Hacker News Reader

Comment by shanhaiguan | Hacker News Reader

It seems that your claim of infinite harm is based on the idea that the future is infinite. If the current subpar healthcare situation continues indefinitely, is the harm that it inflicts on its victims not also infinite? Is the benefit provided from removing this source of harm not also infinite? Then by your own reasoning, the question is not nearly as simple as infinite > finite.

Being in favour of single-payer, I can still appreciate arguments against it I guess. But this particular one isn't very effective.

View on HN

Cheap healthcare advances at the same rate as expensive healthcare, it just lags some years. That's why Walmart famously has dozens of prescriptions it can offer at a price of only $4/mo. Those drugs were once very expensive and were only available to the relatively wealthy.

Once upon a time, I bought my expensive asthma inhalers from Walmart because it's the most convenient pharmacy. Then they stopped carrying it. In fact, every one did. The manufacturer's patent ran out and they stopped making it. It was several years before the drug came back on the market by which time I had moved on to another expensive inhaler.

I too was affected by this. The root cause was the CFC bans [1] to save the ozone layer. The old inhalers used CFCs and therefore could not be used anymore. New technology had to be created that used a different delivery mechanism. Profit incentive is what caused that new delivery mechanism to be created.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorofluorocarbon#Regulation

Regardless, even if you can find some legitimate counter-examples it doesn't negate my premise in the same way that anecdotes are not data.

I think you'll find that the price just changed. People are reporting absurd price drops on a wide variety of different medications. You can thank Trump for it.

It's sort of price controls, but not the usual sort. Trump decided to enforce most-favored-nation pricing. Any price can be charged, except that the USA always gets the cheapest price. The drug manufacturers are understandably livid, so they are now funding attack ads.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com