- Why is insulin so expensive? [Tyler Cowen] “People Are Clamoring to Buy Old Insulin Pumps” [Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic via Ted Frank (calling it “an amazing story …about a problem created by overregulation and fear of tort liability, words that never appear in the article”)]
- Opioid litigation might be working to let the policy offenders in government get away [Jeffrey Miron and Laura Nicolae, Real Clear Policy/Cato; Jeffrey Singer, Cato; Charles Fain Lehman, National Review] A contrasting view: Nicolas P. Terry, Petrie-Flom “Bill of Health”;
- Read and marvel: Critical Dietetics, a social justice health movement [James Lindsay on Twitter]
- How HIPAA, the health privacy law, impedes potentially life-saving research into health records [John Cochrane]
- Uh-oh: Pennsylvania Supreme Court move could reopen forum shopping for medical malpractice lawsuits [David Wenner, Penn Live]
- “Transparent Medical Pricing and the $89,000 Snake Bite” [Cato Podcast with Eric Ferguson]
Filed under: HIPAA, illegal drugs, medical, opioids, Pennsylvania, pharmaceuticals
5 Comments
Re: expensive insulin
An easy answer for an easy question. Why is insulin so expensive? Because the market is broken.
To the extent that the market is broken, it was mostly broken by past government interference in the market.
More government interference is more likely to make things worse than it is to make them better.
I do not dispute your point, MattS. It seems as though the pharma companies’ primary objective seems is rent seeking, and they are doing a fabulous job of it.
On the other hand, there is plenty of government interfernece in countries were insulin prices are lower by orders of magnitude, such as Canada (and, yes, I know that the Canadian health care system has been criticized for other things).
Several factors at play here, all government actions.
Most of the rest of the world imposes price controls. However, price controls almost always lead to supply reductions (timelines for this vary) to the point where demand exceeds supply.
The US government forced beef and pork insulin off the US market, but they remain available in much of the rest of the world, putting downward competitive pressure on the prices for GM based human insulin products (which are what is running at such high prices in the US.
Not just Insulin, the FDA is deliberately going excessively slow in approving generics for off patent drugs / medical devices (see Epipen). There were only two manufacturers for patented human insulin, the patents expired back in 2000 and the FDA has still only approved two generics, keeping competitive market pressure on prices low.
Critical Dietetics–
Back in my Usenet days (1990s, still accessible on Google groups)
one of my sock puppets was
Dr. Houston Murphy
Lecturer on Dietetic Materialism
Enver Hoxha Institute of Advanced Studies
marxondrugs@cloud9.edu
Did the good doctor develop a following, unbeknownst to me all of those years?