It reminds me a bureaucracy of USSR, where there was a developed system helping to people with disabilities -- medical and social measures, -- but to be a subject of that help you need to prove your disabilities on regular basis. System was not bothered by the fact, that if someone miss a limb, than it will last forever. So a person with a missing limb was forced to "prove" his/her limb is missing every few years.
It's been condemned by the UN, but the government would far rather lose lawsuits than admit that disabled people aren't lying about being disabled.
And logistical errors with prescription medications in the United States happen all the time. My wife has two simple, common prescriptions, and when she comes in for refills, it's a complete crap-shoot of whether they are in.
You'd figure that the free market would find some way to optimize this sort of thing - but apparently, it's incapable of anything but gouging patients.
Is this perhaps the key - people being steered off the old patent free insulin and onto more expensive treatments, without really being given the choice?
(Is it better to have a better insulin on the shelf because you can't afford it?
Indeed it isn’t, and like you’ve correctly identified, demand is inelastic. But it’s still a market subject to competitive forces, provided they exist.
> If drug x is what is keeping you alive and they have a patent on it its not like you can't buy the drug.
The drug x did not emerge spontaneously. Someone decided to create it because it was a demand for it and it was an opportunity for profit.
Had the research not occurred, the drug wouldn’t have been created at all. So the way I see it, having an expensive drug (I will maybe be kept alive) is preferred to not having it at all (I definitely won't be kept alive). Plus, patents do expire as far as I’m aware.
Yes, I understand people want drugs at prices they can afford but this is not solvable by simply price fixing without generating unintended consequences.
[1] https://www.researchamerica.org/sites/default/files/RA-2017_...
If you include prescription drugs us government spends 329bil. So I think us government is pretty vitial to medicine in this country.
But, when your head is bleeding out in an intersection, and you're about to die, it's not the best time to be shopping online for an affordable ambulance. Just so you know, an ambulance ride can cost you 3000 to 5000$ even if it's less than half an hour away.
While obesity rates in Canada appear to have stagnated [1], they are steadily increasing in the United States [2]. Additionally, the United States has roughly double the rate of obesity as Canada. Given the relative increase in obesity in the USA versus Canada, it's quite possible the increase in diabetic complications can be attributed to this.
[0] http://diabetes.org/diabetes-basics/statistics/
[1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/82-625-x/2015001/article...
[2] https://www.stateofobesity.org/obesity-rates-trends-overview...
[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-019-05006-6
[1] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/rates-new-diag...
In thus US, insulin (of the types people actually use) is very expensive (~$300/vial), and requires a prescription which expires after one year. In Canada, the exact same insulins from the exact same manufacturers are literally 10x cheaper, and are OTC. Being without insulin takes about two hours to turn into a life-threatening emergency.
The prescription requirement creates ample opportunities for logistical errors that turn into life-threatening emergencies. And there's no legitimate reason for prescriptions to expire. And the cost is such that, if travel were free, you'd often be better off paying the full price in another country than just the co-pay in the US; the price is so insanely inflated that insurance is just compensating for the dysfunction, it isn't better than a sane uninsured baseline would be.
Insulin is cheap in every country in the world except for the United States. This is completely insane. It needs to be OTC in the US, and the import restrictions need to be removed so that US diabetics can have it at the international price instead of the gouging price.