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this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2025
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Microblog Memes
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Not really because people can die without food, and also without insulin. Nobody is choosing between diamonds and insulin.
Insulin is expensive because of a government-enforced monopoly. It’s a simple fact, no matter how motivated one is to ignore it.
Insulin, like most meds in the US, is expensive because of the free market.
If you have a free market on life-saving medicine, guess what, people will pay however much they can afford and then some - because people are keen to survive.
In most (all?) European countries medicines are regulated. Some medicines have many manufacturers, some have a "government-enforced" monopoly but without free market, and the result is that no matter the country, insulin is free or almost free. The reason is that when you regulate this, and the only possible buyer for a whole country is "the government", the seller is forced to negotiate with the whole government to be able to sell to X million people. And the government is not in a life or death situation, so it's less vulnerable to price gouging.
If the governments can negotiate a low enough price, then they can subsidise the last bit via taxes and people get free life-saving drugs. Yet big-pharma still gets profits at these lower prices, as evidenced by the number of pharma companies there are in Europe (including non-eu countries that work similarly in terms of healthcare such as UK, Switzerland).
Free market works, until the seller has a life-threatening reason why the buyer will be forced to pay whatever the price is. The drug situation in the US is not free market, it's free blackmail.