[curiousgeorgio]

Gathering a group of neighbors and telling him to knock it off doesn't have any teeth either, I'm afraid. He can still say "screw you, I'm not breaking any laws, so you can't do anything to stop me."

I do agree about upset customers having teeth. That's exactly how a free market operates. If they're upset enough, they'll stop buying the product and look for alternatives. Except there aren't any suitable alternatives to EpiPen on the market, and it's a potentially life-saving product, so those teeth don't have anything to bite in this case. I'm sure many, many other companies would love to seize that opportunity. So what's stopping them from competing? Answer: unnecessarily complex government regulation.

Or, if that approach doesn't resonate with your worldview, then go out and put pressure on the government to regulate the prices of things like EpiPen.

Either way, the answer lies in the government, not the corporation. The company hasn't broken any laws. We can wish they'd lower prices, but we might as well wish for pink unicorns. The answer for your neighbor is the same - you can't expect him to be reasonable just because you gave him a stern word.

[mikeash]

Yes, your neighbor can just ignore you, but he usually won't. Social pressure tends to work. That's just as true of companies as it is for bad neighbors. If your argument is merely that it might not work, then we're completely in agreement.

[curiousgeorgio]

You can try the social pressure route every time this happens (and if you haven't noticed, this seems to be a recurring issue in health care), but unfortunately that's going to take more effort in the long run with fewer results. Many companies - whether morally justified or not - just won't respond to social pressure.

Or, redirect those efforts into fixing the issue through legislation (either to open up the market to more competition, or to restrict price gouging). That's a battle you only have to win once, so in my opinion, it's a far more effective use of one's time.

But if you prefer to cry out that life isn't fair every time people do things that aren't illegal, that's entirely acceptable. I'm glad to see we still have the liberty to speak our minds, regardless of ideology.

[mikeash]

How am I, an average citizen, supposed to fix this issue through legislation? Write to my representative? He'll just throw my letter on the pile, and our useless legislators will continue being useless.

The only way to get any legislative action on this is to get the electorate to care about it so that legislators get convinced that they need to act on this in order to keep their constituency returning to the polls and checking off their name.

And in order to do that, you need to talk about how problematic and reprehensible these moves are, so people actually care about it.

So really, both the social shaming and legislative approaches start out the same way. Unless you think you're talking to a dictator, your "stop whining and pass some laws" approach is nonsensical.

[curiousgeorgio]

> The only way to get any legislative action on this is to get the electorate to care about it so that legislators get convinced that they need to act on this in order to keep their constituency returning to the polls and checking off their name.

> And in order to do that, you need to talk about how problematic and reprehensible these moves are, so people actually care about it.

It sounds like we're in agreement there. The only difference is, you've expressed an unrealistic expectation with regard to the effectiveness of social pressure directly aimed at the company involved. If history is any guide, we can only expect systemic improvement in this scenario through legislation and/or deregulation. Otherwise, you're merely treating symptoms of the problem, not the cause (and no, the cause isn't capitalism or profit-seeking companies as many may have you believe).

Now, if trying to fix problems in our country through the use of a system of rules and regulations (aka, laws) that has been established for that very purpose is nonsensical, then so be it. I suppose that view is indeed nonsensical in the context of today's prevailing social attitudes.