131–140 of 244 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Did you forget to read the last part, describing the major things that need to change?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
any purveyor of fine chemicals (polymers, etc) and petroleum processing company (hydrocarbon analysis).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems odd to call it that as there's little 'capitalism' in it. It's abuse of state regulations rather than market forces.
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?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People mostly aren't dying because they can't afford life-saving medicine. No, people are definitely dying because they can't afford medicine. They're not taking things they need, they're cutting pills in half, they're diluting injections. When they finally die from some acute episode, what got them there is never recorded. The amount of bullshit I have gone through to get albuterol inhalers (which cost $5 in civil…
Generic albuterol inhaler is $20 using GoodRx.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
92% of contributors to the Linux kernel are paid by companies: https://www.suse.com/suse-defines/definition/linux-contribut... Most major OSS projects are controlled by a few companies who pay developers to work on them. They're more like industry consortiums than DIY anarchist collectives.
Something can be both an industry consortium and a DIY anarchist collective, like Linux; the Linux Foundation isn't Linux. It turns out that industrial companies don't appreciate being subject to monopoly rents any more than private individuals do! The GPL is undeniably very anarchist, and it serves as a kind of constitution that keeps the companies that participate in GPL projects from controlling them. Consider, fo…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anarchism is indeed fundamentally against coercive hierarchy, yes, and I apologize for not being clearer about that. That said, Emma Goldman and many other anarchists were delighted to be deported to Soviet Russia until their famous disillusionment; historically speaking, the mainstream of anarchism considered state communism more friend than enemy, until they saw how it worked out in practice. And my own experiences…
I think a lot of people had a lot of hope in the Soviet Union, especially when there were actual soviet councils involved. It didn't take long to devolve into a regular dictatorship. After all the state was supposed to be a vanguard for the implementation of socialism but power begets power and in the end it existed to serve itself. I think that's the main reason that most sane leftists* are some flavour of anarchist…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You're missing the forest for the trees. This is what Capitalism has always been and always will be due to its incentive structure. If you accept wealth and thus power concentration, you accept market manipulation. The corps won't skip this due to some overarching ideological free-market reason. That's just naive. I mean, just look at the jungle of regulations and the vast inefficient bureaucracy of the US healthcare…
I think that very little of your hypothetical US$100 would benefit the patient, precisely the opposite of giving US$100 to every consumer in a capitalist market.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
R&D and quality control provides benefits to patients, and it is critically important to figure out how to reduce the cost of R&D and quality control so we can do a lot more of them. That's what Four Thieves Vinegar and other biohackers are doing. Regulatory compliance doesn't provide benefits to patients; it's a deadweight loss. As you are presumably aware, to a significant extent, the reason that regulatory complia…
Nothing I said above disagrees with the fact that many pharma are indeed doing what you call "monopoly rent extraction". I think all of those drugs are overpriced for non-economic reasons. Regulatory compliance, for example, with the FDA approval process, isn't a deadweight loss; it's a process that reduces the risk a dangerous drug will be given to the public. It's mostly costly due to incompetence and bureaucracy,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What reduces the risk that a drug will be dangerous is testing, quality control, replication, and transparency. Regulatory compliance is, at best, a means to those ends, not an end in itself. At worst, and far too often, it's a major obstacle to them. People don't have to be evilly plotting when their incentives are set up to empower only people who do evil things. Don't forget that, in the US, we're talking about th…
So, uh, how are we going to ensure that all that testing, QC, and transparency occurs... without some sort of regulatory agency that enforces it? and that agency woudl use compliance (submit this and that form and follow this and that process)... so it would seem that they act as proxies for the value of the things you listed.