Comment by DarkNova6
3 months ago
The bug occurs because of the power discrepancy of those who have the demand and those of who can supply. For some reason, the problem if insulin prices and absurd health costs only exist in the US. I wonder why.
3 months ago
The bug occurs because of the power discrepancy of those who have the demand and those of who can supply. For some reason, the problem if insulin prices and absurd health costs only exist in the US. I wonder why.
The power to charge what you want comes from lack of competition. Regulation can make entry into a market too high, especially for small start ups.
Ensuring that regulation is necessary and as straight forward as possible to comply with is good for consumers.
> competition
We don’t need competition in insulin production. It is a know quantity with fixed and closed quality parameters. Fix the price and let suppliers compete on cost.
The problem in USA is that producing insuline is so regulated that setting up and maintaining production is obnoxiously expensive.
Note that if you cause by regulation or stupid laws something to be expensive to produce/import and then make it illegal to sell above that price - then you will get shortages.
As noone will want to produce insuline if required paperwork costs more than it's selling price.
Note that even if currently adding more regulation to solve problems caused by more regulation will not cause it, it may happen in future.
US healthcare regulations are on Nth round of that.
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There are many kinds of insulin variants on the market. The easy way to differentiate them is by release rate and duration. Gone in an hour for some and 24hours for others. There are other factors as well that make them incompatible with each other.
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Nothing has fixed and closed quality parameters. At least not if your concern is quality as understood by the people who want or need insulin as opposed to whatever arbitrary standard a bureaucrat could make up.
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That would ensure that it is extremely unlikely we get innovation in insulin production as it removes the financial incentive to take the risk with innovation.
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The barrier for entry is primarily capital these days: have a moat, prevent competition, extract money, cease R&D. And if a competitor does come up, just buy them outright. This is the current economic model, as it is practiced by Private Equity.
Power has become infectious and capitalism has changed. The game is about power and extracting more and more money from the productive economy, making it less competitive. Who wins? Those who already have excessive capital.
The only one who would have enough legal power is exclusively the state. It’s no surprise the state is under attack from so many fronts.
You could make an argument that the problem is entirely due to bad regulation, because the regulations haven't mandated effective enforcement.
I don't know if this applies to insulin production, but in several other areas enforcing anti-monopoly regulations is lacking at such a degree that the regulations are almost completely ignored.
> The power to charge what you want comes from lack of competition
Competition alone is never good enough to make price down, because companies and shareholders hate competition and will happily “consolidate” competitive markets into much more profitable oligopolies (when it's not straight monopolies).
Power discrepancy is not a category of pricing. The price is high because the supply is constrained relative to demand. And in this case, regulations cause a restriction of supply.