I focused on the thin profit margins and the consequences.
Then perhaps the government should be building plants to produce these domestically as clearly they need to be a common good rather than subject to the free market, no?
Or, perhaps, we shouldn't allow medical equipment and supplies to be manufactured overseas and imported as that results in cheap overseas manufacturers dumping product at prices sufficiently low that they will cut corners hoping the FDA doesn't catch them all the while driving out domestic suppliers?
Or, perhaps, any company found to have imported drugs from a plant that won't pass FDA inspection needs to have its executives sitting in fucking jail so that US companies have a vested interest in directly inspecting their overseas plants?
See, there are solutions ...
Options 2 and 3 are wretched ideas. It’s the reason we have $100 insulin instead of $3. It’s also why the US has inferior treatments in certain areas.
Logically the FDA kills X amount of people per year by hindering rapid and accessible adoptable of medicine. They save Y by hindering the adoption of bad medicine.
In theory Y is higher than X, but I am skeptical if that is still true.
I’d recommend you watch Dallas Buyers Club.
However, medicare having say the ability to produce generic drugs if they're not being produced sufficiently might fly.
Another would be Medicare a greeting to buy X amount of some drugs from non-profit manufacturer setup specifically just to produce generics. Though even Medicare being able to negotiate prices would be huge wins.
I've got a bit of a cold right now. Once we've solved that we can spend on the cancer patients.
Alternatively, less inflammatorily, the marginal dollar will provide more social utility if spent on buying tirzepatide and mass producing it. So let's do that first.
Someone is buying those "substandard" products or it wouldn't be driving competitors out of business. Did the FDA suddenly realized something the rest of the Regulatory bodies didn't?
They ship generic drugs to the US. The FDA is the regulator. And their regulatory system is terrible. They run extremely infrequent checks, they give months of notice before they do so, and they still manage to find horrific safety violations.
Instead of constant checks that would find small things, they discover a mess every time. This time they found everything you could possibly imagine: incorrect drugs, impure drugs, falsified tests, engineers overriding safety software when it reported impurities, incorrect amounts with falsified reports, etc.
Plants in India undercut everyone in price and drove them out of the market by making a substandard and dangerous version of the drug violating basic safety standards. The FDA failed miserably to detect this until everyone was driven out of the market by these low prices.
Had the FDA done it's job from day 1 this would not have happened. And had we built a strategic reserve in case something went wrong we would have enough of a buffer to weather this storm.