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Best line in the very short article “Health care is a right for all, not a privilege and that is why I am so proud that we created an insulin price cap that suc
by sorrymate 7y ago
Best line in the very short article “Health care is a right for all, not a privilege and that is why I am so proud that we created an insulin price cap that successfully puts patients above profit,” according to Gov. JB Pritzker.
- rogerkirkness 7y agoI am really anxious for the people that will lose their insulin because of this...
- datashow 7y agoIf it does happen, for some people, it proves the whole system is wrong, not their own ideology.
- profunctor 7y agoWhy would they?
- post_break 7y agoBecause the manufacturers can decide to stop selling insulin in Illinois completely.
- zentiggr 7y agoAnd as I said in another comment, let them make that decision... I would love to see them attempt to justify denying life saving medication in only one part of the country because money. Might just be the straw that would finally break their backs, and it's been too long coming.
- post_break 7y agoThere will be sacrificial lambs though. People will die because they can't drive out of state to get insulin. It might take a long time to force them to sell it at this cost, and they might win a lawsuit saying it's unenforceable, all while people die because of this legislation. Trust me, I don't like the companies doing this, but only passing the law setting a price ceiling without a secondary law requiring any company who was selling at the time the law was put in place to continue to sell is short sighted. Way too many situations where this ends up killing people.
- save_ferris 7y agoHow will people lose their insulin over this?
- StillBored 7y agoBecause, like some other drugs in the US, the drug manufactures will collude to create an artificial shortage?
- 7777fps 7y agoAt which point the government could produce more themselves. Why shouldn't governments own private industry if it still competes through the market?
- bmelton 7y agoJust responding to the "Why shouldn't governments" argument, but the obvious counter-response to that is that (at least in its current iteration) the government is pretty bad on slapping its own hand. We see this at the heart of the criminal justice system, and we see its ill effects. That is slowly starting to change, and I think for the better, but it's still pretty bad. In competitive space, what do we do when the government fails to check itself against anti-competitive behavior?
- jerf 7y agoIf you can only charge $100, but it costs $110, what happens isn't that it gets sold at $100 anyhow. What happens is that it doesn't get sold. Nobody has an obligation to manufacture insulin. I'm not saying the costs are $110. I don't know. I'm just explaining why this can result in lost insulin.
- ceejayoz 7y agoIt doesn't cost anywhere near $100 to produce a month's supply. https://www.vox.com/2019/4/3/18293950/why-is-insulin-so-expensive https://www.vox.com/2019/4/3/18293950/why-is-insulin-so-expe... > The US is a global outlier on money spent on the drug, representing only 15 percent of the global insulin market and generating almost half of the pharmaceutical industry’s insulin revenue. According to a recent study in JAMA Internal Medicine, in the 1990s Medicaid paid between $2.36 and $4.43 per unit of insulin; by 2014, those prices more than tripled, depending on the formulation.
- slowhand09 7y agoSo the next step is to nationalize the facility that manufactures it, the testing of it, the distribution of it. All taxpayers will pay for it. And the ubiquitous govt will have to compensate the drug companies for the taking of their intellectual property. Welcome to Venezuela.
- aplummer 7y agoSeriously what a ridiculous slippery slope argument, have you never been to another near identical democracy with a higher HDI than the USA? People don’t pay for insulin in any of them and yet, society functions just fine.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoInsulin is a generic. No one is required to be compensated. Pharma had their chance to be reasonable. That time has passed. Not to say that we shouldn’t appropriate intellectual property when necessary (eminent domain or not respecting a patent, as has happened in India and Canada), it’s just not necessary in this case. That doesn’t make us Venezuela, that makes us pragmatic.
- aplummer 7y agoThe inventor gave the patent away for $1 because it would have been unethical to profit from it. That’s still true.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- AdrianB1 7y agoThere are different generations of insulin; the old ones are cheap, the latest ones are not. I would like to see every inventor give the patents away for free, it would be great in a way, I just don't know who will invent anything new because these days the marginal cost of improving products is astronomical. For example, building a log cabin 200 years ago was tiny, both in cost of raw materials and work. Now the cost of a house is huge, not only because different materials are used, more complex manufacturing processes are needed, but who wants to live in a log cabin? Same comparison with insulin, there is cheap insulin and expensive insulin, people want the expensive one to be cheap. Not always possible.
- efa 7y agoI hate the constant misuse of the word "right". How would a country guarantee this right? What if every doctor in the US quit tomorrow? What if I decided to live on the top of a mountain where there is no population? How does the government guarantee my right to healthcare? Rights are around restrictions. I have the right NOT to be killed. I have a right NOT to be silenced. When something requires someone else doing something and giving it to me - that can't be a right.
- creaghpatr 7y ago>How would a country guarantee this right? Via its taxpayers of course.
- efa 7y agoAnd if no is willing to provide the healthcare? Force them?
- delecti 7y agoWho's going to stop you from having your right not to be killed infringed upon? That requires just as much affirmative action from a society's justice system. Any of our rights only matter as much as society's agreement to help you defend them, and in this case the government of Illinois has agreed to defend this one.
- jwbwater 7y agoPeople not killing each other costs nothing. Cost is only incurred when the right to life is infringed. People providing healthcare to one another always has costs. If this "right" is infringed and no healthcare is provided then no cost is incurred. Whether or not healthcare is a right is a lot less important than whether or not it is affordable.
- jxramos 7y agoNegative rights seem to be those more amenable to guarantees since they ask little. The guarantee of positive rights assumes a bunch of prerequisites from what I understand (some of which like healthcare are predicated on a ton of upfront infrastructure and training and availability and so forth). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights
- XnoiVeX 7y agoIgnoring the right versus privilege debate, It's just humane to provide resonably priced access to a drug that was invented many decades ago the price of which was artificially kept high by abuse of the patent system. The R&D cost of which is certainly fully amortized by now.