
76B opioid pills in 7 years. How pharma companies drowned US in drugs - SenHeng
https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/76-billion-opioid-pills-in-7-years-how-pharma-companies-drowned-us-in-drugs
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moksly
It’s a little unrelated to opioids, but increasing medicine prices is
currently undermining the public health systems of Scandinavia to the point
where we have to debate where to prioritise our funding. Do we really want to
spend millions of dollars on people who have 6 months to live if it means
children have to wait two years for knee surgery. Terrible, and that’s with a
national budget struggling after just a decade of out right immoral price
hikes.

I’m typically not a “to the guillotine” guy, but I can’t wait for the EU
regulations on big pharma.

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chillacy
Sounds a lot like the struggles people have with medical triaging. When
resources are limited sometimes you have to make a decision to remove care
from someone, and it’s tough. I don’t think there’s a way around it in today’s
world.

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moksly
There is a way around it. Big pharma is still just a bunch of companies.

We could make 4000% price hikes on things like insulin illegal. We could set
legal price limits on medicine. We could reform medicine patents. We could
open research. We could even nationalise medicine production. And so on. I’m
not suggesting that’s what we do by the way, that’s why I suggested EU
regulations. The EU bureaucracy is much, much more apt at finding the right
solutions than I am.

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harry8
No. Do all that. (Maybe). Still resources are limited. Still if you had
another $x billion you could save more lives. Still you have to weigh stuff
like the cost of a hip replacement saving pain for old people against a long
shot treatment for a terminally ill child. You can always do more. Someone has
to miss out. Who? Why?

There's no way around it.

There can't be.

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moksly
Except there was a way around it until medicine became so expensive that
nation states stopped being able to afford it.

There will always be a debate on priorities, but it’s gone from being about
how long certain things could wait, to, who doesn’t get treatment at all. The
triage example of earlier is excellent, because war time is a time of scarce
resources, and that’s the state we’re at. Not because the resources are
actually scares, but because an immoral industry got way too greedy.

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bjoli
Jeebus. I got oxycontin for a very bad cough coupled with pain from an
oldmlung surgery. That shit is dangerous. One pill (20mg?) And I was pain free
and half brain dead for half a day.

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vector_rotcev
Does anyone have a link to or a way to access the dataset? I couldn't see one
in the article.

