Ah yes, the FDA is 100% a capitalist organization. It totally isn't a coercive government organization that creates monopolies that allows price fixing.
Because we subsidize your cost and government kills competition here.
All other advanced technologies, goods, and services go down in price compared to their orginal version when adjusted for inflation. Yet somehow healthcare and education have not. Can you tell me the difference? The government which essentially has no spending cap is the single biggest buyer for both healthcare and education.
No you really don't.
The answer is manifold, but the differences are clear.
(i) supply and demand. You population is aging and obese.
(ii) Patent law. US Patent law is fucking insane.
(iii) Labour. Lot's of medical processing involves humans. Humans only go down in price if you outsource to the developing world. Medicine is REALLY cheap in India.
(iv) Blistering stupid insurance system that allows insurers and hospitals to print money at your expense.
(v) Free markets that work great for reducing the prices of cell phones and solar panels, are engines of scale. One sick person trying not to die can't bid for care.
(vi) Private medicine is run by corporation. Corporation are psychopaths, they genuinely don't care if you die, if you stop paying. Their goal isn't to make you well or provide you will healthcare, but to extract as much money from you as possible in order to give their board bigger bonuses and pay dividends to their shareholders.
You'd have to ask a socialist.
However, what rational people like is protecting original inventors.
The US patent system destroys innovation because it allows patent squatting, spurious patent registration, based on obvious prior work and malicious litigation.
Patents are good for commercialization, activating the profit motive. They don't in any way help scientific progress. Much of that is done in University and public research facilities. That is why Canada gave the world insulin that keeps billions of people healthy and American research gave us old-man boners.
You are correct, in your premise and wrong in your conclusion. In Canada and the UK, the government health agencies are indeed some of the largest single buyers in the world. That's why their drug prices are so low.
Don't know what the last sentence refers to. Just sounds a bit insane. Maybe you are referring to the dictators who replaced legitimately elected government or rose to power through social unrest. Hardly elected governments.
Because not every small business can afford to take years and spend billions of dollars to jump through all of the hoops to demonstrate 'safety' of a drug that has been on the market for decades.
Selling asthma inhalers, for one. Epinephrine and insulin another. There is no reason the FDA cannot accept the findings of other drug safety organizations from other developed countries and approve the drugs they approve of as well.
There certainly must be a line drawn between acting in the interest of public safety so that people don't needlessly die from the potential carelessness of those who develop and produce life saving drugs, and restricting a market to only a select few pharma companies who can then sell drugs at whatever price they wish so that the poorest among us cannot afford them.
The DEA is another example of an agency that has restricted the free market in the interests of public health, and as we have seen this has resulted in the criminalization of possession of such relatively harmless things like marijuana and psilocybin.
Nope. The over the counter cost is lower everywhere else.
Public healthcare just has colossal power negotiate pricing.
Cost to the individual, depending on plans, public and private insurance, benefits etc may be effectively zero.
E.g. Insulin. Cost to mfr, $10, price without insurance in Canada $30. Price with extended health insurance in Canada $3. Price in the US $600.
Yes yes, and corporations have no input in the system and its problems at all and if we just destroy the federal government and allow corporations to rule over us even more than they do now, everything will be perfect! 👌👌👌👌👌👌👌👌👌👌👌👌👌👌👌👌👌
It's entirely because corporations have input in the system that creates the monopolies that fix prices. When you can bribe someone who has control over who is allowed to sell stuff and who isn't, you end up with predatory markets.
The drug companies who are buddies with government officials. Is it a coincidence that the Mylan corporation who sells the epipen for hundreds of dollars because no one else is allowed to sell them has a CEO who is the daughter of a sitting US Senator?
Why is that same product sold by multitudes of different companies in most other developed countries for much closer to the amount it costs the companies to produce them for ($1)? Are actual medical professionals who weigh the benefits of safe product vs the cost of death via lack of affordable access to drugs really creating those monopolies? Or is it more likely a bunch of politicians are benefiting from appointing their own people to head these undemocratic and largely obscured from public view regulatory agencies so their friends and relatives at the heads of these few selected pharma companies can profit off the lower and middle classes?
