4 ms·

I'm liberal and don't want central planning. It terrifies me that we are headed down that road at all; even seeing trial balloons for price controls. It always

I'm liberal and don't want central planning. It terrifies me that we are headed down that road at all; even seeing trial balloons for price controls. It always ends very, very badly and there's no reason to think this time would be different.

adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
Price controls on medicine in Europe have worked very well compared to America's "free market" by pretty much any measure.
- namelessoracle 4y ago
  what new medicines have come out of europe recently? (serious question)
  - twoquestions 4y ago
    The Pfizer vaccine for one.
    - rabuse 4y ago
      How's that vaccine working out?
      - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
        really well. Vaccinated people are still 3x less likely to get sick than unvaccinated.
    - namelessoracle 4y ago
      And mRNA tech came from Europe? (seems like it came from USA to me) And isn't Pfizer an American company? You're talking about the German company right? Would they have been able to do without Pfizer backing them?
      - twoquestions 4y ago
        Looks like two Germans, one a Turkish immigrant. https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/10/europe/biontech-pfizer-vaccine-team-couple-intl/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/10/europe/biontech-pfizer-vaccin...
- corrral 4y ago
  Not just Europe—price controls (de jure or de facto, the latter via e.g. establishing a monopsony) are, as best I can tell, the main unifying factor in healthcare systems in the entire OECD except the US. Those systems differ a lot, but at some point and on some level, they all fall back on price controls, apparently to good effect.
  - paisawalla 4y ago
    Just looking through the OECD's datasets [0], I see a lot of health care quality and utilization measures missing for the US and many other OECD countries. How are you defining "good effect"? [0] https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?QueryId=49344# https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?QueryId=49344# I was able to find some incomplete data that suggests the US is pretty good on the metric of wait time, compared to many European countries and Canada: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/242e3c8c-en/1/3/2/index.html?itemId=/content/publication/242e3c8c-en&_csp_=e90031be7ce6b03025f09a0c506286b0&itemIGO=oecd&itemContentType=book https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/242e3c8c-en/1/3/2/index....
    - corrral 4y ago
      I wrote a lot longer explanation but deleted it. Suffice it to say other systems are good enough that functionally no-one wishes they had the US system instead, and it'd sure be weird if every single other OECD state had been relying on price controls this long if they weren't having some beneficial effect. My short-version argument would be—and I'm a little annoyed at having to explain this, because I've been explaining it to people on the Internet for 20 damn years, it's so not-hard to find this info that it's kinda difficult not to have been exposed to it, and it seems like it should be common knowledge at this point and like some folks are going way out of their way not to understand it—that the "good effect" is precisely that the US spends 50-100% more than any of these countries, per capita, and does not smoke the rest on practically every metric, instead doing a little better in some areas, a little worse in others, middle-of-the pack on others still. It sure as hell looks like we're paying a huge premium for similar outcomes, which also explains why there aren't a lot of people in other countries begging their governments to adopt a system like ours (a fact one has to explain when cherry-picking metrics to make the US look good—OK, so why aren't others rushing to copy us? At least some of them should be, if we actually do have an unambiguously better system). The "good effect" is that other health care systems spend far less, and also don't bankrupt people over medical bills, while achieving roughly comparable results. If I came to you and told you I had a process to produce a Tesla knock-off that produced a car a little better in some ways, a little worse in others, but pretty damn comparable, at 50-70% of what it costs Tesla to produce a car, and then showed you dozens of factories I'd already built that were demonstrably doing exactly that, you wouldn't ask me how I was defining "good effect" when I used that to describe the results of the One Weird Trick of my process. It's obvious. Were you not aware of the vast differences in costs & accessibility between OECD healthcare systems? By which I mostly mean between the US and everyone else.
- rabuse 4y ago
  Subsidized by America's spending on R&D for the rest of the planet, just like the military.
  - ceejayoz 4y ago
    That's the industry PR line, at least. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/11/big-pharmaceutical-companies-are-spending-far-more-on-marketing-than-research/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/11/big-p... > The biggest spender, Johnson & Johnson, shelled out $17.5 billion on sales and marketing in 2013, compared with $8.2 billion for R&D. In the top 10, only Roche spent more on R&D than on sales and marketing.
    - noirbot 4y ago
      That doesn't seem to contravene what was being said? The assertion was that the US (via higher prices) is what pays for the R&D. Not they they exclusively spend all the US profits on R&D. If the companies suddenly made 20 billion less, I'd expect the proportionate expense on Sales vs. R&D to stay roughly the same?
- s1artibartfast 4y ago
  Most of Europe doesn't have price controls, but purchasing controls. They are similar but different.

