You’re only deciding between insulin and groceries because the government maintains some company’s monopoly on manufacturing insulin.
In an actually free market, the instructions would be open source and the only question would be whether to synthesize it at home or pay someone else to synthesize it for you.
My guess is it would cost about as much as chocolate does per unit mass.
Capitalism created American price gouging. You have people dying over something that’s completely treatable.
If the “resources were allocated” correctly, then it’s not efficient in any way for an economy to have people dying over something as cheap and easy to treat just because someone can blackmail people to pay more.
My unemployed friend who is a single mother with type 1 diabetes and who has two kids with type one diabetes would be in real fucking life danger in the US. As it stands, she doesn’t need to worry about that. All because we haven’t (yet) allowed capitalism to (completely) rape our healthcare system.
In a “true free market” the instructions would be hoarded by the company that came up with them and the insulin would be sold for as much as humanly possible. The only countries that don’t suffer from this issue are the ones where the government is handling Healthcare and dictates what it’s willing to pay for medicine.
You anti government regulation types sure as fuck don’t seem to understand how we got to having all these regulations. Hint it was companies abusing their customers and employees to the point where tens of thousands of people were dying, for each regulation.
Yes, people confuse “free” (unregulated) with “competetive market” all the time.
If “free” means “no barriers to market entry or exit and even distribution of market power” then they’re similar.
But if free means “no regulation” then it’ll just be a race to accumulate the most market power (and political and military force) and use that to suppress competition. Features like slavey and indentured debtors has commonly occurred in ‘free’ (unregulated) markets, but it is just about the complete opposite of ‘no barriers and even market power’.
Insulin is a bad example because its manufacturing methods are relatively old, but the entire point of patents is to avoid trade secrets. The idea is that inventors share how they do something exactly, and their invention gets legally protected for a certain amount of time before it becomes available for everyone. The problem is capitalism is capitalism, and so it incentivizes abuse, so corporations will flood the system with patents that have as little detail as legally allowed and try to apply them in the broadest way possible. The pharmaceutical industry in particular also seems to have a problem with companies patenting minor tweaks on their products when the previous patent is about to expire to keep a monopoly, and then dialing up the propaganda against their previous product up to 11.
There literally is a black market for it. My city, Las Vegas is littered with handmade signs and flyers of saying they buy and sell insulin and diabetic supplies.
Hard lol at the thought of synthesizing insulin at home. Look a bit into the practical aspects of medicine manufacturing and the quality assurances required to avoid killing the patients.
Yeah I know. One of the big differences between prescription drugs and food, in terms of the industries, is that anyone can bake bread and therefore the only reason to buy it at the store is if the loaf at the store costs less time and energy than making it oneself.
Insulin, like most meds in the US, is expensive because of the free market.
If you have a free market on life-saving medicine, guess what, people will pay however much they can afford and then some - because people are keen to survive.
In most (all?) European countries medicines are regulated. Some medicines have many manufacturers, some have a “government-enforced” monopoly but without free market, and the result is that no matter the country, insulin is free or almost free. The reason is that when you regulate this, and the only possible buyer for a whole country is “the government”, the seller is forced to negotiate with the whole government to be able to sell to X million people. And the government is not in a life or death situation, so it’s less vulnerable to price gouging.
If the governments can negotiate a low enough price, then they can subsidise the last bit via taxes and people get free life-saving drugs. Yet big-pharma still gets profits at these lower prices, as evidenced by the number of pharma companies there are in Europe (including non-eu countries that work similarly in terms of healthcare such as UK, Switzerland).
Free market works, until the seller has a life-threatening reason why the buyer will be forced to pay whatever the price is. The drug situation in the US is not free market, it’s free blackmail.
You’re only deciding between insulin and groceries because the government maintains some company’s monopoly on manufacturing insulin.
In an actually free market, the instructions would be open source and the only question would be whether to synthesize it at home or pay someone else to synthesize it for you.
My guess is it would cost about as much as chocolate does per unit mass.
The free market naturally generates monopolies, only government intervention can maintain an artificially competitive market in the long term.
