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Comment by DarkNova6 | Hacker News Reader

The bug occurs because of the power discrepancy of those who have the demand and those of who can supply. For some reason, the problem if insulin prices and absurd health costs only exist in the US. I wonder why.

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The power to charge what you want comes from lack of competition. Regulation can make entry into a market too high, especially for small start ups.

Ensuring that regulation is necessary and as straight forward as possible to comply with is good for consumers.

> competition

We don’t need competition in insulin production. It is a know quantity with fixed and closed quality parameters. Fix the price and let suppliers compete on cost.

The problem in USA is that producing insuline is so regulated that setting up and maintaining production is obnoxiously expensive.

Note that if you cause by regulation or stupid laws something to be expensive to produce/import and then make it illegal to sell above that price - then you will get shortages.

As noone will want to produce insuline if required paperwork costs more than it's selling price.

Note that even if currently adding more regulation to solve problems caused by more regulation will not cause it, it may happen in future.

US healthcare regulations are on Nth round of that.

> setting up and maintaining production is obnoxiously expensive.

This is what I meant by compete on cost. The manufacturers that are best at cutting these costs will make the most profit. That’s where competition should be focused on such generic items.

None of this is while insulin is so expensive in the US. None of it.

We've been producing insulin for 100 years now. You guys are just making things up and it's wild.

I don't think a single person who is claiming that regulation is driving up insulin prices has even Googled it to make sure what they're saying makes sense. Spoiler alert: It's not.

The cost of insulin is a result of monopolies, pharmacy benefit managers, patents, and most importantly: a LACK of regulation on drug prices.

> The problem in USA is that producing insuline is so regulated that setting up and maintaining production is obnoxiously expensive.

i don’t buy it. no other oecd nation has insulin prices as absurd as the us. this is a greed problem.

the only people to blame when the government starts producing insulin will be the pharmaceutical companies and their refusal to be decent members of society. if they were even a tiny fraction more decent they wouldn’t be in the mess they’re directly causing.

far too often companies are directly to blame for regulation as they repeatedly absolutely refuse to self-regulate and be decent pieces of society.

>this is a greed problem.

I'll take it even further, if you look at the price of goods over time, it's even possible to see the ebb and flow of greed in the numbers:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G5Qi8_vXwAAbRTn.jpg?name=orig

I wonder if prices are really a measurement of fluctuations in some underlying supernatural or cosmic psychic force?

Greed explains nothing. People will be greedy when they are incentivized to be greedy, and thrifty when they are incentivized to be thrifty. There are plenty of incentives, I might add, for regulators to be greedy though.

> this is a greed problem.

Also that. But overregulation makes too hard for others to compete and offer cheaper insulin.

Which may also be expressed as an expectation for a particular quality at a particular cost. There are no deadweights to exploit in insulin production. It seems to some people that regulation is the deadweight but without that quality guarantee you’re dependent on suppliers which duplicates the cost of “self regulation” across the sector.

We will have to wait see where it goes, but California is trying to make their own insulin, so starting January 1st, 2025 you can buy a pack for $55 a as a resident.

2026?

yes, thanks.

> The problem in USA is that producing insuline is so regulated that setting up and maintaining production is obnoxiously expensive.

This has absolutely nothing to do with insulin costs. Nada. Zip. Nil.

> As noone will want to produce insuline if required paperwork costs more than it's selling price.

Where are you getting this information from? I've been in the industry for a bit now and this is a first for me. That the reason why insulin is so expensive in the US is because it costs money to make????

>This has absolutely nothing to do with insulin costs. Nada. Zip. Nil.

Why do you think there are so few insulin producers then?

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/07/15/4229352...

Because it’s such a basic commodity with very little differentiation so profitability can only be achieved at scale.

You're sharing a 10 year old article to back up your claims?

And the answer is because it's a monopoly that the govt refuses to regulate.

How many insulin producers are there in europe?

There are many kinds of insulin variants on the market. The easy way to differentiate them is by release rate and duration. Gone in an hour for some and 24hours for others. There are other factors as well that make them incompatible with each other.

All clearly categorised and regulated. Fill the boxes and ship em and STFU

Nothing has fixed and closed quality parameters. At least not if your concern is quality as understood by the people who want or need insulin as opposed to whatever arbitrary standard a bureaucrat could make up.

> whatever arbitrary standard a bureaucrat

You do know these people are scientific experts and have teams of scientific experts working for them, right. It’s not some blazing skulls stuffed shirt lol

No amount of scientific expertise will turn a subjective thing (which is what product quality is) into an objective thing. Credible, ethical, and well-trained scientists should be able to recognize that and desist from dressing up their preferences into scientific dress and passing it off as the results of objective science.

> subjective thing

There is nothing subjective about insulin quality you dimwit

The quality of a product is subjective to the user of that product. This is a scientific fact of economics, and insistence otherwise is science denial.

That’s why we have regulation LOL toxicity is not subjective

Oh Lordy what has become of HN a load of fresh dummies with no grounding in the basic principles of libertarianism. All the fire none of the intellect.

Just no sport.

Sometimes the results of science are unintuitive, but they are facts all the same. The toxicity is an objective feature of the chemical properties of a substance. Whether, to what extent, and how people value such a substance due to its toxicity, and how this plays into their activities which might have assumed its nontoxicity is a subjective matter. The latter is what the manufactuerer is interested in when producing their product; if they consider the former objective fact, it is because the latter subjective evaluation makes the objective fact significant.

That would ensure that it is extremely unlikely we get innovation in insulin production as it removes the financial incentive to take the risk with innovation.

People don't innovate to compete on cost?

The barrier for entry is primarily capital these days: have a moat, prevent competition, extract money, cease R&D. And if a competitor does come up, just buy them outright. This is the current economic model, as it is practiced by Private Equity.

Power has become infectious and capitalism has changed. The game is about power and extracting more and more money from the productive economy, making it less competitive. Who wins? Those who already have excessive capital.

The only one who would have enough legal power is exclusively the state. It’s no surprise the state is under attack from so many fronts.

You could make an argument that the problem is entirely due to bad regulation, because the regulations haven't mandated effective enforcement.

I don't know if this applies to insulin production, but in several other areas enforcing anti-monopoly regulations is lacking at such a degree that the regulations are almost completely ignored.

> The power to charge what you want comes from lack of competition

Competition alone is never good enough to make price down, because companies and shareholders hate competition and will happily “consolidate” competitive markets into much more profitable oligopolies (when it's not straight monopolies).

Power discrepancy is not a category of pricing. The price is high because the supply is constrained relative to demand. And in this case, regulations cause a restriction of supply.

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