| In some ways, the gatekeeping of healthcare should be met with more resistance than repair an item that someone else made but you now own. Your body is something that belongs to you, you technically manufacture, yet you are legally forbidden from applying known and often the most effective remedies to your own body if you don’t engage with a giant government-sanctioned system that can charge you whatever they want. To top it all off, the rules are not even consistent and are motivated by reasons other than what is best for the patient. For example, taking more than the maximum dose of Tylenol at can cause long-term or permanent liver damage. This is still available over the counter with no restrictions whatsoever. On the other side, we can see that the DEA was created to enforce drug policy (or rather racism and classism via drug policy) which has the effect of making access difficult for many people who are prescribed scheduled substances. Yet we have a opiate crisis that managed to appear within this draconian regulatory environment. Then we have situations like the FDA which been aware of the dangers of high sugar in diets, but the sugar industry’s dollars into “studies” managed to convince them that “dietary fat” is the problem. The “for your own good” argument only works if they actually acted for our best interests, but time and time again, it’s shown to us that this is just a big game in which we have no say in, yet we are all subjected to. We should have the right, as an informed human, to independently decide what we want to do to or put into our body, just as we should have the right to choose what we wish to do with our possessions. |
That is never the case. Humans are very risk averse and risk of broken product is infinitely smaller than risk of screwing up with your health.
That's how we ended up with the straightjacket system. Rachet goes only one way, there is a crisis (e.g. thalidomide in 70s, snake oil salesmen and so on), we rachet it up to ensure confidence.
The consequences of a single case of problem have a decade long consequences. E.g. baby formula was contamined in China (wiki "2008 Chinese milk scandal"), 300k were sick, six children died. Baby formula is not trusted even a decade and half later and imported stuff is used.