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> Instead, the government could institute price controls and distribute directly to those in need or allow all private purchases to go throug

Every country in the world is hunting for N95s right now. For the US to institute price controls just means the supply will shift to another country that doesn’t.

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If the top 10 bidders are all Americans (which is plausible, given America's wealth and inflated healthcare costs), the U.S. government could use price controls to drive the price down from the 2nd highest to the 10th highest bid without losing supply to other countries. There's still the possibility that driving prices down would push manufacturers out of the business (or more likely, fail to pull in manufacturers who otherwise would have started producing PPE).

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