this post was submitted on 19 Apr 2024
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Showerthoughts
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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.