Great article... Pharmaceuticals is interesting since the needs of corporations functioning under capitalism and their customers disconnect a lot
Making effective drugs is mad expensive (billions of USD), so companies are strongly incentivized to squeeze as much profit as possible everywhere on top of the already bad enough corporate greed levels
Thanks to patents, new drugs are almost always monopolies, so the pharma who makes the drug can charge (almost) as much as they want and make a lot
Whereas making drugs without patents is not profitable as the article suggested... so these are done mostly by factories based in India and other not fully developed countries
Funnily enough most ppl need cheaper generic drugs, not the ones most pharma companies are innovating and will make mad profits from
And for the people mentioned above, pharmaceuticals are basically a need not a luxury, but somehow it's dependent on the ebbs and flows of free market capitalism
My unhinged opinion is... Most of the pharmaceuticals research are done by (mostly) publicly-funded research labs anyways... so might as well just let the government do something about this? I wouldn't be surprised if some folks in academia wouldn't mind moonlighting as CEO at a nonprofit drug manufacturer or sth
In a free market, people would be able to get any drug they like.
I'm presuming that over-regulation in the wrong way might be the cause here. But the problem is, markets carrying necessities tend to exploit customers when there's no competition, so I'm not sure that deregulation should be the move either.
In a free market, people can get any drug that provides sufficient profit margins to justify the market producing it. If scarcity needs to be induced to bring the profit margins up to an acceptable level… the market is free to do so.
I highly recommend that you do blame capitalism because we live in a capitalist society. They claim to have the solution to our physical needs, it is a failed system.
I think California is moving this way. They started producing their own insulin and suddenly everyone is reducing the price of their insulin to $30 a dose or whatever CA was charging. Let's do it with more
Don’t blame capitalism, blame the people who abuse an under-developed social system.
Capitalism isn’t the problem. Communism isn’t the problem. People are the problem. The system of government is merely an ineffective solution, but any other solution won’t be a magic pill unless it addresses the people problem.
I did not describe capitalism at all. I misspoke in my second paragraph, it’s a socioeconomic system, since it feeds into how the entire society functions, not just transactions.
They don’t use the mechanisms, they exploit them. Capitalism is at its core about simple value exchange: it takes x man hours to extract a material, y man hours to process them and z man hours to build a product from them. The cost if the good should be (x + y + z) multiplied by a reasonable profit.
Instead, we have businesses paying significantly less than the time cost for the work, while charging significantly more. This abuse and exploitation is the root of the problem that people blame on capitalism - but capitalism isn’t the cause of the problem, the cause is the people who exploit.
Similarly, with communism everything is supposed to be fairly distributed. However abusive people exploit the system by establishing themselves as the ones who decide how things should be distributed, and violently silence anyone who disagrees.
Any alternative system must focus on the people problem in order to be an effective solution, not the perceived problem with current systems.
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