uspol, pharma (+?)
https://twitter.com/nyt_diff/status/1630936010669301761
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/01/business/insulin-price-cap-eli-lilly.html
Eli Lilly has announced that it will voluntarily cap the price of Humalog-brand insulin at $35/vial. It remains to be seen how serious they are.
uspol, pharma (-)
"Lilly trumpeted its decision as a victory for patients. In reality, though, Lilly’s moves are more limited than they initially appear. Lilly’s existing $35 cap on out-of-pocket payments will be easier for privately insured patients to take advantage of. But the policies announced Wednesday will not have much, if any, effect on what many people are actually paying.
And Lilly was already charging insurers only a fraction of its high list price when accounting for rebates and discounts.
David Ricks, Lilly’s chief executive, acknowledged in an interview on Wednesday that there was no guarantee that the company’s changes would result in insurers paying less for Humalog, though he said he expected that would happen.
In addition, the lower list prices, which will take effect over the course of this year, only apply to Lilly’s older insulin products.
'I don’t think that these prices are quite as impressive as they look when you first see them,' said Stacie Dusetzina, a professor of health policy at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. 'It doesn’t necessarily mean that Lilly is taking a big financial hit to do this.' "
uspol, pharma (-)
so yeah no lol
re: uspol, pharma (-)
@Felthry If I had to guess, I'd say that everyone needs food and water, and thus the prices of those things tend not to be as gouged. But for medicine, only relatively fewer people need any given one, and they need it much more urgently, and they can't rely on handouts from random kind people like for water (say), and by definition all such people are sick and possibly dying.
re: uspol, pharma (-)
@fox_news It might also partly be that medicine in general is a lot harder to make than food and shelter. so there are fewer people/companies making it, so fewer individuals need to be greedy in order to make it unaffordable
because if someone's trying to charge you $50 for an apple, even if there are a dozen people trying to charge you something in the range of $45 to $55 for apples... There's also the farmer's market down the street that sells apples for $0.50
but if someone tries to charge you $50 for one day's supply of insulin, well there's only a handful of places you can buy that and if they're all charging $45-$55 for it, you don't really have a choice
-F
re: uspol, pharma (-)
@Felthry ...Yes that's what I said.
re: uspol, pharma (-)
@fox_news I thought you were talking about fewer people needing it; i'm talking about fewer people providing it
-F
re: uspol, pharma (-)
@Felthry Yes, and they both follow pretty much immediately one from the other because of the background free-ish market.
re: uspol, pharma (-)
@fox_news sorry
we're bad at reading between the lines, and not formally trained in any sort of economics
-F
re: uspol, pharma (-)
@Felthry That's alright! I sometimes think a couple steps ahead and forget that not everyone does that innately, or has even basic knowledge of every field.
re: uspol, pharma (-)
@fox_news we have basic knowledge of a lot of things, and deep enough knowledge to think steps ahead in mathematics and electronics, but economics is not one where we have more than rudimentary knowledge
-F
re: uspol, pharma (-)
@fox_news i'm not sure what exactly makes it feel worse, or at least more immediate, than people profiting off of food and water and housing but it certainly does
-F