President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

Generic insulin would be relatively cheap to produce. ... IF there was a free market for it. It's downright Owellian to look at the high price of insulin and make it about a "free market" failure. The FDA threw up "biosmilarity" barriers to entry that gave government-created oligopoly to three companies, despite the fact that insulin itself is not patented and would be relatively cheap to produce in a competitive marketplace. ... if anyone was allowed to produce it without having to pay a prohibitive amount of money to the FDA first and navigate an overly complex regulatory environment that keeps everyone else out. As if that hasn't been enough though, the Medicaid drug rebate program and Obamacare tried to price fixed the cost, which further keeps any potential competition out of the marketplace, and it has created the opposite effect of the BS they promised people when they destroyed the market for it.

It's the least free marketplace for anything imaginable. It's a complicated mess of government regulation and huge government programs that have taken over a marketplace. ... and we have what we have because of it.

FWIW, California isn't going to really bring down the price of insulin as long as that environment exists. It's just going to run up debt (or force others to pay for) subsidizing the cost for people.

I always find it absurd, though, when the marketplace for something gets swallowed up by regulators and huge, populist government programs that were going to magically make everything free but required destroying the market for the thing the government took over ... then, the predictable happens ... and people like you try to make it into a free market failure. It's absurd.