[ghostwriter]

Healthcare and medicine is a commodity service, similar to airway transportation and food supply, and the more abundance is there on all levels of it, the lower the prices get across time. Artificial caps on the cost of medicine creates unhealthy bureaucratic incentives like this one instance within NHS in the UK https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2019/06/15/trump-criti...

[zbyte64]

Medicine is still a commodity even if another entity collectively bargains for it (ie NHS). Why doesn't the parent just by the medicine directly? Surely the NHS doesn't prevent that from happening. Oh, right, it is too expensive to purchase for most people without collectively bargaining. But I guess even that kind of bureaucracy isn't tolerable to an absolutist.

[ghostwriter]

The entity may and should collectively bargain 90% discount, as long as the parents of those who need the unavailable medicine right now can withdraw from contributing their taxes to NHS and use the freed funds for direct purchases of the otherwise unavailable drug. I’m not sure it’s possible at the moment.

[zbyte64]

I get that sounds "fair" but when you consider the family can suffer from any number of ailments that is rather cruel to say "your son requires special medicine, to afford that you must withdraw from public health care and you are on your own if you break your arm or back"

[ghostwriter]

That’s why I mentioned that abundance of options on all levels of the service of “providing healthcare” is crucially important for reducing costs over time. I can imagine different plans for different people of different healthcare needs (young and old, employed and unemployed etc), covered by more than one healthcare provider, in the same manner it is currently done in airway transportation.