76B opioid pills in 7 years. How pharma companies drowned US in drugs | Hacker News Reader

76B opioid pills in 7 years. How pharma companies drowned US in drugs

arstechnica.com

35 pointsSenHeng8 comments

It’s a little unrelated to opioids, but increasing medicine prices is currently undermining the public health systems of Scandinavia to the point where we have to debate where to prioritise our funding. Do we really want to spend millions of dollars on people who have 6 months to live if it means children have to wait two years for knee surgery. Terrible, and that’s with a national budget struggling after just a decade of out right immoral price hikes.

I’m typically not a “to the guillotine” guy, but I can’t wait for the EU regulations on big pharma.

Sounds a lot like the struggles people have with medical triaging. When resources are limited sometimes you have to make a decision to remove care from someone, and it’s tough. I don’t think there’s a way around it in today’s world.

There is a way around it. Big pharma is still just a bunch of companies.

We could make 4000% price hikes on things like insulin illegal. We could set legal price limits on medicine. We could reform medicine patents. We could open research. We could even nationalise medicine production. And so on. I’m not suggesting that’s what we do by the way, that’s why I suggested EU regulations. The EU bureaucracy is much, much more apt at finding the right solutions than I am.

No. Do all that. (Maybe). Still resources are limited. Still if you had another $x billion you could save more lives. Still you have to weigh stuff like the cost of a hip replacement saving pain for old people against a long shot treatment for a terminally ill child. You can always do more. Someone has to miss out. Who? Why?

There's no way around it.

There can't be.

Except there was a way around it until medicine became so expensive that nation states stopped being able to afford it.

There will always be a debate on priorities, but it’s gone from being about how long certain things could wait, to, who doesn’t get treatment at all. The triage example of earlier is excellent, because war time is a time of scarce resources, and that’s the state we’re at. Not because the resources are actually scares, but because an immoral industry got way too greedy.

We could do all that and more (and we probably should) but we'll still have a bottleneck somewhere.

An organ just came available for transplant: who gets it?

Solving the triaging issue would basically be solving scarcity. So yea, in a post-scarcity world we wouldn't need to have this conversation.

Jeebus. I got oxycontin for a very bad cough coupled with pain from an oldmlung surgery. That shit is dangerous. One pill (20mg?) And I was pain free and half brain dead for half a day.

Does anyone have a link to or a way to access the dataset? I couldn't see one in the article.

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