adgjlsfhk1 4y ago

Price controls on medicine in Europe have worked very well compared to America's "free market" by pretty much any measure.

namelessoracle 4y ago
what new medicines have come out of europe recently? (serious question)
- twoquestions 4y ago
  The Pfizer vaccine for one.
  - rabuse 4y ago
    How's that vaccine working out?
    - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
      really well. Vaccinated people are still 3x less likely to get sick than unvaccinated.
  - namelessoracle 4y ago
    And mRNA tech came from Europe? (seems like it came from USA to me) And isn't Pfizer an American company? You're talking about the German company right? Would they have been able to do without Pfizer backing them?
    - twoquestions 4y ago
      Looks like two Germans, one a Turkish immigrant. https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/10/europe/biontech-pfizer-vaccine-team-couple-intl/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/10/europe/biontech-pfizer-vaccin...
corrral 4y ago
Not just Europe—price controls (de jure or de facto, the latter via e.g. establishing a monopsony) are, as best I can tell, the main unifying factor in healthcare systems in the entire OECD except the US. Those systems differ a lot, but at some point and on some level, they all fall back on price controls, apparently to good effect.
- paisawalla 4y ago
  Just looking through the OECD's datasets [0], I see a lot of health care quality and utilization measures missing for the US and many other OECD countries. How are you defining "good effect"? [0] https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?QueryId=49344# https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?QueryId=49344# I was able to find some incomplete data that suggests the US is pretty good on the metric of wait time, compared to many European countries and Canada: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/242e3c8c-en/1/3/2/index.html?itemId=/content/publication/242e3c8c-en&_csp_=e90031be7ce6b03025f09a0c506286b0&itemIGO=oecd&itemContentType=book https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/242e3c8c-en/1/3/2/index....
  - corrral 4y ago
    I wrote a lot longer explanation but deleted it. Suffice it to say other systems are good enough that functionally no-one wishes they had the US system instead, and it'd sure be weird if every single other OECD state had been relying on price controls this long if they weren't having some beneficial effect. My short-version argument would be—and I'm a little annoyed at having to explain this, because I've been explaining it to people on the Internet for 20 damn years, it's so not-hard to find this info that it's kinda difficult not to have been exposed to it, and it seems like it should be common knowledge at this point and like some folks are going way out of their way not to understand it—that the "good effect" is precisely that the US spends 50-100% more than any of these countries, per capita, and does not smoke the rest on practically every metric, instead doing a little better in some areas, a little worse in others, middle-of-the pack on others still. It sure as hell looks like we're paying a huge premium for similar outcomes, which also explains why there aren't a lot of people in other countries begging their governments to adopt a system like ours (a fact one has to explain when cherry-picking metrics to make the US look good—OK, so why aren't others rushing to copy us? At least some of them should be, if we actually do have an unambiguously better system). The "good effect" is that other health care systems spend far less, and also don't bankrupt people over medical bills, while achieving roughly comparable results. If I came to you and told you I had a process to produce a Tesla knock-off that produced a car a little better in some ways, a little worse in others, but pretty damn comparable, at 50-70% of what it costs Tesla to produce a car, and then showed you dozens of factories I'd already built that were demonstrably doing exactly that, you wouldn't ask me how I was defining "good effect" when I used that to describe the results of the One Weird Trick of my process. It's obvious. Were you not aware of the vast differences in costs & accessibility between OECD healthcare systems? By which I mostly mean between the US and everyone else.
rabuse 4y ago
Subsidized by America's spending on R&D for the rest of the planet, just like the military.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  That's the industry PR line, at least. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/11/big-pharmaceutical-companies-are-spending-far-more-on-marketing-than-research/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/11/big-p... > The biggest spender, Johnson & Johnson, shelled out $17.5 billion on sales and marketing in 2013, compared with $8.2 billion for R&D. In the top 10, only Roche spent more on R&D than on sales and marketing.
  - noirbot 4y ago
    That doesn't seem to contravene what was being said? The assertion was that the US (via higher prices) is what pays for the R&D. Not they they exclusively spend all the US profits on R&D. If the companies suddenly made 20 billion less, I'd expect the proportionate expense on Sales vs. R&D to stay roughly the same?
s1artibartfast 4y ago
Most of Europe doesn't have price controls, but purchasing controls. They are similar but different.