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Doesn’t make a lot of sense. Generic insulin’s are already being made. Why not just buy those?
Government should absolutely play in this space. Hell, one of the primary anti-fungal creams (NYStatin) was developed by a female researcher and state employee in the 1960s.
it's obvious that many medical supplies have an inelastic demand so are easily manipulated. When the market fails governments need to step in.
Healthcare is the most heavily regulated industry in the US. Many of those regulations were written specifically to minimize or eliminate the influence of market forces. You can't reasonably say the market has failed when it has been so tightly constrained by regulation.
as with every build-vs-buy problem, you don't know if you'll actually be able to do it until you do it. I'm wondering what a state government has ever done that is as complex as manufacturing a medicine -- maybe road building / big water projects?
if they succeed it would be a new chapter in state capacity + really exciting, especially if they are transparent about accounting and show that they're not warping the market
I think biohacker group open insulin https://openinsulin.org/ was founded in oakland -- they're working on lispro, the fast-acting kind in humalog
the humalog plant in puerto rico cost 200-500 million dollars in the early 2000s [1]. there are 3+ million californians w/ diabetes (per diabetes.org), and it costs north of $5k per year per person, so that's like 15 billion. you don't have to dent that # much to get ROI on this.
1. https://www.pharmaceutical-technology.com/projects/eli_lilly...
Sometimes I feel like this is the endgame where the US overall kind of declines but California starts managing itself better and operates almost like an independent country. Probably wishful thinking but would be great.
And I say that as someone who left California for the northeast.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Healthcare is the most heavily regulated industry in the US. Many of those regulations were written specifically to minimize or eliminate the influence of market forces. You can't reasonably say the market has failed when it has been so tightly constrained by regulation.
How is healthcare in the countries with very little health care regulations?
How hard would it be to found an insulin startup? This seems like the kind of problem designed to be intractable, the "busy work" of bureaucratic private health care systems.
Sometimes I feel like this is the endgame where the US overall kind of declines but California starts managing itself better and operates almost like an independent country. Probably wishful thinking but would be great.
Whatever glory Cali has— tech, entertainment, farming, weather, natural beauty— is in spite of govt rather than because of it.
Sometimes I feel like this is the endgame where the US overall kind of declines but California starts managing itself better and operates almost like an independent country. Probably wishful thinking but would be great.