As far as I am concerned, the people engaged in price gouging for insulin are essentially committing mass murder for profit. It is so far outside of any kind of moral standard, that I have no problem in categorising it as just straight up evil.
There's clearly something very, very, very broken here, but unwinding the tremendous weight of bureaucracy and regulations that prevent an interested investor in setting up shop making insulin on the cheap is the root of the issue. The regulations need not even be a negative; I don't have a reason to believe that recombinant engineered bacteria produced insulin is really that easy, and the regulations may be all that's keeping a tide of ineffective or harmful varieties of insulin from flooding the market.
I don't think that is a particularly coherent position on my position.
This is ridiculous. Pharma companies, unlike you and me, have the ability/equipment/expertise to manufacture insulin. Many people need insulin to survive. These companies could make insulin for relatively cheap and still be massively profitable, but they choose not to, and people suffer because many people who need insulin can’t afford the artificially high prices.
Acting like this price-gouging is caused by anything other than corporate greed is naive and misleading.
Of course it's corporate greed -- even if they sold insulin for relatively cheap and were massively profitable, they would only bother to produce it because of corporate greed.
Whether or not other companies could conceivably produce insulin is irrelevant. The parent commenter and I are talking about the current producers’ shitty behavior. If someone falls out of a tree because I easily could have but chose not to grab them, that is wrong. Other people could have possibly helped and didn’t, but that doesn’t make my shitty behavior any less shitty.
I glad we can agree on the impact of corporate greed, though.
This doesn't make sense. Only an entity out to make a quick one-time score would literally kill their customers or potential customers. If anything, you'd want to bleed your customer for as much as you can, which is closer to what they actually do, e.g. provide 'discount programs' for people with less wealth or income to obtain drugs with high 'sticker prices' for much less.
Remember that, generally, if anyone is paying these high prices, it's insurance companies, not private individuals.
Obviously this is awful, gross reasoning. But I think it's pretty solidly what pure economics would lead you to, and I expect that's what the term "mass murder for profit" is referring to.
The casual disregard for humanity and their largest customers should result in severe consequences for the companies and the investors in them. In short, they should be ground down and driven out of business.
If people weren't prohibited from buying whatever the drug they want at their own risk, they wouldn't be forced to monopoly prices.
I am pretty confident that people will take stupid risks, as I am confident that people who want to be safe - buying from reputable sources - will be able to.
If unregulation begets competition and that begets lower prices, why do these turmeric supplements cost $30[0] while you can go to the spice aisle and get 10x as much for $5?
[0]:https://www.amazon.com/Turmeric-Curcumin-Capsules-MONEY-GUAR...
Guess who's really winning there? Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics and their shareholders. Certainly not the Iranian or American people at large.
His perspective against for-profit wars, yet lean towards defensive military spending (not to be conflated with modern offensive military spending) was nuanced and very insightful.
That's just not true. Of course a profit-maximizing entity (which is an idealized abstraction that doesn't perfectly match anything in the real world) would 'love' an addictive product, or to minimize their costs, including an externalities for which they're liable, but, again, ideally, those same entities would absolutely prefer that their product does NOT in fact kill their customers or potential customers as that would just reduce their maximum potential profit.
Per your hyperbole, mass media is also engaging in 'mass murder for profit' as they cause people stress and stress likely shortens their lives. A tradeoff involving the potential loss of life or some period of life is not literally murder.
If you sold all of your possessions and lived a life of poverty you could donate the proceeds, and any income you earn that you don't strictly use to prolong your own life, to a charity that could save lives or lengthen others. That you do not, nor almost anyone else, is NOT literally the same as murder.
There’s a difference between making money and short term exploitation. If I own woodland, I can earn a living harvesting trees for decades, or cut the whole thing down. Clear cutting gets you a big check now, but less over time. Responsible harvest gets you more money in the long run, but spread over time.
None of this is sustainable, and many of these companies even outsource their manufacturing. By maximizing short term results above all else, they will kill the golden goose, and ultimately will either be nationalized, or replaced by foreign competitors.
But since their products or their production methods kill people they prefer more profits over less profits. I can't find any possible excuse for lobbying against safety regulations in coal mines other than them being greedy bastards.