Tuesday, April 2, 2019

Price discrimination Saves Lives!

Great post from Marginal Revolution on how drug companies enforce price discrimination against richer countries:

[Patient IDs] will be used to put an identifying barcode on the bottles they receive with their name and other info. Not only can the code be used to guarantee only residents of the country get the drugs…the provisions require that patients then return a bottle to get a new bottle and allows them to get only one bottle of their prescription at a time, even though allowing them to get multiple bottles could “ease the burden on patients and health providers,”

Although groups like Médecins Sans Frontières are outraged by these restrictions, what they don't realize is that the alternative is one world price, and it would be a lot closer to the $85,000 US price than to the $1,000 price in Egypt and India.  In other words, Price Discrimination Saves Lives!

No comments:

Post a Comment