The wealthy scramble for Covid-19 vaccines: ‘If I donate $25,000..’
latimes.com
latimes.com
The former essentially offsets the negative impact by creating positive externalities, unlike the latter.
Truth is that everybody in the US (and Europe) is wealthy. The panhandler on the corner is making more money than the median daily income of the world population.
Until people admit "I am wealthy, and I need to help out" instead of pointing to whoever has more wealth than they do, nothing will change.
> It is clear from the graph that when put in the context of their individual budgets, donor households towards the lower end of the expenditure distribution tend to give away more of their money to charity than donor households in the higher expenditure percentiles. On this measure, poorer donor households are more generous than richer donor households, those in the bottom decile donating approximately 3% of their budget compared with those in the top decile donating roughly 1%.
http://www.cgap.org.uk/uploads/Briefing%20Papers/CGAP%20BN7%...
In other words, loss aversion is a strong incentive.
People would rather over-pay to receive something than pay for a general tax (a loss) even when it would provide an absolute equivalent result.
Speaking of which, you'd first have to ban all election spending. Campaigning would be done by marching in the street with a bristol board sign colored with crayons, taped to a softwood plank.
When rich people are trying to give away money, we should try to direct that money to good causes. We have an opportunity to do that here.
What would you prefer: that rich people give away money, or that they keep all of it to themselves? If they want to give it away we should certainly be interested in how to direct it. If they keep it to themselves, nobody benefits except them.
Tolerating, however isn't something that should happen. Though as people are discussing, maybe in this case turn it from corruption where it'll pad some people's pockets to a legitimate way to fund initiatives to help the less fortunate can be beneficial.
Is it right? No, but humanity rarely follows what's right when its more beneficial to certain people to follow the wrong paths.
Mind you, any large system has good and bad parts, and they can change roles under different circumstances, across different time periods; some change fast and some slow; some never come back, and some can hop back and forth.
Auction with small amount of highly daughter after goods is a reasonable approach to demand fair share of social responsibility from the rich. After all, why do we want to grant them the same cheapness that they inevitably are entitled to but are not really fair to others?
Apologize if you meant differently.
It’s basically a tax on the wealthy.
Why not do both? And ATM why not execute a measure that is the one more acceptable to everyone, I.e. auction? I doubt any typical citizens would be mad at auction off 1% and use the fund to increase the total supply by 10% or even 100%.
But, I still need evidence that money is not the constraints, or it could not help resolve other constraints. Please enlighten me with what you know.
If the problem is funding, then lets raise funds. We don't need to sacrifice our vaccine distribution for that.
I think it's quite easy to setup the logistics of auction in such a way that it would have no impact on the distribution to the normal people. The rich can utilize their own expensive network of operators or let them figure out a way to get their precious vaccines and leave the mass infrastructure for the people needs them most.
"Let's raise funds" auction is rasing funds. And it's perfectly sensible to setup other channels of fund raising as well.
And again, auction is not countering anything else one can propose. It's about getting the rich to shoulder their fair share of running the society. After all their fortune comes from the society, they have more stake in maintaining and keep it running.
It's a nice idea, but barely skims the problem. Everybody else still wants it, and now they think it's okay to throw money around.
The problem we're really describing is too much money turning people into psychopaths. You'd let them spend it, I think it's easier to just make that a punishable offense. You can't be grotesque with money if you don't have it anymore.
A $25,000 donation is kind of laughable when hospitals have no issue charging that much to give a kid some stitches after falling off a bike.
Try 100x that maybe?
But even beside that, just intuitively, $25k seems low for a life-saving queue-jump during a crisis.
Not really. Right off the bat, if you figure there's a 1% chance you die if you get it and a 20% change you get it, that values a life at $12.5M. That's a little on the low side for someone rich, but not not by that much.
You also have to factor in that it's free in 6 months, and for at least 3 months, it's not like you can do anything. The drug is also experimental, so there's an off chance something really bad happens. The vaccine also means you won't be a long hauler, so that adds some value.
