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Let someone pay 20,000x the price of a good or service if they want to. This is a good thing, not a bad thing. This drives early returns on investment, leading
by exabrial 6y ago
Let someone pay 20,000x the price of a good or service if they want to. This is a good thing, not a bad thing. This drives early returns on investment, leading to cheaper and widely distributed drugs in the future.
- rightbyte 6y agoMoney is not an issue here. Current resources is.
- exabrial 6y agoDoesn't it take money to increase the supply of a good? A manufacturer making bank on a product is going to reinvest that into his supply chain, increasing the overall supply... a good thing for everyone, which eventually, depresses prices and makes said goods commodity and affordable for everyone.
- maxerickson 6y agoThe existing purchase guarantees completely swamp any extra demand from private bidders. Say you got a million (or 10 million) people to pay extra (it'd be lot of people at that point); the manufacturing demand wouldn't go up any, and they would probably just delay delivery of some other doses for a week (or a month).
- s1artibartfast 6y agoI think this includes a number of questionable assumptions. 1) The money would go to the manufacturer. 2) The supply limiting factor can be addressed in a reasonable timeline 3) The demand will exist at the time when supply is increased. 4) The price is a limiting factor. As far as I know, lead times for this drug manufacturing equipment is usually >1 yr and the demand will not be there when it arrives. All of the vaccines currently cost $2-20.
- high_density 6y agoditto this. if some rich people are willing to pay 20,000x, then that roughly means (20,000 - 1) more vaccine for others (per rich person willing to pay, that is.) The other option is paying with tax-money... btw, another view: why fix it to 20,000x? why not auction?