anapaix wrote:
DiscoGary wrote:That is exactly what free markets do.
no you see, first you have to tie the markets hands with 10000 regulations every step of the way, and THEN it won't work! checkmate capitalists!
I'll just repost this again:
There might only be one treatment discovered for a particular type of cancer for example and just one company that spent billions of dollars and 20 years developing it. What happens then? Competing companies are supposed appear from nowhere, spend billions and 20 years developing another effective product then sell it for half the price of the original company to help out Average Joe? It's just unrealistic.
Not only is it unrealistic, if you get rid of exclusivity rights to drugs, (regulations which actively prevent competition) then when a company has spent all that time and money developing and testing a drug then some other company will just reverse engineer the often simple chemicals in it. Then they will sell that same drug for pennies. The company responsible for the research and development will go out of business and medical research in the united states will halt immediately.
The free market system doesn't work for healthcare, not even on paper. There are so many thousands of segments in healthcare it is impossible to have competition in each one.
Like I said, one company (one guy even) can stumble across the cure for one type of cancer. How do you expect another two companies to also stumble across that same cure and produce rival products? It's just the thinking of a fantasy land.