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except when the choice is "Buy this or die", people tend to pay whatever they have to.
by jsn117 11y ago
except when the choice is "Buy this or die", people tend to pay whatever they have to.
- tbrownaw 11y agoAnd they can only buy it from one place (which doesn't have to compete on price due to being the only one) because... guess what? Government interference.
- username223 11y agoFrickin' government, man... If it weren't for them always interfering, I could have a diesel VW that was fast, efficient, and non-polluting!
- deelowe 11y agoWhat does emissions regulation have to do with prescription drugs? People really need to stop it with the false dichotomy BS.
- tbrownaw 11y agoSure, but it wouldn't have seatbelts or airbags and the "non-polluting" would come with 2 pages of fine print redefining what pollution is (and it would probably give you cancer).
- gnaritas 11y agoHe was being sarcastic.
- aianus 11y agoWhat if I don't want or can't afford seatbelts or airbags or accident insurance (not to be confused with liability insurance)? Poor people end up taking that increase in life expectancy and just wasting it on walking and sitting on the bus because it's so expensive to operate a vehicle here in Canada. It's your mother's place to tell you to wear your seatbelt, not the government's.
- WalterBright 11y agoConsider food - buy food or die - yet food does not go for monopoly prices.
- username223 11y agoHow does one go about getting a monopoly on calories?
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y agoTurns out that stuff does actually grow on trees.
- mikeash 11y ago"Food" is not a single commodity, but rather about a million different items which largely substitute for one another when it comes to basic "or die" sustenance. If bananas suddenly cost $100/pound, my choice wouldn't be to pay $100/pound or die, I'd simply stop buying bananas, and buy more of other food instead. Drugs are not comparable, because there's typically only a handful of drugs that are effective for a given condition, and often just one.
- rodgerd 11y agoExactly: food is fungible, and the threshold to compete is "to have some land on which food can grow".
- WalterBright 11y agoGiven the famines that regularly happen in countries that don't have free market food supplies, I wouldn't take it as a given that food is implicitly plentiful. The inexpensive prices for drugs cited in the article happened before the US government got heavily involved with running the health care industry. Maybe that's a coincidence, but I doubt it.
- mikeash 11y agoThe US food market is far from free, with intense regulation and subsidies, yet famine looks to be pretty much impossible here.
- aianus 11y agoThe choice might be "buy this or die" but it's the government that makes it "buy this [at exorbitant cost] or die". In this case, not even due to a patent, but because you can't sell a generic without lengthy, costly FDA approval. Essentially the government is telling sick people, "you can't take this generic daraprim from India because we haven't approved it, so pay Martin Shkreli $750 a pill or fuck off and die". It's asinine and it's 100% the government's fault this is happening. If Martin Shkreli hadn't done it, someone else would have.
- cookiecaper 11y agoShkreli is at fault whether someone else would've done it or not. Someone else didn't do it, Shkreli did. He's responsible for his actions, and the government is responsible for making them possible.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]