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You can find free market alternatives for many issues in the book _The Machinery of Freedom_ by David Friedman As to vaccines, I wonder what proportion of the
by xenophanes 17y ago
You can find free market alternatives for many issues in the book
_The Machinery of Freedom_ by David Friedman
As to vaccines, I wonder what proportion of the population wouldn't be willing to pay for their own vaccines. For any vaccine that we make 300 million of it's gonna be cheap, so the unwilling people would either be very poor or have some philosophical objection to vaccine (weird religious view, anti-science, etc).
So the problem is only the size of, say, one million vaccinations.
Existing big drugs companies today voluntarily give away substantial amounts of free medicine to poor people. My friend is a recipient. They do it to create good will and word of mouth and that kind of reasoning. I imagine if no one else was willing to do it, and one company stepped up and provided vaccines for poor people for a high profile disease, thus staving off a public health risk, it'd make them look so much better than the other companies it'd pay for itself.
Or maybe that wouldn't work. It takes creativity to solve these problems. I don't see anything that makes this problem, in principle, more difficult than a variety of others. Also, it's not like the Government is offering a good solution. The Government's approach is to not find a way to do it for a profit, and not find a way to persuade people to do it voluntarily, and instead just to do it by force.