[The Conversation] - Blame capitalism? Why hundreds of decades-old yet vital drugs are nearly impossible to find
[The Conversation] - Blame capitalism? Why hundreds of decades-old yet vital drugs are nearly impossible to find
The shortages, which have been going on for years, have typically affected only low-cost generics rather than profitable brand-name drugs.
The feds should be producing generic drugs in the states:
- ensures supply
- ensures quality
- creates jobs
- fills gaps for drugs that are no longer profitable
- contributes to national security
- creates competition
- lowers costs
I think California is moving this way. They started producing their own insulin and suddenly everyone is reducing the price of their insulin to $30 a dose or whatever CA was charging. Let's do it with more
I highly recommend that you do blame capitalism because we live in a capitalist society. They claim to have the solution to our physical needs, it is a failed system.
Great article... Pharmaceuticals is interesting since the needs of corporations functioning under capitalism and their customers disconnect a lot
- Making effective drugs is mad expensive (billions of USD), so companies are strongly incentivized to squeeze as much profit as possible everywhere on top of the already bad enough corporate greed levels
- Thanks to patents, new drugs are almost always monopolies, so the pharma who makes the drug can charge (almost) as much as they want and make a lot
- Whereas making drugs without patents is not profitable as the article suggested... so these are done mostly by factories based in India and other not fully developed countries
- Funnily enough most ppl need cheaper generic drugs, not the ones most pharma companies are innovating and will make mad profits from
- And for the people mentioned above, pharmaceuticals are basically a need not a luxury, but somehow it's dependent on the ebbs and flows of free market capitalism
My unhinged opinion is... Most of the pharmaceuticals research are done by (mostly) publicly-funded research labs anyways... so might as well just let the government do something about this? I wouldn't be surprised if some folks in academia wouldn't mind moonlighting as CEO at a nonprofit drug manufacturer or sth
In a free market, people would be able to get any drug they like.
I'm presuming that over-regulation in the wrong way might be the cause here. But the problem is, markets carrying necessities tend to exploit customers when there's no competition, so I'm not sure that deregulation should be the move either.
In a free market, people can get any drug that provides sufficient profit margins to justify the market producing it. If scarcity needs to be induced to bring the profit margins up to an acceptable level... the market is free to do so.