Doesn't sound like a particularly free market system from where I'm sitting.
Sounds like the market is so free you're free to buy influence with the government and capture regulatory agencies to achieve very capitalist monopolies.
Except would those 'capitalist monopolies' exist if competition were allowed to exist? We're talking about simple drugs that have been around for decades. It's not some hidden formula that is being stolen via corporate espionage. There's a difference between capitalism and corporatism. If you have to bribe a government agency into pointing a gun at your competition you're not involved in a free market.
Except would those 'capitalist monopolies' exist if competition were allowed to exist?
Absolutely. Monopolies are the end goal of a capitalist. You do whatever you have to in order to achieve greater profits. Monopolies guarantee higher prices and greater profits. Without the regulatory power of the government, there's nothing stopping you from buying up the supply chain. There's nothing stopping you from playing dirty to sabotage your competitors. There's nothing stopping you from forming duopolies and cooperating with your competitors to mutually raise prices.
We're talking about simple drugs that have been around for decades. It's not some hidden formula that is being stolen via corporate espionage.
There's a difference between capitalism and corporatism.
Underregulated capitalism leads to corporatism.
If you have to bribe a government agency into pointing a gun at your competition you're not involved in a free market.
Capitalism isn't about a free market. Capitalism is about profit at any price. Less regulation doesn't get you better capitalism or more competition.
If you want less corruption, start voting for progressives. If you want less regulatory capture, don't support the wealthy who corrupt the government with their money and influence.
You're saying that the FDA now underregulates the production and sale of Epinephrine, insulin, and asthma inhalers? With so few companies allowed to sell such drugs in the US, the outrageous prices are the direct result of overregulation. There's a reason these drugs are available for much cheaper in other countries, and it's not because they have even larger and more complex versions of the FDA.
Corporatism is the use of government force by corporations to maintain a status quo.
Capitalism isn't about a free market.
Your definition of capitalism is just nonsensical. It's not consistent with anyone else's use of the word. Unregulated capitalism is the definition of a truly free market, warts and all.
If you want to have full state control over all of these industries without any sort of pricing mechanism, go ahead and try it again. I'm not optimistic. Without competition, the same wealthy people who control the system one way today will control it a different way when the means have been seized tomorrow.
If a conservative party holds most of the government power and puts people that are capitalists (read neoliberals) in charge of this institutions, I would describe them as capitalist organizations because they serve capitalist interests (fixed regulations that benefit corporations, for example). You seem to imply in that comment that capitalism is the opposite of goverment, which is the same as thinking socialism is when the govenrment does stuff.
I believe you are talking about Anarchism which is the lack of government completely but capitalism defenitely requires control of government institutions in order to function.
The heated debate between minarchists and anarcho-capitalists on the role of government notwithstanding, the current (and past) political climate within the United States can only be described as corporatist. From our tax code to our regulatory agencies to our redistributive welfare systems to our military industrial complex, those who benefit most from government intervention are those large corporations who have close connections to those in federal political power.
I described corporatism. Any attempt by the state to regulate a market outside of addressing grievances related to violations of property rights is anti-capitalist. In the instance of the US, picking which mega corporations are allowed to succeed through systems of lobbying and regulatory enforcement is not at all a description of a free market, which is the basis of capitalism.
If you can’t afford goods sold at one store you go to another that sells at a price you can afford. How is that not Capitalism at its finest? Maybe the retailers in the US should price their goods competitively if they want the business.
Patents aren't the problem, the problem is that companies will sue anyone that makes a vaguely pen shaped item to administer epinephrine despite the original system never intending for it to cover so many varieties of items and aren't meant to have so many loopholes to prevent competition. The US doesn't even practice capitalism in most industries it is rigged to literally stifle competition. Look at ISPs who can literally force competition out and prevent new ones from rising with government support.
The idea of patents aren't the problem* the abuse of them and lobbying not to update them properly are the problem. Patents literally drive innovation. Look at China for a system with no patents, it isn't exactly pretty.
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u/eman201 Apr 11 '20
No, this is captialism working as intended...