Free Market
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@JaredBusch said:
But there was nothing illegal in what he did.
Yet to be determined, he's not a free man right at the moment. He may have acquired the drug rights using money he did not earn.
JB will correct me if I'm wrong - but what I think JB meant was that in regards to his hiking the price on this drug, he did nothing wrong.
The fraud charges are currently appearing to be unrelated to that.
Just important to box the "did nothing wrong" because the drug price hike didn't happen in a vacuum, if he stole the money to buy the drug to do the hike, the hike is kind of tied to the stolen money.
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@Dashrender said:
@Nic said:
Free market capitalism breaks down when you have an infinite demand, like you do when someone needs a drug to live. You can literally charge them all of their possessions for it and they will pay. This is why for essential goods and utilities you want a regulated market.
yeah - you're touching on points Scott regularly makes to why healthcare should be something provided by the government, and the only reason I've ever budged from my otherwise stanch stance that heathcare is not a right and therefore is 100% your own personal responsibility.
There is another side here too. I agree with Nic, freemarket does not apply to medicine.
However, lets imagine that it did. If we remove the shackles of "things that are not free market" like not having monopoly laws, unregulating drugs, making people pay for their own healthcare we would also remove things like the patent office. Suddenly the ability to jack the price on a drug does not exist because someone else could make it for cheap.
It is the government that makes it that this company has exclusive rights to make the drug. So not only is there questions around the free market on the "provisioning of healthcare" side but also on the "exclusive rights to manufacture" side as well as the "exclusive rights to legal distribution" side.
There is no free market from any angle in this particular scenario.
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What I find odd about this particular case, is that Daraprim has been around for 62 years.
Isn't there supposed to be a time limit on patent rights? Also, if there are, how long are the patent rights for medicines? Or can they simply be "renewed" by selling the patent to a new owner?
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@DustinB3403 I think you mean patent rights
Hopefully no limit on patient rights. -
@scottalanmiller said:
@DustinB3403 I think you mean patent rights
Hopefully no limit on patient rights.Yep...
sorry, corrected.
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Patents tend to be a little fluid. Earn enough and you can convince someone to extend that stuff.
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@DustinB3403 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@DustinB3403 I think you mean patent rights
Hopefully no limit on patient rights.Yep...
sorry, corrected.
Funny mistake given the topic. Patent rights overriding patient rights is really the issue at hand!
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A free market would be SAM letting someone else get a word in edgewise in this thread
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Here is a thought experiment...
What if a single rich person could hire every doctor that there is - this doesn't just give them access to all existing legal healthcare but the right to control the creation of more (only doctors can make more doctors legally.) The market is not free, someone new is not allowed to just become a doctor by knowing doctor stuff, you have to have other doctors and political groups approve you. It's a gated thing. So, in theory, access to healthcare can be controlled by a single person without the ability to have competitors.
In a free market, that situation cannot arise. Someone could always invest the time, effort or money to compete. But in the current framework, it is completely possible although totally impractical, to literally buy up all healthcare and with non-competes literally shut down the healthcare systems totally if one so desired.
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@scottalanmiller what your missing though is that the doctors may choose to be hired by that person or not.
In addition there are monopoly laws, which oddly things like healthcare and the US Government are monopolies.
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@DustinB3403 said:
@scottalanmiller what your missing though is that the doctors may choose to be hired by that person or not.
Nope, not missing that. That doctors have a free market to sell their services is not in question, it is the people's right to get those services that is.
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@DustinB3403 said:
In addition there are monopoly laws, which oddly things like healthcare and the US Government are monopolies.
There are, and they don't get applied to healthcare specifically.
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OK speaking of patents - are you for or against them?
I'm thinking that in the free market areas that it's probably an OK if not really a good thing.
But I can definitely see where it hurts in the locked in areas like power, water, healthcare.
I Also now understand why healthcare isn't and can't currently be a free market thing, because it's all controlled tightly by the government.
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@DustinB3403 said:
@scottalanmiller what your missing though is that the doctors may choose to be hired by that person or not.
In addition there are monopoly laws, which oddly things like healthcare and the US Government are monopolies.
Sure there are monopoly laws, but some monoplies can't really be avoided - like power lines to your home. It's not tenable to have more than say 2 power companies run power to every house in most cities, and even two would represent a huge waste of resources.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@DustinB3403 said:
@scottalanmiller what your missing though is that the doctors may choose to be hired by that person or not.
Nope, not missing that. That doctors have a free market to sell their services is not in question, it is the people's right to get those services that is.
what do you mean people's right to get services? We have no rights to any service, at least not constitutionally.
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@Dashrender said:
OK speaking of patents - are you for or against them?
Mostly against and believe that they should, at most, be extremely limited to specific product categories and for extremely limited periods of time and very, very firm in their limits without exceptions. I believe that they should never apply to software or chemicals or other potentially natural things.
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@Dashrender said:
I Also now understand why healthcare isn't and can't currently be a free market thing, because it's all controlled tightly by the government.
That's only part of it. Even if the government was not involved at all, it's not eligible for the free market because it is not an optional service in the standard sense of the term.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I Also now understand why healthcare isn't and can't currently be a free market thing, because it's all controlled tightly by the government.
That's only part of it. Even if the government was not involved at all, it's not eligible for the free market because it is not an optional service in the standard sense of the term.
IE you don't get the doctor that wants to test something out on you versus using the proven method with side effects x, y and z?
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@DustinB3403 said:
@scottalanmiller what your missing though is that the doctors may choose to be hired by that person or not.
Nope, not missing that. That doctors have a free market to sell their services is not in question, it is the people's right to get those services that is.
what do you mean people's right to get services? We have no rights to any service, at least not constitutionally.
In a free market you have a right to attempt to get services. To be remotely a free market, that must exist. The situation exists here that people can actually be barred completely from healthcare. That no market would exist at all, free or otherwise.
The right to property is considered a natural law and superseding the Constitution requiring that it not be stated explicitly within it.
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@DustinB3403 said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I Also now understand why healthcare isn't and can't currently be a free market thing, because it's all controlled tightly by the government.
That's only part of it. Even if the government was not involved at all, it's not eligible for the free market because it is not an optional service in the standard sense of the term.
IE you don't get the doctor that wants to test something out on you versus using the proven method with side effects x, y and z?
No, meaning that healthcare is not like a car. You need healthcare to live, you don't need a car to live. There is no desire to buy healthcare that you don't need, no way to test services and no choices when things are critical. Unless you have the ability to get to any hospital, see any doctor and agree on prices and services before you die or take permanent damage, there is nothing like a free market associated with healthcare.
This isn't about what is or isn't offered. It's about the intrinsic nature of healthcare. This isn't a statement about the US or any current system. It's about free markets and healthcare - the two are not related topics.
