Feelings

Feelings have no place in a public-policy debate, and those who attempt to use such argument must be brought up on public fraud charges and imprisoned.
Yeah, I know, I’ll get hate mail for that statement — because it’s true.
Let’s just start with my recent post on Trump’s administration and birth control. The usual response to my argument is that “well, what do you with women who need the $200 pills instead of the $10 ones“?
My answer is simple: There are more options for birth control than pills, and it is precisely the obscuring of the price that allows someone to charge 20 times the going rate for a product that does the same thing.
In other words absent the “feelings” arguments there would be statistically zero $200/mo birth control pills sold because almost-nobody would pay that much money. Those who had some legitimate medical reason to not use the $10 or $20 options would choose some other form of birth control (e.g. Depo, an IUD, being involved only with a man who has had a vasectomy on a monogamous basis, etc.) The few who insisted on paying the $200 would be free to do so, but the lack of customers would cause the price to go down. In fact I suspect the cost of making such $200 pills is not much more than the cost of making the $10 ones, and it is precisely that they are patented that prevents someone else from copying them at 1/20th the price. That, in turn, means the only control on price is transparency and a market system where people pay out of their pocket what they think something is worth when examined against all the other alternatives.
Likewise, absent the “feelings” argument there would be no $500,000 cancer treatments either. This, however, doesn’t mean the treatment would not exist — only that the price wouldn’t. Cancer patients would have to take the various treatment options and their published and verified effectiveness ratings along with price into account and choose. Those who tried to gouge wouldn’t get away with it because there’s no market for that. Those who had a superior and more-expensive product would get away with it if individual cancer sufferers deemed the price to worth it. Again, patents make possible restrictions on duplication but a patent can’t force you to buy. If people have to write an actual check and can’t force someone else to pay then the cost:benefit analysis becomes both exposed and judged by the person most-impacted by the decision — the one with the cancer!

This post was published at Market-Ticker on 2017-10-08.