Think of how productive thousands of people would be if they weren’t staring down at death or disability daily because some ambitious motherfucker decided to make a cheap commodity like insulin a monopolized product, essential for life at a usurious price.
You're talking about the legislators and the bureaucrats, right? Sure, the lobbyists asked them too but you'd think professionals would be a little more responsible than to just do what the lobbyists ask (yes I know they only did so incrementally over a decades long time period but my point stands).
This stuff is only a monopoly because we've made it so slow and money consuming to break into these industries that there is not a steady enough flow of new entrants who undercut incumbents and drive costs down to actually keep the costs down.
Who make that regulations? The government.
The government is just a huge corporation without competition that can use violence legally on people.
At each place where the cost of service and product have gone up you will find regulations and monopolistic entreprises who are way too much connected to the government.
There are regulations against price collusion but they are not enforced.
And so capitalist pharmaceutical companies came in, invested in R&D, and created new formulations of insulin that work better. And they're charging more to recover their investment. And when it goes off patent (and if the ass-covering shitheads at the FDA don't fuck it up), those new formulations will eventually be the same $25 at Walmart.
The very same government you want to take everyone money and believe will spend it wisely
> This line of argument seems suspiciously pro-capital
it seems like you think only one side has any moral contribution to make. This isn’t Russia in the 1920’s
Sure business will do what they can to pump shareholder earning, the check on that is market competition. In this instance various government regulations , and laws prohibit or limit that competition that would emerge in a freerer market
Insulin in particular was part of a EO package that was going to open up competition (and lower prices), the EO package was rescinded by Biden
If the problem is that people are frequently running a red light, the root cause isn’t the fact that a traffic light exists.
an Unneeded, nonoperational light (which alot of regulations are) would be the root cause
https://www.policymed.com/2021/10/biden-administration-resci...
The reality is that the GOP would vote against the sun coming up in the morning if Biden suggested it were a good idea. Such is politics.
In the case of insulin, it was in fact invented with nothing more than research grants and the promise of fame and nobel prizes. But it also took 30 years from the first hints of what might solve diabetes until they produced a drug for it. It's an open question whether that could have happened faster with a profit-motivated company pushing the research.
Our economic policy for decades has been mostly centered around pumping capital into markets to prop them up or grow them. The problem is there’s too much money pursuing too little novel work. Ironically, making billions of “surplus” dollars available to big companies drives lots of little command economies, not healthy markets. It makes more sense to corner the market on insulin or some foot fungus cream and rip people off than to create a new or improved product. There is very low R&D at improving anything associated with insulin because of rent seeking behaviors.
Profits don’t motivate research. Market activity does. I hope we learn from the successful aspects of COVID and pump money at people to make economic decisions for themselves.