> “you cannot sell medicine X for more than $Y” This leads to shortages. I am speaking from experience here. I'm an anesthesiologist, and with three exception

> “you cannot sell medicine X for more than $Y” This leads to shortages. I am speaking from experience here. I'm an anesthesiologist, and with three exceptions I can think of, our drugs are all off-patent, so their prices are basically a function of production costs. But the federal government of the US, which buys a lot of drugs under the VA and Medicare, has a rule that you can't increase the price by more than X% per quarter (or year, not sure). Now, we all agree that this sounds like a good regulation. Right? Nobody can just raise the price of insulin by 40000%? Except that generic drugs really don't make much money, and when one company leaves the market for a given drug (there are usually only 2-3 manufacturers per drug), the remaining corp(s) can only make up the shortfall by moving to 24-hour operations (in the short term). Staffing that means hiring more people and paying overtime. So the cost of production... doubles, at least. The part that is missing: it's a drug that sells for twenty cents for a sterile ampule. Doubling it to forty cents is not going to break the bank. It's cheap, it will continue to be cheap, and yes - in the long run, someone will set up a line to make it for ten cents and sell it at twenty. But in the short run? You run out of drugs. I've seen it in almost every category of anesthesia drugs (induction, opioids, paralytics, paralytic reversal, etc.) in the last ~20 years. You'd think that "not being aware during surgery" would be one of those things that people would care about, but it isn't.