Increasing prices on preventative medicine/devices is a great way to make sure fewer people use them and disease transmission/severity increases.
Yes, increasing price makes it so less people can afford it, but it also makes more supply available so more people can buy it. What use is cheap masks when only a small portion of the population can actually get their hands on it because of shortages?
Now apply the same market logic to a future vaccine and you'll have a situation where herd immunity will never be achieved because it won't be profitable to achieve it.
Edit: It's even worse than the above though. Those that won't buy expensive masks/vaccines are also likely to be those most exposed/vulnerable to the disease in the first place. Then, when they're on death's door they will need much more expensive emergency care at the nearest hospital. Letting the market make these kinds of decisions is how the US achieves such dismal health outcomes despite spending a fortune on healthcare.
What use are available masks if only a small portion of the population will have them because of their scarcity?
In the short term, the amount of masks are the same. Pricing them higher doesn't magically cause masks to evaporate, and vendors aren't going to hoard masks when they can fetch a high price on the market. In the long term (when production ramps up in response to the increased price) the production of masks will increase, allowing more people in aggregate to have masks, even if it means that some portion of the population will be priced out.
The alternative is that the supply of masks stay the same in the short term and long term, and the masks is randomly distributed (at best) or held in the hands of a small number of hoarders.
This is an utterly false dichotomy and a big reasons why government exists and is actually useful. Governments can do things (and compel others to do things) that don't fall in the optimal spot on the supply/demand curve. If supply is limited masks should not be "randomly" distributed, but distributing based on who can afford them is probably not any better than random in an epidemiological sense. Should the first people to get vaccinated be billionaires or health-care workers?
This appears to be a shifting of the goal posts. Your original comment remarked about how "Increasing prices on preventative medicine/devices is a great way to make sure fewer people use them", however now you seem to advocate for central allocation of medical resources. If the government is in charge of allocating resources, prices would be a moot point.
Supply and demand ais an elementary model to explore the basic principles of price theory. It is a starting point, not the last word. Listening to people talk about it like an iron law of nature is like doing a high school math problem about how fast a car can get from A to B and thinking you've got the hang of autonomous vehicles.
This is a red herring on the strawman's shoulder. Good. Grief.
I really think you would be much enlightened to listen to Thomas Sowell's Basic Economics audio book. It's really long, but covers this sort of thing just oh so well.
It will help you to answer questions like: how come people in the Soviet Union were starving to death while crops rotted in the field? Among many others...
I am talking about the rigorous microeconomic theory which involves using calculus is required to actually pass an economics course or analyze a commodity market. If you are not familiar with concepts like elasticity, substitution, or the difference between consumer and producer surplus then I suggest you look deeper into microeconomics.
> I am talking about the rigorous microeconomic theory which involves using calculus is required to actually pass an economics course or analyze a commodity market. If you are not familiar with concepts like elasticity, substitution, or the difference between consumer and producer surplus then I suggest you look deeper into microeconomics.
The claim that economics requires "math" has no support - just follow the epistemology on the claim and it's a dead end. It is always stated matter-of-factly as if it is prima facie true. Social sciences have never been about maths outside of a very non-rigorous movement to convert social sciences into hard sciences.
For example, when I go to the store and they don't have what I want, do you believe there is an equation that I am operating on that instructs me in what to do next? If you truly believe this, then you believe in something akin to a religion - that there is some unknown but discoverable equation all of us make decisions with. If you don't believe this, then you cannot find that equations are how I am making decisions, therefore my decisions on how to allocate my resources are guided by something else, thus, microeconomics cannot be based on the maths.
It is also interesting you state calculus as if it is so hard. I haven't found evidence of this while I have seen people struggle more with advanced algebra than with advanced calculus.
Your statement suggests that Sowell somehow got through Harvard, Columbia, and University of Chicago without taking a "real" economics course, or that those courses were inadequate, or that Sowell is incapable of grasping these more advanced conecpts. These sorts of statements really just make you look like an ass, or worse.
BTW, your first sentence is nonsensical. Things that are theoretical do not "operate" because they are not in the physically existent universe, and economics attempts to explain things exclusively in the physically existent universe.