This is not a coherent position. By this logic, every single person who is _not_ making insulin (people like you and me) are also guilty of committing mass murder.
There's clearly something very, very, very broken here, but unwinding the tremendous weight of bureaucracy and regulations that prevent an interested investor in setting up shop making insulin on the cheap is the root of the issue. The regulations need not even be a negative; I don't have a reason to believe that recombinant engineered bacteria produced insulin is really that easy, and the regulations may be all that's keeping a tide of ineffective or harmful varieties of insulin from flooding the market.
“This is not a coherent position. By this logic, every single person who is _not_ making insulin (people like you and me) are also guilty of committing mass murder.”
This is ridiculous. Pharma companies, unlike you and me, have the ability/equipment/expertise to manufacture insulin. Many people need insulin to survive. These companies could make insulin for relatively cheap and still be massively profitable, but they choose not to, and people suffer because many people who need insulin can’t afford the artificially high prices.
Acting like this price-gouging is caused by anything other than corporate greed is naive and misleading.
What about the pharma companies that do not produce insulin (like GSK or TEVA). They have all the necessary expertise, ability, and equipment to manufacture insulin. Many people need insulin to survive. These companies could make insulin for relatively cheap and still be massively profitable, but they choose not to, and people suffer because many people who need insulin can't but it from them.
Of course it's corporate greed -- even if they sold insulin for relatively cheap and were massively profitable, they would only bother to produce it because of corporate greed.
No one is talking about the other companies. Here is a hot take: companies which are currently selling insulin are ripping people off. People are suffering as a result.
Whether or not other companies could conceivably produce insulin is irrelevant. The parent commenter and I are talking about the current producers’ shitty behavior. If someone falls out of a tree because I easily could have but chose not to grab them, that is wrong. Other people could have possibly helped and didn’t, but that doesn’t make my shitty behavior any less shitty.
I glad we can agree on the impact of corporate greed, though.
>This is not a coherent position. By this logic, every single person who is _not_ making insulin (people like you and me) are also guilty of committing mass murder.
I don't think that is a particularly coherent position on my position.
The way that I read what you wrote was that "charging too much for insulin is morally equivalent to murder". How much do you charge for insulin? Would they be less culpable if they stopped producing insulin completely? If another company (say GSK or TEVA) has the technical ability to produce insulin, but doesn't, are they murderers?
For many diabetics, insulin is about as vital as water. If I have somehow ended up with an effective monopoly on water, would it be murder to price out all the poor? Would it be murder to stop all access to water? Am I allowed to point to other people and say, well they are not producing water? Or am I morally culpable for my own actions, regardless of the actions of others?
There's clearly something very, very, very broken here, but unwinding the tremendous weight of bureaucracy and regulations that prevent an interested investor in setting up shop making insulin on the cheap is the root of the issue. The regulations need not even be a negative; I don't have a reason to believe that recombinant engineered bacteria produced insulin is really that easy, and the regulations may be all that's keeping a tide of ineffective or harmful varieties of insulin from flooding the market.