Color me shocked, I tell you, Shocked!
Color me shocked, I tell you, Shocked! The first link is the New England Journal of Medicine article brief, the second is the CBS News summary of the story triggered by the NEJM. The third is a slightly better brief article from the NY Times.
This is where I find the no regulation, free-range 'capitalists' and smack them upside their let the market decide greedy heads. Here's a newsflash. There is no part of the applicable market that is looking to have fewer choices and pay higher prices. Demand continues to be consistent, if not necessarily high. So justify your sudden and exorbitant price increases now.
You fought FOR regulation to force the brand name drugs to allow you into the market place. You heavily pushed, and convinced others to do likewise, the AMAZING HEALTH CARE SAVINGS that only generic drugs could provide. You touted how your lack of research and development costs enabled you to charge a fraction of what the traditional drug companies charged.
Doxycycline was approved in 1967.
Epinephrine was being used to treat asthmatics in 1903.
God only knows when people started using digitalis, or foxglove, for heart disease.
I am indescribably skepticant that there is any rare earth strategic element production secret that has suddenly changed and a drug that could be produced for pennies for decades has suddenly become as expensive as a newly patented medication. Prove it, and I'll change my mind.
Even if only one company in the entire world produced something like doxycycline, even if there were a sudden spike in the international need for it due to a pandemic of Hollywood proportions, the actual production costs per a given amount of the drug would not increase. The retail cost might increase if you needed a sudden ramp-up of production for a pandemic, because you would have to invest resources into that ramp-up; but there is no pandemic. And the drugs that have suddenly risen exponentially in cost cross over all sorts of unrelated categories, and probably different production and processing, as well.
One possibility in common is unbridled monopolies. Now that there are rules in place to benefit the generics, lets take advantage and rip people off. See, another reason I am so skeptical is that if there were really a shortage or something critical, there's usually some kind of announcement. Somebody says something, if only because doctors and hospitals might need to alter how they treat patients.
So let's say there's been some sudden upheaval in the pharmaceutical industry, and drug production costs have skyrocketed across the board. Where's the concomitant increase in prices in all the drugs, all the brand names, all the generics? Is it happening all over the world, or just in the United States? Oh, and just for fun, somebody look and see if it's the generics made by the brand name drug companies, or truly separate generic drug manufacturers that are experiencing the price increases, or both. In case you didn't know, an awful lot of generics are made by the same companies that made the brand name stuff. You might as well look and see if there's a blip around the time the ACA came into being, too. Just for fun.
It will be very hard for people to convince me that this is not simply money-grubbing profiteering. And another nail goes in the coffin that is pushing me more and more to support unequivocal national health care. I am tired about having to argue each of these things individually, separately, and as a crisis, resulting in yet another tangled morass of regulation that is inconsistent and conflicting under various and sundry government departments. Come up with one singular pile of regulation under Medicare that applies to everybody and have done, already. Think of all the bits of regulation you could cull, all the bits of bureaucracy you could lop off. By Grabthar's Hammer, what a savings!
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1408376
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/generic-drug-prices-skyrocketing/
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/08/business/officials-question-the-rising-costs-of-generic-drugs.html?_r=0
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1408376
This is where I find the no regulation, free-range 'capitalists' and smack them upside their let the market decide greedy heads. Here's a newsflash. There is no part of the applicable market that is looking to have fewer choices and pay higher prices. Demand continues to be consistent, if not necessarily high. So justify your sudden and exorbitant price increases now.
You fought FOR regulation to force the brand name drugs to allow you into the market place. You heavily pushed, and convinced others to do likewise, the AMAZING HEALTH CARE SAVINGS that only generic drugs could provide. You touted how your lack of research and development costs enabled you to charge a fraction of what the traditional drug companies charged.
Doxycycline was approved in 1967.
Epinephrine was being used to treat asthmatics in 1903.
God only knows when people started using digitalis, or foxglove, for heart disease.
I am indescribably skepticant that there is any rare earth strategic element production secret that has suddenly changed and a drug that could be produced for pennies for decades has suddenly become as expensive as a newly patented medication. Prove it, and I'll change my mind.
Even if only one company in the entire world produced something like doxycycline, even if there were a sudden spike in the international need for it due to a pandemic of Hollywood proportions, the actual production costs per a given amount of the drug would not increase. The retail cost might increase if you needed a sudden ramp-up of production for a pandemic, because you would have to invest resources into that ramp-up; but there is no pandemic. And the drugs that have suddenly risen exponentially in cost cross over all sorts of unrelated categories, and probably different production and processing, as well.
