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There is a way around it. Big pharma is still just a bunch of companies. We could make 4000% price hikes on things like insulin illegal. We could set legal pri
by moksly 7y ago
There is a way around it. Big pharma is still just a bunch of companies.
We could make 4000% price hikes on things like insulin illegal. We could set legal price limits on medicine. We could reform medicine patents. We could open research. We could even nationalise medicine production. And so on. I’m not suggesting that’s what we do by the way, that’s why I suggested EU regulations. The EU bureaucracy is much, much more apt at finding the right solutions than I am.
- harry8 7y agoNo. Do all that. (Maybe). Still resources are limited. Still if you had another $x billion you could save more lives. Still you have to weigh stuff like the cost of a hip replacement saving pain for old people against a long shot treatment for a terminally ill child. You can always do more. Someone has to miss out. Who? Why? There's no way around it. There can't be.
- moksly 7y agoExcept there was a way around it until medicine became so expensive that nation states stopped being able to afford it. There will always be a debate on priorities, but it’s gone from being about how long certain things could wait, to, who doesn’t get treatment at all. The triage example of earlier is excellent, because war time is a time of scarce resources, and that’s the state we’re at. Not because the resources are actually scares, but because an immoral industry got way too greedy.
- chillacy 7y agoWe could do all that and more (and we probably should) but we'll still have a bottleneck somewhere. An organ just came available for transplant: who gets it? Solving the triaging issue would basically be solving scarcity. So yea, in a post-scarcity world we wouldn't need to have this conversation.