I'm back!!

I'm back from a short hiatus due to vacation and work picking up, sorry to everyone who has been looking for updated posts. I am still fairly pessimistic about the tone of the healthcare debate and the misconceptions of the program, and have resigned myself (for now) to just letting the debate run it's course before getting myself too worked up about it. What I am really thinking about now is the nature of work, which is the subject of a in depth posting I plan on making in the coming months. I am approaching the post as if it's a research project, something I hope will change some minds.

As for this post, I was sitting in a meeting and of all topics the EFCA (employee free choice act) came up. Being a corporate employee who is fairly well taken care of, we don't hear much about unions and the company's "anti-union" policy - but this was indeed not the case yesterday during this meeting. I'm not going to get into the debate about EFCA here, because I think there are definitely some positives and negatives to the legislation that are worked out before it's passed. What I want to talk about is the nature of companies and how we would be potentially better off without Wall Street.

An example was brought up about pharmaceutical manufacturers and their practice of increasing the prices of their branded drugs on a fairly regular cycle. This has to be done largely because companies like Pfizer have products that go generic and with too few new drugs in the pipeline they have to sell their existing products for more just to maintain previous levels of profit. So bottom line here, the people who buy pharmaceuticals end up paying more so that stockholders of Pfizer can make money. They may not even make money, they may just maintain the status quo - but nonetheless consumers pay more. Companies also pay dividends to investors to give investors value, all out of money that could go to hiring employees, offering wages, and more. It seems frustrating to me on the surface, and it looks like something I am going to do some digging in on...just wanted to keep everyone posted on what I was thinking ;)

More (regular) posts to come! Sphere: Related Content