Comment by pipes
7 hours ago
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.
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.
> 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.
> The problem in USA is that producing insuline is so regulated that setting up and maintaining production is obnoxiously expensive.
i don’t buy it. no other oecd nation has insulin prices as absurd as the us. this is a greed problem.
the only people to blame when the government starts producing insulin will be the pharmaceutical companies and their refusal to be decent members of society. if they were even a tiny fraction more decent they wouldn’t be in the mess they’re directly causing.
far too often companies are directly to blame for regulation as they repeatedly absolutely refuse to self-regulate and be decent pieces of society.
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> setting up and maintaining production is obnoxiously expensive.
This is what I meant by compete on cost. The manufacturers that are best at cutting these costs will make the most profit. That’s where competition should be focused on such generic items.
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We will have to wait see where it goes, but California is trying to make their own insulin, so starting January 1st, 2025 you can buy a pack for $55 a as a resident.
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> The problem in USA is that producing insuline is so regulated that setting up and maintaining production is obnoxiously expensive.
This has absolutely nothing to do with insulin costs. Nada. Zip. Nil.
> As noone will want to produce insuline if required paperwork costs more than it's selling price.
Where are you getting this information from? I've been in the industry for a bit now and this is a first for me. That the reason why insulin is so expensive in the US is because it costs money to make????
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.
All clearly categorised and regulated. Fill the boxes and ship em and STFU
> 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).