freebee@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Not the reason. Lots of distrust in Europe too, where you can buy a box of paracetamol for just a few euro.
Places where it’s sold over off the shelf in supermarkets it costs pennies.
It’s also now harder to buy good vinegar in smaller supermarkets. They’ve replaced most of their options with cider vinegar, due to idiots falling for the drink cider vinegar for your health joke.
Yup. Whenever medicine is brought to you by the truly free market, it’s not expensive at all.
You can get inserts for shoes, reading glasses, recently hearing aids (props to Biden for deregulating that), knee braces, vitamin supplements, basic painkillers, anti-inflammatories, anti-allergy stuff, stool softeners, eye drops, prebiotics, probiotics, marijuana, mushroom extracts, sunblock, gauze, adhesive bandages, antibiotic ointments, etc for quite cheap.
All of those things are free market goods.
Things that should be cheap but are priced very expensively are the things that you can’t just buy, but by law require a doctor’s consent along with your own: insulin, psych meds, serious painkillers, vision-correcting lenses, hearing aids until the recent deregulation (again awesome work Biden), x-ray imaging, oral antibiotics, anticoagulants, blood thinners, pulmonary surfactants, etc.
Everything on both of those lists are dirt cheap to produce. But acquiring the first list — the free market ones — is actually cheap for consumers. Acquiring the second list — the ones that cannot be exchanged on the free market — is ridiculously expensive to consumers.
Capitalism is not the problem.
Free market medicine is perfectly fine in the USA. It’s the highly centrally- controlled aspects of medicine in which prices are skyrocketing.
Paracetamol, which we call acetaminophen or the brand name Tylenol in the US, is still quite inexpensive.
If it were a prescription-only drug it might still be cheap in generic form, but getting the prescription would cost well over $100
Tinks@lemmy.world 6 months ago
You can do that in the US too, but if they give it to you in a hospital the line item charge is much higher.