It's called inducement. To expound on your case for everyone else: the drug company is basically giving you a huge rebate for your portion of the cost so it can charge the insurance company the huge remaining cost. Say your drug costs $600/month. You have a drug copay of $200/month, the insurance company might have a negotiated rate of $450. So it pays $250 of it and you're on the hook for $200. The drug company knows that's a lot of money and a lot of people would balk at paying that. So the drug company says "hey, no sweat, we're nice guys concerned about you, so we'll writeoff $190 (which they would not have gotten anyway), you pay $10, and we'll still get $250 from your insurance." Not a bad gig if you can swing it.

BUT BUT BUT now to the part you're uncertain about: why only for private insurance and government insurance, like Medicare?

It's because Medicare has an Anti-Kickback Statute [42 U.S.C. 1320a-7b(b)]. And it is EXTREMELY broad. Pretty much no form of remuneration can be used as inducement to use anything Medicare pays for.

@WierdUncle, I believe you're saying you can't tax an asset because you can't truly assess the value of an asset.

But in your very next breath, you say banks give loans based on the assessed value of someone's stock as collateral.

So the government has a privately determined assessment of someone's wealth. They can tax that.

It depends on how you define the Game. Maybe the Game is strictly merit based within the rules of the Game and you work hard and win your fights and you're the best. But most Games IRL have externalities. Uncle Bob might really want his weakling nephew to win so sends Joe over to let you know it'd be a real shame if something happened to your mom. That's part of the Game too.

So who's the best at the Game? In this case, weakling nephew.

You can apply the same thing to college admissions, soccer, company promotions, etc.

For a second, I thought you were talking about the Facebook settlement:

Facebook will pay up to $14 million to settle claims it favoured foreign workers

True. Even though some studies use completely made up data, some studies move us along. But the faulty studies can also cause a lot of harm.

I've been told "reproducibility" is a requirement of good "science". Otherwise it's anecdotal.

What you're saying is similar to the Vienna Beef story about moving buildings. But the goal of science is understanding the why. So if an experiment is not reproducible, then the results are not valid because you haven't ascertained the cause.

If the second lab doesn't have the institutional knowledge to reproduce the first lab's results, then it's up to the first lab to help the second lab gain the knowledge, because otherwise it's just magic.

Medical research is particularly bad because it's often run by "Doctors" who think by being a doctor they know how to do research. But they are not PhD's and know nothing about setting up good studies. They just get paid by vendors to do "research." I've seen studies that were vendor funded for their laser machine had just 6 participants.

Well, that, and I'm incapable of doing it

As for me, it's 'cause the other browsers are good enough. I still use FF for the plugins and staying away from MS and Google.

I understand they're in a hard place. Their core user base doesn't like to pay for anything and hates advertising and have the patience and knowledge to circumvent most forms of revenue. That's an unsustainable business model.

Basically, browsers are not really a business.

That's why Google pays Mozilla to develop a "competitor".

A similar thought is we should not bail out the insurance companies. They made risk calculations and collected premiums, with built in profits, to cover these homes and businesses. They are on the hook for not charging enough. That's what re-insurance is for.

I believe there are places people should not live. The federal government should not come in and rebuild whole cities every year because of a predictable natural disaster. If an insurance company won't cover your home then you probably shouldn't rebuild there. And you sure as hell should not expect the rest of the country, through the federal government, to pay for your beachfront mansion every 5 years. But they always do.

Not quite. The insurance companies received premium payments either from you or your employer (lowering your salary). Not having to payout earns them the entire premium.