What you’re describing is to abolish “intellectual property” rights. I’m all for it.
No free market on insulin here in Finland.
Insulin is free.
Capitalism created American price gouging. You have people dying over something that’s completely treatable.
If the “resources were allocated” correctly, then it’s not efficient in any way for an economy to have people dying over something as cheap and easy to treat just because someone can blackmail people to pay more.
My unemployed friend who is a single mother with type 1 diabetes and who has two kids with type one diabetes would be in real fucking life danger in the US. As it stands, she doesn’t need to worry about that. All because we haven’t (yet) allowed capitalism to (completely) rape our healthcare system.
In a “true free market” the instructions would be hoarded by the company that came up with them and the insulin would be sold for as much as humanly possible. The only countries that don’t suffer from this issue are the ones where the government is handling Healthcare and dictates what it’s willing to pay for medicine.
You anti government regulation types sure as fuck don’t seem to understand how we got to having all these regulations. Hint it was companies abusing their customers and employees to the point where tens of thousands of people were dying, for each regulation.
Yes, people confuse “free” (unregulated) with “competetive market” all the time.
If “free” means “no barriers to market entry or exit and even distribution of market power” then they’re similar.
But if free means “no regulation” then it’ll just be a race to accumulate the most market power (and political and military force) and use that to suppress competition. Features like slavey and indentured debtors has commonly occurred in ‘free’ (unregulated) markets, but it is just about the complete opposite of ‘no barriers and even market power’.
‘Free’ is a not a great word in this context.
Is how to manufacture insulin a trade secret? Is that why there’s no black market for it?
Insulin is a bad example because its manufacturing methods are relatively old, but the entire point of patents is to avoid trade secrets. The idea is that inventors share how they do something exactly, and their invention gets legally protected for a certain amount of time before it becomes available for everyone. The problem is capitalism is capitalism, and so it incentivizes abuse, so corporations will flood the system with patents that have as little detail as legally allowed and try to apply them in the broadest way possible. The pharmaceutical industry in particular also seems to have a problem with companies patenting minor tweaks on their products when the previous patent is about to expire to keep a monopoly, and then dialing up the propaganda against their previous product up to 11.
There literally is a black market for it. My city, Las Vegas is littered with handmade signs and flyers of saying they buy and sell insulin and diabetic supplies.
Hard lol at the thought of synthesizing insulin at home. Look a bit into the practical aspects of medicine manufacturing and the quality assurances required to avoid killing the patients.
Well if those regulations are going away anyway…
Those are two nonequivalent industries with wildly different variables of influence. Did AI write this?
No, the one who wrote that is intensely human, trust them.
Yeah I know. One of the big differences between prescription drugs and food, in terms of the industries, is that anyone can bake bread and therefore the only reason to buy it at the store is if the loaf at the store costs less time and energy than making it oneself.
A better equivalency would be the insulin industry and a Diamond industry unrestricted by region.
Not really because people can die without food, and also without insulin. Nobody is choosing between diamonds and insulin.
Insulin is expensive because of a government-enforced monopoly. It’s a simple fact, no matter how motivated one is to ignore it.
Insulin, like most meds in the US, is expensive because of the free market.
If you have a free market on life-saving medicine, guess what, people will pay however much they can afford and then some - because people are keen to survive.
In most (all?) European countries medicines are regulated. Some medicines have many manufacturers, some have a “government-enforced” monopoly but without free market, and the result is that no matter the country, insulin is free or almost free. The reason is that when you regulate this, and the only possible buyer for a whole country is “the government”, the seller is forced to negotiate with the whole government to be able to sell to X million people. And the government is not in a life or death situation, so it’s less vulnerable to price gouging.
If the governments can negotiate a low enough price, then they can subsidise the last bit via taxes and people get free life-saving drugs. Yet big-pharma still gets profits at these lower prices, as evidenced by the number of pharma companies there are in Europe (including non-eu countries that work similarly in terms of healthcare such as UK, Switzerland).
Free market works, until the seller has a life-threatening reason why the buyer will be forced to pay whatever the price is. The drug situation in the US is not free market, it’s free blackmail.