$25k feels about right.
Also, you’re not factoring in the reputational and legal risk to those bribed, and the fact that the rich try to get it with the specific intent to ramp up their riskier activities once they get it, which will allow them to do valuable things in a disproportionately valuable time frame.
I agree with OP. I'm betting if you have an open auction, 25k would come in on the low side.
Still distributing the proceeds of the auction would have the same problem.
GPS trackers on tamper proof containers with computerized scales? With some sort of self destruct system? Perhaps 24/7 monitoring from a command centre? Or just post armed guards 24/7 at each distribution point. Sky’s the limit it seems if cost is no object.
I don't think we should acquiesce to corruption like you're proposing. There are better ways to raise funds.
Most of the article is about hypothetical situations where boutique doctor clinics might receive vaccine allocations that would go to their wealthy client base. Unless I'm missing something, the article doesn't actually say it's happening, just that it might.
The headline claim about one person asking about a $25K donation comes from a single anecdote in the middle of the article:
> Dr. Jeff Toll, who has admitting privileges at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, one of the first hospitals to stock the vaccine, recalled a patient asking: “If I donate $25,000 to Cedars, would that help me get in line?’” Toll said no.
The rest of the article makes a logical leap from people asking their doctors when they can get the vaccine to implications that they are trying to skip the line by paying extra, simply because they're wealthy. The author throws in some anti-Hollywood and anti-Silicon Valley jabs for good measure:
> The pattern is familiar in a state where Hollywood stars and Silicon Valley executives are accustomed to getting their way.
There doesn't seem to be much substance to this article, beyond the one anecdote from one guy who asked about a $25K donation.
Once the second phase opens next year and allows anyone with a risk factor including some pretty common ones; diabetes and obesity, I expect the rules to be bent a bit more and a black/greymarket to gain traction. Although, wealthy people tend to be older anyway which makes them more likely to qualifying risk factors.
If state governments set aside some amount of vaccines and auctioned them off to the highest bidders, it might help cover the budget shortfalls and cuts to social services that are going to come in the next few years as a result of states draining their budgets to pay unemployment benefits during the pandemic.
Those cuts would disproportionately affect the poor, and the rich wouldn't care -- but we can get the rich to help us avoid making the cuts.
Given that many of the rich donors would be old, and therefore members of the high risk group eligible for early vaccination, such auctions might not actually make a big difference in who gets the vaccines first.
There aren't 10 wealthy people. There's about 12 million millionaire households in this country. That's not even discussing the generational implications of that. Young couple in their 20s or 30s that don't have a lot of wealth themselves, but can fallback onto a parental group to help them. There's only ~210 million people > 18 years of age. 12 million households is a lot even when you start excluding people based on being cash poor (locked up in long-term bonds, most of it is housing appreciation, etc).
These people generally can afford their own health care, they have good health outcomes even when they get COVID (access to health care, diet, general healthiness, etc). They likely already have jobs that they can do remotely & generally minimize contact with other people indoors via food delivery services & whatnot.
We're already prioritizing lots of "famous" people because they need to help the media get the message out. I find this argument questionable but at least it's plausible & I haven't researched the data/case studies on this. The rest of us need to wait. We need to make sure that we're prioritizing those people who are likely to GET COVID multiplied by their expected likelihood of how many people they'd infect & somehow score that against their personal risk for fatality. In a list like that I'd expect elderly homes to get the most attention. Very susceptible as we have seen in the reports. Doctors & nurses would be lower as they have access to healthcare, they have great access to high quality handling of COVID, etc.
These are the guidelines I would use. Then I'd have the candidate groups vote amongst themselves in terms of who they think should have priority. If there's a nurse there that's well like & is working two jobs that have them in contact with large population groups because of shitty pay, let that information source bubble up to the overall organizational level. Then from those loops have cut-offs (i.e. everyone this spot & below gets the next batch because there's more needy people elsewhere). As you vaccinate more of a group then you end up having better heard immunity. As you vaccinate more people who travel between groups regularly, you decrease the speed of disease spread.
