/mth to people with rare forms of inflammation disorders. It's now been proven that this drug can help stroke and heart attack victims, but at that price, doctors won't prescribe it and insurance companies in the US won't cover it for those conditions. Now Novartis is faced with a dilemma - lower the price on the drug to make it more widely available or keep it high and guarantee their income.

Drug companies in the US have to sell their medications to Medicare at the average selling price of the drug and to Medicaid at 4% above the lowest price they offer it to a private insurer. Your government has agreed to PAY MORE for drugs than it has to - it has systemically built it into the procurement model.

You want to figure out why? Follow the money. Why did Democrat Corey Booker vote against Americans being able to import low cost pharmaceuticals from Canada? You'll find he's taken over $400,000 in PAC contributions from Big Pharma lobby groups.

We talk about "unscripted " but you buy into the scripted nonsense that drug companies charge Americans more because that's the only way that R&D can get done and your government pays them ABOVE the lowest rates because that's in the best interest of the tax payer?

Come on.
 
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GoodluckChuck

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When I heard that Henry Ford gave his employees 2 days off instead of one so they could have enoug time to blow all their money and need to come back to work on Monday to survive. That's when it clicked that the system is this way by design.

Honestly the world just isn't a fair place. It's a natural evolution for those more able and willing to take advantage of the less able and less willing. The fact that we are born where we are makes it seem rigged but at least in The Western world we have the opportunity to make the best of our situation. It's important for those of us that get it to get off our asses and do everything we can to make our environment better for ourselves and those around us. The world doesn't get better by protesting on the weekend then going back to our tv and alcohol. It gets better by changing the way we live and being the people we know we can and should be.
 

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