"In 2001, Acthar sold for about $40 a vial. Today: more than $40,000. An increase of 100,000 percent." https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-problem-with-prescription-d...
'Price gouging' is not an accepted part of capitalism. Those laws (and customs..) that call out some prices as 'gouging' are bad economics and not 'proper capitalism' either way.
But you are right, that the drug prices are an even more egregious example. And, of course, we get those weird prices because of heavy and incompetent government interference in the drug markets. So we should probably look into scaling back that interference, instead of adding even more.
(And I specifically mention incompetent interference. To give a counter-example, for the most part I am quite happy with the economic policies of my local government. But then, I live in Singapore, where our Prime Minister was the top math graduate of his year in Cambridge, writes C++ sudoku solvers for fun and is looking forward to learning Haskell when he retires.)
No, we get it because of the wrong kind of interference (due to regulatory capture and government corruption). I think in Singapore the government interferes heavily too - at the very least posing as a bundling buyer for hospitals to put drug purchases out for tender. Every developed country does this.
In any case, the medical system itself provides a lot of examples of regulation driving prices in most cases.
Less regulated subsectors like Lasik eye surgery, or elective dental work, or cosmetic surgery, generally improved in quality and dropped in price in the last few decades.
(Another thing to investigate for me would be vet care. The technologies involved are similar enough; but the legal environments are radically different in most jurisdictions. If memory serves right, the evidence was mixed.)
Price-gouging is absolutely acceptable capitalism, we only call it 'gouging' because being a greedy asshole doesn't align too well with the moral compasses of most of society. Which is why government 'interference' is a thing in the first place, because otherwise capitalism doesn't give a shit about morals or correctness or acceptableness or anything that isn't capital.
It there's any interference it's so much more likely that it's corporate money interfering with the government.
I was objecting to complaining about raising prices as not being proper capitalism.
> It there's any interference it's so much more likely that it's corporate money interfering with the government.
If only! I'd rather have Warren Buffett or Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos etc have more say over what the government is doing than the status quo.
Heard it on an NPR podcast fee days ago. So i guess that is the reason.
Hopefully the winds are shifting as a new demographic is entering the political arena having been the butt-end of this status-quo for a while.
It's not. No one is on the other side of this except those profiting. We all want medicine to affordable to everyone, not just the wealthiest of us.