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Comment by terminalshort | Hacker News Reader

We do let them do that if you are willing to pay them for it. The fact is that if you "let doctors do medicine" without any cost benefit analysis, then you really aren't going to like the cost.

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You mean we do let them do that unless you aren't able to pay them for it. If you're the minority that has very large sums of money your doctors can decide what treatment works best, but for everyone else their healthcare is dictated by some company whose only concern is increasing the amount of profit they rake in and they'd happily see you dead if it would improve their bottom line.

Your comment contains nothing of value. If you have a better way to allocate scarce resources please state it.

In the US the allocation process itself is very expensive. Something like a third of the cost goes towards paying the administrative costs of navigating the byzantine insurance rules.

These resources are only scarce because of artificial scarcity.

This is especially true of patent medicines, where it's government enforced artificial scarcity.

If not for the government enforced artificial scarcity then many of those medicines wouldn't exist in the first place. Bringing a new drug to market costs >$1B now, largely due to clinical trials. No one is going to do that without patent protection.

Medical patents should come with compulsory licensing requirements. Nobody's saying that research houses shouldn't get paid, just that the monopoly needs to end.

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