61–70 of 79 posts
They literally just saved the world, and we’re not going to give them any credit for it…?
And we paid them extremely well to do so. They made $18bn in profit. And the founder is with $6bn. That’s plenty of credit.
If you produce something socially useless, no one cares how much you charge for it, but if you produce something that saves lives, then it's "greedy" to charge as much money as possible for it.
Whether true or apocryphal, there exists this intriguing idea that in China's past, they had a system of medicine where doctors were paid a salary when the client was in good health, which immediately ceased if they fell ill. What's interesting about this, is the rest of the world typically does exactly this, with almost everything but not medicine. With medicine, people can pay more and more for products and service…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you happen to find if the same drug is available as a generic? I use a daily medication. Every time I got to get t he script filled I get asked if I want the brand name or the generic. There is a two or three times price difference, why would I ever get the brand name?
Oh yeah, I definitely checked. There are two companies that make it. Both are priced exactly the same though.
If you produce something socially useless, no one cares how much you charge for it, but if you produce something that saves lives, then it's "greedy" to charge as much money as possible for it.
They literally just saved the world, and we’re not going to give them any credit for it…?
If you produce something socially useless, no one cares how much you charge for it, but if you produce something that saves lives, then it's "greedy" to charge as much money as possible for it.
If you produce something socially useless, no one cares how much you charge for it, but if you produce something that saves lives, then it's "greedy" to charge as much money as possible for it.
What people also don't realize is that they only have the 20 year patent period to make money in. After that the drug is copied by generics companies. This incentivises innovation while also not placing a permanent burden on the economy. Pharmaceuticals are 10-20% of healthcare spending and probably have a very good $/lives saved ratio. Isn't it great how you can just take cefalexin instead of having to get cut open…
They literally just saved the world, and we’re not going to give them any credit for it…?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whether true or apocryphal, there exists this intriguing idea that in China's past, they had a system of medicine where doctors were paid a salary when the client was in good health, which immediately ceased if they fell ill. What's interesting about this, is the rest of the world typically does exactly this, with almost everything but not medicine. With medicine, people can pay more and more for products and service…
We do that with "almost everything"? I can't think of anything. I don't think e.g. phone service is comparable, because while you might not pay when the service is down, the service's uptime doesn't depend on you. If you destroy your cell phone, you can't use the service, but the service is still working. If you sold "medicine as a service", it would just include that, but it couldn't guarantee that you'd always be h…
Whereas with medicine, people will sit there and let the system slowly and agonisingly fail them over and over again, at tremendous personal expense, until they are literally dead.
Medical malpractice - that is, a medical professional getting their treatment provably wrong to the point it causes death instead of prevents it - has been a leading cause of death (in the top 5) for decades.
It's somewhat of an inversion of capitalism that such a dysfunction persists in just this one area.
Your analogy with cellphones doesn't relate this because cellphones work.
If instead, they also ranked top 5 out of all failed any-distance communications methods, alongside smoke-signals, pigeons, cans-on-a-string and megaphones, development would be focused on until they rank better.
When medical malpractice ranks in the bottom 5 causes of death, the positive mechanisms of capitalism will be functioning in this area.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whether true or apocryphal, there exists this intriguing idea that in China's past, they had a system of medicine where doctors were paid a salary when the client was in good health, which immediately ceased if they fell ill. What's interesting about this, is the rest of the world typically does exactly this, with almost everything but not medicine. With medicine, people can pay more and more for products and service…
If that were the system, doctors would be incentivized to sign up as many healthy young people as possible, and to fire them as patients as soon as they got sick.
One way it could be modified would be if doctors had a cap on patients, couldn't refuse to treat their existing ones, and couldn't take on new ones. The cap amount being based on life expectancy balanced against a competitive income.