What availability would those producers need to provide? Some quota of supplies? Low prices don't matter for much if there's a shortage, and there _will_ be a shortage of cheap emergency medicine if the companies that produce it can get away without spending too much on the unprofitable requirement. (and if it were profitable they'd do it anyway, without need for government requirement)
I worry that requiring a pharma company to provide supplies hurts anyone who wants to start up a new pharma company. It's easier to comply with government regulations once you're a big company and have many plants, but new companies have to be lean or else they'll never make it off the ground.
Society isn't some laboratory where you can run experiments to your heart's delight. Decisions have consequences. Harming the market for medical research is particularly insidious, as its costs are very real but hard to see: all of the people who will be worse off because the treatments they need are not invented.
Like, for example, the decision to increase the price of an Epipen to US$300 in the USA, whereas the same product in Australia costs AU$100
> Society isn't some laboratory where you can run experiments to your heart's delight.
In a way that's what policy and regulation are. Since we can't know the full consequences of policy and regulation until they're implemented and time passes. Sure, most policy and regulation aren't willy-nilly.
Trade-offs I guess. Regulate the sale of some emergency medicines so that those who need them now can afford them at the expense of, what exactly? It's not like regulating the sale of one medicine is going to break a pharmaceutical company?
Why do I feel like I'm trying to defend sensible pricing here? Are people really that allergic to the word regulation?
I worry that requiring a pharma company to provide supplies hurts anyone who wants to start up a new pharma company. It's easier to comply with government regulations once you're a big company and have many plants, but new companies have to be lean or else they'll never make it off the ground.