That’s not the issue here. The issue is this: There is a general rule that government should not get involved in any kind of financial enterprise that competes with private enterprise.
Maybe the state can get around that by decreeing this to be a public health policy.
Is that general rule in the Sherman Act? (I’m genuinely curious about this point.)
What kind of “general rule” is this? Statutory? Constitutional? American Way?
And yet the government has been giving away free vaccines for nearly two years and everyone is just OK with it.
“General rule” in the sense that this is a common policy at various government levels, although this consists of a “mish-mash” of specific non-compete rules and regulations (for example, the prisons commonly have rules about what work prisoners can do, to avoid competing with private industries).
I googled “government not compete with private enterprise”, and there are a bunch of cites discussing how government does, or does not, or should, or should not, compete with private industry, along with all kinds of counter-examples of ways that it commonly does.
But in any case, it is commonly contentious, and when California gets into the insulin business, there will be disputes over it.
Here is one cite I found from stackexchange in which several useful-looking answers are given, some of them including cites to various legal cases:
Note, though, this is a different situation: The government isn’t in the business of manufacturing its own vaccines. Rather, the gov’t buys vaccines from private manufacturers which it then gives away.
Insulin is not Rx except in Indiana. But for insurance to pay you need to get Rx from a Dr.
The clown that raised the price of the Epipen ended up in prison.
~VOW
Up here at the Canadian border, I often hear of people driving into BC for insulin and other prescription drugs. Now I’m wondering if A) insulin is a prescription medicine in Canada; and B) how much does it cost there over-the-counter? What about test strips and other diabetes medication? What about other medications?
This morning I felt like that ‘Aliens!’ guy. I wondered if pharmaceutical corporations and insurance corporations are in collusion. Insurance companies need customers. To get customers, drugs have to be exorbitantly expensive. So drug makers charge more for their products so they make gobs of money, and patients have little choice but to buy health insurance.
Here’s an article about it:
Canada has always been good with insulin (despite Wall Street plutocrats offering key researchers dump trucks full of cash):
Canadians without any coverage report spending up to $15,000 annually in out-of-pocket costs. The Canadian Diabetes Association found that 57% of Canadians are not fully complying with their treatment plan because of high costs.
Wow. I keep hearing that people go to Canada for cheap drugs, but after reading that I’m wondering if they’re saving anything.
At which point my schadenfreude prompted to toast the occasion. I hope the bastard winds up horribly allergic to his favorite food and when he finds out there’s no epi-pen available.
I don’t know enough about it to comment further. That was the article I found while googling.
But not for screwing consumers. For screwing Wall Street.
Which tells you where the real crime lies.
