[flagged]
Oligopolies colluding to elevate prices of necessities to fatal levels is a product of regulation. In cases like these, incumbent businesses support regulation because it raises barriers to entry for new entrants; this results in oligopoly or monopoly, permitting the extraction of monopoly rents, even when people are literally dying in the streets because they can't afford products like insulin which are extremely cheap to produce.
(Insulin wasn't always cheap to produce, but for 43 years now it's produced by genetically engineered microorganisms, which makes it very cheap. It's a tiny protein, only 51 amino acids, produced from a 110-amino-acid precursor protein.)
> but these enforcement efforts feel perpetually behind the curve in an economy where regulatory complexity has become a competitive advantage
The only way for "regulatory complexity" to become a "competitive advantage" is for there to be very high levels of regulation.
I think that the solution isn't specifically more regulation, or less regulation, or more regulators (which would just compound the problem), but better regulation. Law should be treated like code - as a liability (not an asset), but one necessary to accomplish a purpose, and so written as carefully and simply as possible.
Where's our team of pen-testers looking to find holes in the draft of a new law? Our Unix-philosophy-adjacent lawyers proclaiming that "less is more" and striving for composability in separate laws instead of bundling everything together? Our git forge for legal documents where the public can view and comment on the legal system (even if actually making changes is more complicated)?
Software engineering and the law could learn so much from each other - it's a shame there's so little cross-pollination.
Consumers are so alienated that they'll pay out of pocket for a disruptor like Hims, which is doing its best to circumvent the entire system. Sadly, just as there's little government oversight to prevent pharma from becoming monopolistic, there's virtually no regulation on supplements. So you end up with the worst of both worlds; you can either take the $1000 monopoly pill or the $2 gas station pill filled with sawdust and raccoon repellant.
Those complexities may be relevant to other drugs, but not specifically to insulin, which is the case we're discussing here. Nobody needs to recoup their research investment for figuring out how to make insulin cheaply, and insulin prices are extremely far from "the point of maximum efficiency/optimization", which would be where drug companies were charging barely enough to cover the cost of production. Insulin is not regulated as a supplement, it cannot be administered as a pill, it is not sold in gas stations, and no cases of sawdust or raccoon repellent contamination have been reported in insulin.
All that's happening with insulin is that there's an oligopoly that's colluding to extract monopoly profits, which they can do precisely because regulation prevents biology students from hacking together insulin-producing yeasts over the weekend and selling the insulin to whoever is willing to risk it. That same regulation is what prevents Harbor Freight from importing insulin by the case from any of the dozens of other countries where it costs a tenth of what it costs in the US.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskChina/comments/1j9zf2u/chinese_i... says of China, "I checked and found that rapid-acting insulin is $4 per bottle, long-acting insulin is $10 per bottle, and other brands of insulin cost between $5 and $8." So why does it cost US$100 per bottle in the US? You'd think you could make a big profit importing Chinese insulin, no? But regulations make it difficult to import that insulin from China, so difficult that incumbents can extract US$100 per bottle in monopoly rents.
Also recombinant DNA processes for making these meds is pretty mature tech it’s not like some crazy trade secret.
His parents have been doing IV infusions for the past two years, which seem to be having more of a positive impact than anything the health care system did, and now they are about to start peptide therapy, which is something I know little about.
Edit: had to do a quick double check, but the foods that I eat, and don't eat, are specifically for hEDS/ME/CFS brain fog which I believe is IL-1B cytokine related and I think it's plausible that this probably has a crossover to Crohn's. Listing it here as something to consider; A diet of zero sugar and zero fruit, a lot of kale, chia seeds, and pumpkin seeds. I do one meal a day, and an occasional extended water fast. For vitamins I take TUDCA, DIM, and D3.
Prolonged use of steroids can cause dysautonomia which causes a plethora of other issues. So understanding dysautonomia could help. I also use a weak ligand approach to dysautonomia which is unusual with the use of modafinil and amitriptyline.
Low Dose Naltrexone (LDN) is a rather benign medication that's been known to help. There is little downside to trying it - so it can be used as a bit of a diagnostic in addition to treatment. Of course DIY research rules apply.
One of my more out there theories that seems to be quickly gaining traction is that a low dose of GLP-1 agonists can be surprisingly good for autoimmune conditions.
Most of my other peptides are hEDS focused and include VIP, Ipamorelin, Selank/Semax, and BPc157/TB500. Though I really only take the ipamorelin and semaglutide these days. These are a bit more risky but since my alternative is to be very sick I have a different risk tolerance profile compared to most.