121–130 of 244 posts
I can get the medicines I need to "save" me. I can't get the medicines that would help me to die. I wonder what this group's moral posture is on using their equipment to manufacture Nembutal (or other barbiturates). I would like to have 15g of Nembutal in a safe place, so that I can kill myself painlessly and without leaving a mess, should the circumstances require that. I know that no medical professional would help…
I know a bunch about pharma. The folks who are doing this and saying it's cheaper are often completely neglecting costs that are borne by corporations: the initial R&D, but also the immense amount of quality control and regulatory compliance. I've also talked to the biohackers. S ome of them are smart, careful, and just get stuff done in the lab. Then there are the attention hogs who inject themselves on youtube (typ…
Just to frame all this a bit better: in Italy epipens cost… wait for it… ZERO - nil - nada. You have a diagnose of anaphylactic shock risk? You get epipens. Public healthcare pays for it, therefore everyone pays for it with their taxes. Without a prescription, you can get one for around 75€, which is already considered criminally expensive. This is true for thousands other products. So please now tell me again how r&…
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Just to frame all this a bit better: in Italy epipens cost… wait for it… ZERO - nil - nada. You have a diagnose of anaphylactic shock risk? You get epipens. Public healthcare pays for it, therefore everyone pays for it with their taxes. Without a prescription, you can get one for around 75€, which is already considered criminally expensive. This is true for thousands other products. So please now tell me again how r&…
The direct cost to the consumer is $0 (or lira, or EU, or whatever), but that's because public healthcare negotiated with the power of a volume customer to agree on a fixed price, which is paid for by the government, which is paid for by people's taxes. So what you're doing is spreading the cost of the drug across the population. I had a similar situation when I had kaiser- no out of pocket costs. As to why drugs are…
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Clearly making it happen will require a revolution in manufacturing, which may or may not already be underway, but making it happen for software required decades of continuous revolution in semiconductors and telecommunications. Some kinds of analysis machinery, like GC, ICP, and DSC or DTA, are probably inherently fairly large; other kinds, like FT-IR, other kinds of spectrometry, TLC, HPLC, other kinds of liquid ch…
Probably the 'manufacturing revolution' will be modifying yeast, plants, etc. to produce the chemical compound of interest. Everyone needn't have expensive equipment - testing can be outsourced. Such an effort would need a GPL like agreement to keep people honest, but the technology exists.
> “If you're going to die and you're being denied the medicine that can save you, would you rather break the law and live, or be a good upstanding citizen and a corpse?” It's obviously better to risk using DIY medicine than to die, and it sounds appealing—mutual aid, neighbors helping neighbors, saving lives with free medicine! But framing it this way significantly misrepresents the issue of for-profit medicine. Peop…
What if the DIY medicines weren't of dubious quality? What if they were higher quality than the ones that cost US$750 a dose? What if everyone had an analysis machine that could analyze the medicines, DIY or not, to find out what was in them, and the DIY stuff turned out to be purer and more precisely dosed? That's what happened with Linux versus, say, Solaris and Microsoft Windows, and it's what's happening now with…
if someone glad to try some secret drug, maybe they can killed by error one...
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Some things change, but to make NMR cost effective would be cheating mother nature. The entire technique is based on producing a strong and homogenous magnetic field that can hold a lot of sample, only to probe the sample with weak RF and listen to its faint echoes. Industrial diamonds got "cheap" but large ones never did.
You could be right; certainly you know a great deal more about the subject than I do. What are the companies, or at least the industries, that would buy all the machines if you could make them much cheaper and/or better?
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Why wouldn't a capitalist corporation choose to lobby the government to bend the rules in their favor if they think that that would give the best ROI? In what version of Capitalism would this not happen? What would remove this incentive structure?
In almost any version of Democracy, an authoritarian politician can choose to run for office on a platform of establishing a dictatorship; in most of them, they can even succeed. That doesn't make the would-be dictator a democrat, and it doesn't make their platform a democratic platform. Similarly, free-market incentives to lobby for government monopolies don't make monopolies capitalistic, because capitalism require…
I mean, just look at the jungle of regulations and the vast inefficient bureaucracy of the US healthcare system. Those 15k layers of shite can only happen with just as many corps doing everything to either save their profits or trying to get as large a piece of the cake as possible. Public good be damned.
Say if the US gov planned to add $100 per patient in some grant for whatever reason. How much do you think would actually trickle down to the patient? I'd be like nervously donating $100 to a dodgy charity in a corrupt developing nation in the 1960s.
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The computer market is not particularly regulated, yet we still have international big tech monopolies stifling competition. I think the US simultaneously needs: • less regulation, to reduce barriers-to-entry • more regulation, to allow competition Normally, I'd be concerned about reduced regulations having safety implications, but the existing situation is already unsafe.
Patents are a big part of how the stifling is done. Getting rid of them, or at least cutting their term by a factor of 3-4, would help a great deal.
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Everything is a market. Someone has to produce a finite supply for some cost. There is some demand for the medicine. Suppliers can be incentivized to produce by demand through price. Look up the percentage of all drugs that were invented in the United States. Socialized medicine is subsidized by capitalist innovation overseas. There are so many problems with the US system, but they have more to do with regulatory cap…
Sit tight and assess! This is like reading a propaganda pamphlet with the inevitable very long term "it may work, we'll have to wait and see in a decade or two, but until then at least our profits are not affected"-solutions.