| > So we agree medicine cannot be managed as a business, right? No, we don't all agree with this. In a well-regulated and competitive market, businesses can opine about their fantasy product and scheme about how to extract maximum revenue from their customers all day, but if they push the envelope too far, a competitor will emerge and undercut them or offer a better product. The issue is that the pharmaceutical industry isn't regulated in a manner that promotes competition. It's a heavily concentrated industry dominated by just a few multinational companies, most of which originated in the United States. Like a growing number of industries in the US and elsewhere it is regulated in a manner which preserves the dominance of a few powerful firms and creates barriers to entry for competitors. The behavior of these firms naturally shifts toward milking their customers as hard as they can because governments have granted them big moats. They pay the politicians, the politicians protect them, and we get another example of late stage capitalism, which isn't really capitalism at all. Many Americans seem to harbor a curious cognitive dissonance: they don't trust their government, but they believe that more regulation of these already heavily regulated industries, devised by the government they mistrust, will fix the problem. |