Why hasn't Amazon declared war on their customers? It doesn't have to do the market, and it certainly has nothing to do with capitalism. It has to do with rent seeking on behalf of lobbyists are the corruption of government. Imagine a world where drugs go off-patent in 5 years (or if you really want to be radical, no patents at all) and every drug was available without any prescription whatsoever. I guarantee you prices for pretty much all drugs would be 10-100x lower. How do I know this? Because I moved to a country (Tanzania) in which no one has health insurance and there are practically no controls on any drugs at all.
Medications that had costed me $500 with insurance per month in the US I can buy for $20/month. One of my friend's father is diabetic, and he spends maybe $40/month on insulin.
The patent system in the US combined with the 3rd party payer system has created astoundingly bad incentives for every party. And the result of all of this is sky high drug prices.
People seem to think that the defective US healthcare system is an indictment on free-market capitalism. But there's nothing free-market at all about our system. What it's really an indictment on is cronyism, corruption, and rent-seeking.
The question becomes, what do we do about it? The tangled and corrupt web of healthcare will be almost impossible to undo. I'm a staunch neoliberal but even I don't think it's going to be possible to go back to that in the US. It pains me to say/think this, but maybe the only solution for us is single-payer.
Single-payer has pretty terrible incentives too, but probably not even as bad as the current system.
Medications that had costed me $500 with insurance per month in the US I can buy for $20/month. One of my friend's father is diabetic, and he spends maybe $40/month on insulin.
The patent system in the US combined with the 3rd party payer system has created astoundingly bad incentives for every party. And the result of all of this is sky high drug prices.
People seem to think that the defective US healthcare system is an indictment on free-market capitalism. But there's nothing free-market at all about our system. What it's really an indictment on is cronyism, corruption, and rent-seeking.
The question becomes, what do we do about it? The tangled and corrupt web of healthcare will be almost impossible to undo. I'm a staunch neoliberal but even I don't think it's going to be possible to go back to that in the US. It pains me to say/think this, but maybe the only solution for us is single-payer.
Single-payer has pretty terrible incentives too, but probably not even as bad as the current system.