One possibility in common is unbridled monopolies. Now that there are rules in place to benefit the generics, lets take advantage and rip people off. See, another reason I am so skeptical is that if there were really a shortage or something critical, there's usually some kind of announcement. Somebody says something, if only because doctors and hospitals might need to alter how they treat patients.
So let's say there's been some sudden upheaval in the pharmaceutical industry, and drug production costs have skyrocketed across the board. Where's the concomitant increase in prices in all the drugs, all the brand names, all the generics? Is it happening all over the world, or just in the United States? Oh, and just for fun, somebody look and see if it's the generics made by the brand name drug companies, or truly separate generic drug manufacturers that are experiencing the price increases, or both. In case you didn't know, an awful lot of generics are made by the same companies that made the brand name stuff. You might as well look and see if there's a blip around the time the ACA came into being, too. Just for fun.
It will be very hard for people to convince me that this is not simply money-grubbing profiteering. And another nail goes in the coffin that is pushing me more and more to support unequivocal national health care. I am tired about having to argue each of these things individually, separately, and as a crisis, resulting in yet another tangled morass of regulation that is inconsistent and conflicting under various and sundry government departments. Come up with one singular pile of regulation under Medicare that applies to everybody and have done, already. Think of all the bits of regulation you could cull, all the bits of bureaucracy you could lop off. By Grabthar's Hammer, what a savings!
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1408376
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/generic-drug-prices-skyrocketing/
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/08/business/officials-question-the-rising-costs-of-generic-drugs.html?_r=0
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp1408376
I'm going to guess that the market for some of these generics has atrophied to the point where only one or two vendors are producing them any more, which makes them a lot more subject to short term manipulation or acts of bad luck.
ReplyDeleteE.g., if some venture capitalist identifies a list of sleepy little drugs that are in wide use, but only made by one outfit, well, obtaining one of those outfits gives you a natural monopoly for as long as it takes a competitor to tool up a new facility.
Or if a production facility is at the end of its life, that's a natural time for the owners to think, "Wait, how am I going to finance the new facility in the light of poor past planning? And hey, maybe we should look at the price in general, here...."
What a revolting development.
ReplyDeleteLet them eat aspirin.
ReplyDelete"It's sixty-plus years of greedy corporatist motherfuckers rigging the game to steal all the pie."
ReplyDeleteThat was more accurately what I meant. It bothers me when talking heads go on about the "free market" and what not as if that explains everything and will make it all better. So I may have confabulated and misphrased in my ire.
"...if some venture capitalist ..."
Oh, yes. They are so very, very in there.
"Let them eat aspirin."
Well, I would say this trend might more precisely be let them eat willow bark. Until they monopolize the trees.
There seems to be some confusion in English as to whether “free market“ refers to the law of the jungle, or to the capitalism of Adam Smith in which businesses are prohibited from conspiring against consumers.
ReplyDeleteAlistair Young It is so weird to me that we are so completely on the opposite side of the fence, and yet so completely on the exact same side of the fence at the same time. It's like there's some weird misapplied underlying principle of physics at work ... I say this as a positive thing.
ReplyDeleteAlistair Young The problem with the "free market" is that there are two mutually exclusive freedoms: If the sellers have the freedom to make cartels, then the buyers don't have the freedom to shop around.
ReplyDeleteAlso, "barriers to entry" isn't just about regulations — it's also something that happens in unregulated industries simply because a) capital or knowledge intensive processes and b) the incumbent can lower their prices until you give up, and still come out way ahead on average.
ReplyDeleteAlso, they can hire assassins and thugs to destroy you or your products. That last is the Somalia warlordism result, or for that matter New York City style mafia-dominated waste disposal. And if you can't hire a police force that is better than their thugs you're still screwed.
Hence why government regulation shouldn't be about setting up extra barriers to entry, but about lowering them for new entrants. Or at least raising barriers for the incumbents.
ReplyDeleteAs far as actual examples — Amazon, various industries where China undercut the entire rest of the world, very successfully I might add...
As for the latter...
Since the people you argue against are rarely arguing for the straw-men-ad-absurdum you seem to propose (more regulation! Any regulation!), but rather for better regulation, I think it's a perfectly valid response to reduce your position to the absurd extreme as well.