My first thought was how dangerous this is. Then after thinking some more, I was left questioning how a developed country can mess up so badly that some people feel this is their only option.
Regulatory capture.
Look up the percentage of all drugs that were invented in the United States. Socialized medicine is subsidized by capitalist innovation overseas. There are so many problems with the US system, but they have more to do with regulatory capture (including difficulty of FDA approval + difficulty of becoming a doctor) and price transparency than anything else.
Otherwise, please work on entertaining new ideas and contributing with your own ideas/suggestions/explanations rather than being "that guy" who shits on people with low value comments lacking any reason or explanation (typically because they are wrong but don't want to admit their position for fear of ridicule by people like themselves).
And for medical conditions that don't yet have drugs developed: "Why can't I make a profit by investing some reasonable amount of money to develop a drug?" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_drug_development puts the average cost in the billions of dollars. How much of that is due to intrinsic difficulty, and how much is artificially imposed?
Testing usually doesn't come cheap, but you also might be able to drop by a well equipped Chem department at a university for testing as well
> Testing usually doesn't come cheap, but you also might be able to drop by a well equipped Chem department at a university for testing as well
I don't think it's that easy. Even if you successfully synthesize the right chemical, you also have to get dosage and delivery right (consistently!).
From the OP:
> In response, Four Thieves published the instructions for a DIY epipen online that can be made for $30 in off-the-shelf parts and reloaded for $3.
If I had to depend on an epipen to save my life, I don't think I'd want a DIY version that may not work when I need it (e.g. mechanism fails, storage stability issues, dosage issues, etc.). Sure I guess it's better than nothing, but it's also proof this clearly isn't the solution to the $600 epipen problem.
> Shkreli drove the price of the lifesaving HIV medicine Daraprim sells up to $750 per pill. So Four Thieves developed an open source portable chemistry lab that allows anyone to manufacture their own Daraprim for just 25 cents apiece.
The article calls Daraprim and "HIV medicine" throughout, but isn't that misleading? I thought it was an anti-parasitic (that may be used by HIV patients to treat secondary infections).
DIY versions are normally more expensive than mass-produced equivalents. So either this DIY version has atrocious quality, or $600 is far too expensive. (Judging by the prices in normal countries, $600 is far too expensive!)
Yeah, the answer is $600 is far too expensive.
IMHO the answer is some kind of regulation (e.g. limiting the profit margin on generics or even drugs more generally), or some kind of boutique government-owned generic maker tasked with being a manufacturer of last resort and selling generics at its cost (which should be higher than a non-price-gouging private company, so it works to put a price-ceiling on those companies and also acts as insurance against unavailability).
IMHO, the solution is actually less regulation.
If any company could enter that market with being sued into the ground, you'd get top notch a quality product for a fraction of the price before you could finish spelling epinephrine.
• less regulation, to reduce barriers-to-entry
• more regulation, to allow competition
Normally, I'd be concerned about reduced regulations having safety implications, but the existing situation is already unsafe.
That said, if a patent is pending and no one knows when it'll be granted, is that not enough? Would competitors really introduce their own patent-violating version, knowing they may have to suddenly cut production if the patent goes through? Do they do that today?
At any rate, those delays seem absurd; presumably they're due to having a backlog, due to the USPTO not employing enough people, due presumably to them not having enough of a budget. Not that I'm in favor of giving money to patent-granters, though. I wonder if a fee paid by the patent-holders—say, a small percentage of the revenue from selling patented products—would be a reasonable way to fund it.
I don't know how common it is today to introduce a product while planning to cancel it if a competitor's pending patent gets granted.
The funding of the PTO has been a contentious political issue for decades.
You need a delivery mechanism that can be used quickly and reasonably safely, ideally by someone in the early stages of anaphylaxis. Taking out a vial and a syringe, and carefully extracting the epinephrine from the vial with the syringe, are not things you'd want to be doing under those circumstances. Hence the invention of better approaches.
But epipens were originally "brought to market in 1983". How are there still active patents for it? "Kaplan continued to improve his designs over the years, filing for example US Patent 6,767,336 in 2003." I wonder if the new patents cover the 1983 devices. If so, that seems like an obvious abuse of the system: keep filing a new patent for different aspects of or variations on the device, and you can multiply the duration of your monopoly grant.
> If any company could enter that market with being sued into the ground, you'd get top notch a quality product for a fraction of the price before you could finish spelling epinephrine.
I doubt it. IIRC, EpiPens are off-patent, and the only thing holding back competition is the need to demonstrate the competing product is safe, reliable, and equivalent. I even believe a competitor product was withdrawn from the market because it was delivering an unreliable dosage.
So if you remove the regulations, you'll probably get a flood of corner-cutting crap that's dangerous. That's likely especially true for an emergency use item like an EpiPen, which literally sits on a shelf unused unless there's an emergency (leaving a big opportunity to sell defective items undetected by consumers).
See also payday loans, overage bank fees, credit card APRs, etc.