Finally!!!!!
Insulin is way too expensive. California has a solution: Make its own
171–180 of 273 posts
Re: Insulin is way too expensive. California has a solution: Make its own
#172This is great news. Honestly, I hope to see more nationalization of widely used services (or whatever the equivalent word for nationalization is at state or municipal levels.) Municipal broadband, power, roads, schools, post, housing, and healthcare? It's long overdue, and with an appropriate amount of funding has been shown to be effective at controlling costs and delivering moderately good quality in most cases. A…
> has been shown to be effective at controlling costs That has never happened. What does happen is the cost is borne by the taxpayer rather than the user of the service. The "warping" of the profit motive in the insulin case is entirely caused by government interference and regulation (by making it nearly impossible for competitors to spin up and make insulin).
Remember this - the California insulin manufacturing program is going to turn out to be very expensive.
Re: Insulin is way too expensive. California has a solution: Make its own
#173Or just abolish the FDA?
They're the ones keeping competitively priced insulin out of the market.
https://mises.org/wire/patents-legal-monopolies-and-high-pri...
Re: Insulin is way too expensive. California has a solution: Make its own
#174This is great news. Honestly, I hope to see more nationalization of widely used services (or whatever the equivalent word for nationalization is at state or municipal levels.) Municipal broadband, power, roads, schools, post, housing, and healthcare? It's long overdue, and with an appropriate amount of funding has been shown to be effective at controlling costs and delivering moderately good quality in most cases. A…
>Municipal broadband, power, roads, schools, post, housing, and healthcare? It's long overdue, Yeah, everything was great under the state owned telco monopolies. Let's get back to that!
In the case of municipal broadband it mostly comes from communities that suffer form poor/no investment from the big players and is the only recourse for decent internet. It usually is faster and cheaper than existing solutions. There's clearly market failure here and players abusing their local monopolies to refrain from investing / provide decent service.
The state of telco in the US is pretty shocking, even in places like NY state.
Re: Insulin is way too expensive. California has a solution: Make its own
#175Walmart now sells Novo Nordisk produced insulin for $17 per pen[0]. I have a hard time believing California will do it cheaper than that. [0] https://www.walmart.com/cp/relion-diabetic-care/3769564
As someone with little actual knowledge of different insulin, I've been told that the cheaper one that Walmart sells is significantly harder to manager and you tend to end up going through lots of spikes & dips with it, which while enough to still live for some is pretty debilitating. Hopefully California is planning on doing a different style of insulin that better manages that?
That's incorrect. For a long time, Walmart has sold an older, human insulin. This is a relatively new product which is an analog insulin. It's the same NovoLog that's widely prescribed just with the ReliOn brand stuck on it.
Re: Insulin is way too expensive. California has a solution: Make its own
#176„Alec Smith, died in 2017 because he could not afford the $1,300 out-of-pocket price for his prescription once he was dropped from his parents’ health insurance when he turned 26“
What a reality. I‘m glad that I don’t have a life threatening diseases, but I would do everything that is possible to survive. Steal, rob, fraud to come at least up with the money to survive.
I‘m shocked that simply surviving a manageable sickness in a first world country is not a human right.
Re: Insulin is way too expensive. California has a solution: Make its own
#177Or just abolish the FDA? They're the ones keeping competitively priced insulin out of the market. https://mises.org/wire/patents-legal-monopolies-and-high-pri...
Yeah, I mean I'm sure there's a complicated story here... but when the market isn't producing some consumer good, I think it's a good idea to check whether there's some root cause we can fix. Not just throw yet another hack on top of the chaos.
Re: Insulin is way too expensive. California has a solution: Make its own
#178Or just abolish the FDA? They're the ones keeping competitively priced insulin out of the market. https://mises.org/wire/patents-legal-monopolies-and-high-pri...
That's a bit like saying we should defund the police. It's thought provoking and grabs headlines. It even has some merit, but it's ultimately not the solution. Reform the FDA, sure I can support that.
The FDA, from my perspective, plays such a huge and important role in our society and showcases the exact things we need from our government. They are an example of a government entity that mostly gets the job done right, an essential part of our livelihood today.
Re: Insulin is way too expensive. California has a solution: Make its own
#179Why not just import it from Europe, its around 18 dollars here.
Re: Insulin is way too expensive. California has a solution: Make its own
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Municipal broadband, power, roads, schools, post, housing, and healthcare? It's long overdue, and with an appropriate amount of funding has been shown to be effective at controlling costs and delivering moderately good quality in most cases. Where? The US has among the highest percentage of kids going to government owned and operated schools. We have plenty of government housing as well (projects). Nearly all of ou…
Its easy to point at what doesn't work well, there's tons and tons of things that work great that nobody talks about. Municipal broadband: the best broadband in the entire United States is provided by the municipality of Chattanooga. [1] Post: The USPS is the most trusted brand in the United States, above FedEx and UPS. [2] Transit: The New York City Subway is the 3rd largest metro rail system on earth after London a…
American schooling sucks because it's beholden to political objectives contrary to the interests of educating children. Look at the manufactured controversy over "intelligent design" a few decades back, or the current controversies over transgender bathroom access, or Florida's censorship of material in school libraries[0].
Municipal broadband and the post works well because the US is good at building infrastructure. But at the same time, our government is also beholden to interests that want to kill that infrastructure so they can sell costlier and worse equivalents. States passed a bunch of laws to ban local government from running ISPs and Congress has been putting stupid funding mandates on the USPS's pension schemes that make a profitable public venture unprofitable.
Transit is a bad example because America is famously addicted to cars and allergic to any transit system that isn't a road. The NYC Subway could not be built today under the current political climate. Hell, it wasn't even built by the city or state government; it was stolen from the people who built the system through overregulation. Nationally, we have Amtrak[1], which was created by bailing out failing freight companies. With some high-speed upgrades it could be great, but the system is still beholden to those same freight companies' infrastructure[2].
The underlying problem is that America does not want to build working government programs. It is run by people who deliberately take funding in order to burn it so they can complain about how much better "privately-run" monopolized systems are.
[0] There are probably examples that right-wingers would point out as well - maybe check Reason or CATO for them, because I forgot.
[1] US citizen: Japan has high-speed bullet trains! We should build a Shinkansen!
US: We have a Shinkansen at home.
Shinkansen at home:
[2] Which, BTW, is actually supposed to give Amtrak priority over the rails. Like it says it in the actual law. Nobody cares.