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submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (22 children)

The problem is that the biggest "winners" in this case are almost exclusively the people willing to go the furthest to put profits ahead of people, which in a better system would never be incentivized.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 year ago (13 children)

That leads to a beauty of capitalism though. People prioritize profit, yes, but with competition, the way to make a profit is to be appealing to people. You make a profit by providing the best good or service at the best price. This means that the people who have the goal of profits also have the goal of pleasing their customers.

There's a quote from somewhere that goes something like this "capitalism takes the most ambitious, selfish, and capable people and forces them to stay up at night thinking about what everyone else wants".

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (10 children)

We have seem over and over again that companies will eventually become greedy and will kill all competition. One example Standard Oil , they will eventually not serve the customers as you mentioned. The customers will have to pay really high prices for lower quality service or product. I am not a lot into socialism because we come back to the same that one entity is controlling everything and we have seem also that the government sucks. So maybe a hybrid approach will be nice to try.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Insulin prices in the US is a great example of this. It's not about being competitive, it's about charging the absolute highest amount they can possibly get away with.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Insulin prices would be a lot lower if more people were allowed to produce and sell it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

It's not a question of not being allowed to produce it, it's anti-competitive practices by the pharmaceuticals industry, which capitalism rewards.

Specifically, drug manufacturers have repeatedly made lots of little changes to their existing insulin products in order to apply for new patents on them. This process, called “evergreening,” has discouraged competitors from developing new versions of existing insulins because they’d have to chase so many changes. This has slowed down innovation, along with “pay for delay” deals, in which insulin manufacturers pay competitors to not copy specific drugs for a period of time.

Source

Even though there are very few insulin products that have patent protection on the compound itself, the vast majority of insulin products still have patent protection on the pens and other devices that deliver the dose of insulin. Novo Nordisk has patents for Novolog, Novolin, and FIASP products; Sanofi has patents on the devices for all of its products; and Eli Lilly still has patents on some devices that deliver Humulin and Humalog.

The patent protection on the devices is significant. Because the pens and other insulin delivery devices can only be used on with one brand of insulin, competition on those products is effectively delayed. While a prospective competitor could develop a follow-on biologic or biosimilar of the insulin, it would have to develop its own delivery device.