Nostr

It's because of patent law that healthcare is so expensive. Drug companies and medical equipment manufacturers use the state as a cudgel to strengthen their monopoly, exploit the vulnerable, and extract wealth.

Then people are convinced to make excuses for billion dollar corporations, oh no, they won't innovate, there won't be new drugs, how will they recoup costs?

And I'm here like, we can't just separate R&D from manufacture? Trade associations are a thing. The industry could pool resources to maximize value. It's not like demand for new drugs is going away.

Anyway. That's the kind of thing that runs though my head when I see drug advertisements. It's silly, this whole system is super silly. I feel like I'm taking supersillium.

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Discussion

fiatjaf 2y ago

You're the first person I see in my feed that is using wss://lightningrelay.com

Hunter ₿eaṩt 2y ago

I have too many relays x3

DRE 2y ago

Hospitals are incentivized to over prescribe treatment and/or inflate prices. Insurances companies have a limit in the profit margin they can make, so it’s more lucrative for them to pay for an expensive surgery than a preventative measure low cost measure. Not saying that this is what happens all the time, but the incentives are screwed up. The fact that you can’t call a hospital and get a straight answer on how much a procedure costs tells you everything. Crowdhealth is trying to fix this by changing the incentives, so that’s something to be optimistic about.

Hunter ₿eaṩt 2y ago

Crowdhealth is very cool. But they're standing up against one of those Keynesian, violence-fueled Beasts...

Aurelius 2y ago

The concept of a patent has mutated from one of compensation for the time and energy it took a man to create a thing, to the development of a legal monopoly that will enrich the owner for as long as possible.

Hunter ₿eaṩt 2y ago

💯

Though, arguably, patents were originally a way to expatriate tech from other countries so it can be built domestically. It was kind of like a form of open source, before that became an actual principled thing. People used to think kings were necessary too; sometimes societies just outgrow their power structures.