this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2024
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Not the reason. Lots of distrust in Europe too, where you can buy a box of paracetamol for just a few euro.
You can also buy tylenol for cheap in america, that's why it's a ridiculous example of how health costs have to be inflated to account for the way insurance reimburses which leaves uninsured people SOL but also occasionally leaves insured people SOL if they find some silly little reason not to cover something like they used the brand name instead of the generic or they used injectable vs pill or whatever the fuck else.
You can do that in the US too, but if they give it to you in a hospital the line item charge is much higher.
Places where it's sold over off the shelf in supermarkets it costs pennies.
It's also now harder to buy good vinegar in smaller supermarkets. They've replaced most of their options with cider vinegar, due to idiots falling for the drink cider vinegar for your health joke.
What’s “good vinegar” and where is it off the shelf? It seems like the vinegar section of my store has gone crazy over the last decade or so, with so much choice. I usually have cider vinegar, white wine vinegar, balsamic vinegar and rice vinegar for cooking, and distilled for cleaning, but I do t even know what half the choices are
Yup. Whenever medicine is brought to you by the truly free market, it’s not expensive at all.
You can get inserts for shoes, reading glasses, recently hearing aids (props to Biden for deregulating that), knee braces, vitamin supplements, basic painkillers, anti-inflammatories, anti-allergy stuff, stool softeners, eye drops, prebiotics, probiotics, marijuana, mushroom extracts, sunblock, gauze, adhesive bandages, antibiotic ointments, etc for quite cheap.
All of those things are free market goods.
Things that should be cheap but are priced very expensively are the things that you can’t just buy, but by law require a doctor’s consent along with your own: insulin, psych meds, serious painkillers, vision-correcting lenses, hearing aids until the recent deregulation (again awesome work Biden), x-ray imaging, oral antibiotics, anticoagulants, blood thinners, pulmonary surfactants, etc.
Everything on both of those lists are dirt cheap to produce. But acquiring the first list — the free market ones — is actually cheap for consumers. Acquiring the second list — the ones that cannot be exchanged on the free market — is ridiculously expensive to consumers.
Capitalism is not the problem.
Free market medicine is perfectly fine in the USA. It’s the highly centrally- controlled aspects of medicine in which prices are skyrocketing.
Paracetamol, which we call acetaminophen or the brand name Tylenol in the US, is still quite inexpensive.
If it were a prescription-only drug it might still be cheap in generic form, but getting the prescription would cost well over $100