Comment by toofy
3 months ago
> 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.
>this is a greed problem.
I'll take it even further, if you look at the price of goods over time, it's even possible to see the ebb and flow of greed in the numbers:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G5Qi8_vXwAAbRTn.jpg?name=orig
I wonder if prices are really a measurement of fluctuations in some underlying supernatural or cosmic psychic force?
Greed explains nothing. People will be greedy when they are incentivized to be greedy, and thrifty when they are incentivized to be thrifty. There are plenty of incentives, I might add, for regulators to be greedy though.
> this is a greed problem.
Also that. But overregulation makes too hard for others to compete and offer cheaper insulin.
Which may also be expressed as an expectation for a particular quality at a particular cost. There are no deadweights to exploit in insulin production. It seems to some people that regulation is the deadweight but without that quality guarantee you’re dependent on suppliers which duplicates the cost of “self regulation” across the sector.