There are ways to do this fairly & efficiently. The problem is how to fight the innate selfishness we all have where we look with either missing or partial data & complete the gaps in a way that happens to benefit the group I'm in in some way. At the extremes you have those who are willing to do it blatantly & pay bribes to get advantage over their fellow being. At the other it's "we have to use famous/powerful people to advertise!", or "sell to the rich!" which again promote ways of privileging the people who make these decisions & their friend networks. This kind of flawed thinking is eating apart American society. We need to be focused downward. How can we best help those less fortunate than ourselves. We need to get them to the poorest & most vulnerable the fastest. They're suffering from it the most & are likely to be in housing conditions or working conditions that keep the disease alive longer. Why is this important? The disease has a fantastic opportunity to mutate if vaccine doesn't perfectly contain it. Think Spanish Flu that turned into the annual flu. Or we can roll the dice again on this thing. YOLO?
Turning to market distribution after taking on free public money to make a vaccine available to everyone sounds like pure corruption.
Let us hope this is true. Because it appears that public policy experts are racializing the question of who is an "essential worker" and who should be getting the vaccine first: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/05/health/covid-vaccine-firs...
> One occupation whose priority is being hotly debated is teaching. The C.D.C. includes educators as essential workers. But not everyone agrees with that designation.
> Marc Lipsitch, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, argued that teachers should not be included as essential workers, if a central goal of the committee is to reduce health inequities.
> “Teachers have middle-class salaries, are very often white, and they have college degrees,” he said. “Of course they should be treated better, but they are not among the most mistreated of workers.”
> Harald Schmidt, an expert in ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania, said that it is reasonable to put essential workers ahead of older adults, given their risks, and that they are disproportionately minorities. “Older populations are whiter, ” Dr. Schmidt said. “Society is structured in a way that enables them to live longer. Instead of giving additional health benefits to those who already had more of them, we can start to level the playing field a bit.”
And they’re seriously arguing for holding that up on the grounds that teachers are too white and well-off? Wow.
The chronic underpayment of teachers looks almost trivial by comparisons.
Why is this an important signal, given healthcare teams have already decided on a priority order?
Because if we handle it right, we can get the wealthy to pay for the vaccine production for everyone else, or plow that money into state governments to prevent the cuts to social services that are coming.
You’re not “getting the rich to pay” - you’re preventing the poor from accessing the drug, placing vulnerable less wealthy peoples life’s in danger because you prioritised doses for people who can pay (who would _get it anyway_ if they had a risk factor).
You’re literally trading a risk on one persons life for somebody elses money.
Not to mention the moral issue of “how many doses are set aside?”, because why not sell all of them for $25k if that’s the price you can get?
If you think the states should get the money, then taxes are a better approach.
Giving this to rich people does nothing to further immunity in vulnerable sectors of the population - it weakens that goal.
We don't need to take the narrow view that hospitals are the only way to do this. Let the states run the show, let them take the money, and let them use the money for social services, or to reimburse hospitals for vaccines, or whatever else that will make a positive impact.
Your approach baffles me.
Saying you would take socialised medicine and yet prioritising actions which oppose this goal mean it’s not what you actually want and so you’ll never get it.
Traditionally, vaccines have been tried out in the poorest countries first... because it's easy to do if all you have to do for masses to show up is bribe the leaders and give hungry people free food. If things go wrong, "they died of hunger" and nobody cares.
This time around, it may be a bit tricky to do that, so it has to be tried out closer to home. The problem is people are not willing to be guinea pigs. Many would rather wait and see: https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/who-wants-be-guinea-pig-h...
So, I think this is just an effort to manufacture consent. "The rich people are willing to pay a lot for it. Are you sure you don't want it?"
I think there is a better way to do it than to give it to doctors and other frontline workers. They're too valuable. The people who are going to get it should be randomly drafted to get it... over and over again until we reach critical mass. Eventually, we should leave out enough people unvaccinated and hence long term effects can be less catastrophic.