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this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2023
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You are doing exactly the thing the person you are replying to is calling someone out for, so if anything you are underlining the point. Pharmaceuticals is a vast industry, and the matter they work with is not homogenous.
You cannot infer from the cost of insulin to inhabitants of uncivilized western countries what the actual cost of providing a still in-development medicine will be. More specifically, you cannot expand from being ripped off in one country for one medicine and the myopic view that provides to pharmaceuticals as a whole.
As a counterpoint in your case, I pay nothing for my insulin, as its included the base medical insurance everyone has to have. As are a vast amount of other pharmaceuticals.
I gave an example of a treatment style pharmaceutical that has been used consistently to boost corporate profits rather than serve the greater good. Would you like to talk about the cost of epipens next? How about the opioid industry?
A pill that treats solid tumours would be an enormous boon to humanity. You're letting really tired cynicism get in the way of basic logic. This argument would mean that insulin wasn't a breakthrough, because it didn't cure diabetes.
For profit pharmaceuticals is indeed a huge issue, but it's one that is entirely separate from whether or not a given medical treatment is good or not.
grumble grumble Look at this big pharma scheme that allows people to live longer! grrrr I'd rather die from cancer than let big pharma take my hard-earned dollars!
Are you saying insulin has not served the greater good? This whole "treatments are a conspiracy to enrich corporate profits" BS is crazy. That it can happen, and sometimes does happen, does not mean it always happens or never happens.
The world is complicated. Simplified "pharma bad" arguments are pure fantasy.
Not only that, it's also important to consider just how vast pharmaceuticals as a branch of industry and research and medicine is, overall.
Sure, some exec at the top might be a money-grubbing arsehole who couldn't care any less if 8 billion people died so long as they made 2% more profits.
But there's a giant apparatus of often very serious and very altruistic researchers, doctors, nurses, workers and helpers underneath that, too. Lots of bad apples, lots of shining examples. Just like, well, any other industry.
And sure, one can easily argue "but you're playing with people's lives here, it's not okay for it to be like this". And of course I agree. But it's utopian to think we can fix this with reductive, as you say, "pharma bad"-arguments. And it's not like the transport industry, the power industry, the the military-industrial complex (intentionally) or the tourism industry don't habiutally play with people's lives. We just tend to not notice it as directly.
And sure, I get that for americans in particular this is a sore topic of particular import because they're so vulnerable to exploitation due to a lack of social support structure and regulated and standardized insurances.
But anything can be reduced to a simple "is bad" if we want it to. It's important to not think in such simplistic us-vs-them terms, otherwise nothing can ever be improved.