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It’s not new, sadly. The manufacturers prices always fluctuate. Thankfully we as patients don’t feel the direct knock on in our prescription costs. It’s one of the many benefits and challenges of the NHS.
We do though. Our NHS pays these extortionate fees and WE fund the NHS.
In many cases WE pay twice, we fund the NHS but can’t access the services on The NHS so are forced into the hands of the private vultures.
The whole thing is a giant shit show.
A prime example of personal recent experience. Wife needs a cortisone injection. NHS wait is months and months so advised by NHS to go private for speed. £500 an injection. Drug is available OVER THE COUNTER in Romania for £1.70.
Bought two vials. A saving of £998.30
I’ve always thought that the NHS is big enough as a group of organisations that manufacturing of generic drugs and other medical supplies should be done by a NHS owned and operated organisation. Not only could it steady the price fluctuations, they could be sold to other countries to offset the cost of care here.
Until the cut backs during the coalition government onwards the brand of the NHS has taken a massive beating, they should’ve made the most of the skill and knowledge of NHS staff to expand in to markets that are paid healthcare away from the UK.
A bit like how other counties put their public owned enterprises to work (such as the French and German utility companies)
Yes needles as well. Not sure if they will send to the UK but as I understand, it’s similar to buying some paracetamol over the counter.
Luckily people we know who live there can walk in and get it for us.
If things continue as they are in the UK, it wouldn’t surprise me if people started bringing medications to order from all over the world.
> If things continue as they are in the UK, it wouldn’t surprise me if people started bringing medications to order from all over the world.
Trans people are already resorting to this. Why wait 5 years for a heavily gatekept psychological assessment, in order to see if you'll be allowed to wait another 9 months to maybe be given the minimal hormone dose... when you could instead get it delivered by post from another country in a couple of weeks at minimal cost.
So of course, the tories are looking at blocking them from ordering it from other countries, not improving the nhs.
Not hating on trans, but it’s normal to have some checks and balances in place before such a big transformation surely. Of course 5 years is too long, but you can’t compare a life changing medication for antibiotics. I’d expect antibiotics that can save your life to be cheap and easy to access whilst hormones for a sex change to be more regulated to make sure each pacient actually understands the full effect and is also understood and listened to
Other countries get by fine on an informed consent model. Most trans people spend months or years exploring and understanding their gender before seeking medical treatment.
If a trans person can explain what it is they want to change, and can show they understand the effects of treatment, and they consent to it... What more is really needed? Why stop a grown adult from making a decision about their future. We don't gatekeep other big life decisions like marriage or children.
**Edit:** Also, with the number of trans people killing themselves while on the waiting list (and hrt is recognised as life saving medication) I think it's clearly better to give easy access without your checks and balances than to continue to try a gatekeeping model where people end up waiting multiple years.
> But there are also many cases of people regretting their change
Except there aren't. The number of cases of regret has been vastly blown out of proportion, and we have good evidence that of those who do detransition, the vast majority do so because their family/ social group aren't supportive not because they decided that they are not trans.
If you get as far as surgery, less than 1% of people getting surgery end up regretting it later. For comparison, *knee* replacement is at around 17% 'moderate or severe regret' with only 44% 'no regret', yet we don't see the same 'regret fear' for hip replacements...
I buy OTC meds when I visit home as well. UK needs to remove the stick from its butt regarding meds. If doctors don't intend on seeing patients then let us get what we need more easily. Obviously not talking about glugging morphine but you get my drift.
Boots are questionable about selling you them, I tried to buy some for a non-medical project and they gave me the 5th degree, then said no. Ebay however will sell you as many as you can afford.
I buy my injection needles and syringes on Amazon, saves the endless faff with getting gp to issue them.
I just get a script for the actual medication.
The big problem for those who wish to fully privatise the UKs health system is that most people in the UK could not afford it.
UK salaries are terrible in comparision to the USAs, certainly as regards 'middle-class' jobs. That isn't going to change any time soon.
The UKs middle-class are as dependent on the welfare state as 'the poor', just a different aspect of that welfare.
I’d the UK privatised healthcare, salaries would rise as the tax burden would plummet. We could abolish shit like employer-side NI for example, which drives wages down like crazy.
I probably isn’t worth it, but it’s not like for like
Theres nothing to suggest that employers would pass on the savings to employees. As always, it'll probably all just go to the shareholders who will now be paying even less tax on what they earn through it, resulting in even less money going healthcare.
Its why they push to get rid of the NHS so hard. Its why the party that represents people who own for their money want it too.
Contracts last for very fixed duration - I have to have antibody treatment\* for an immune system disorder, and in the 6 years I've been receiving this treatment I've had 4 different brands (Inflectra, Remsima, Zessly, Infliximab) dependant on which is cheapest, so the contracts seem to last 18months - 2 years.
\*Antibody treatment has been spectacularly effective - I can live a pretty normal life, but the cost to the NHS is of the order of £10k a year, just for the drugs (and it's one of the cheaper biologics). It boggles my mind that they'll spend that on me.
It's cheaper for the NHS to treat you so you can remain an active productive member of society as long as possible. The alternative would probably involve you slowly becoming a nursing case with frequent hospitalisations, which would cost the NHS a lot more than the 10,000 quid they're paying for your medication. It's a simple cost-benefit calculation.
I say that as someone who's legally disabled and getting around 1,000 Euros in pain meds per month so I can work full-time.
I too have had 3 of the four you mentioned (Inflectra, Remsima and Infliximab). I was on one brand, then they switched me to a bio similar as it was cheaper for the NHS to provide.
I've also for the past year been self injecting my infliximab as a trial every two weeks, which works out better than having hospital visits every 6 weeks for lengthy infusions, and my marker levels are better as they aren't dipping near the 5th week like they were before.
The brand of tablets I take daily are often switched around, and sometimes mixed when I get my prescription. I suppose it depends on what they have in stock. I also asked my GP to give me three monthly prescriptions at a time to save some money.
You've been moved onto different treatments because biosimilars have become available - the "original" formulation of infliximab (Remicade) was super expensive but when the exclusivity period (normally 8-10 years) expired generic versions (Remsima etc) became available which pushed the price right down.
If there are shortages, prices are allowed to fluctuate.
If prices go up, typically it isn't just in the UK.
Medication is just a product to these manufacturing companies. They will sell to whoever pays the most.
The NHS increases the amount it will pay to ensure the product can be supplied.
Quite often the NHS takes a month to put their prices up.
In that month if a pharmacy supplies the medication they will make a loss as they will have paid the new higher price to obtain the medication but the NHS reimburse at the old lower price.
Times like this you will find some pharmacies telling patients the medication is out of stock but in fact it isn't. They just can't afford to lose the money.
The difference can be immense, jumping from 30p to over £50 for a box of 28 tablets. I saw this happen with Temazepam a few years back.
As well as bringing new supply to the market. People hate it, I get that, but not interfering with the normal functioning of supply and demand has always proved to be far better than the alternatives.
Tell that to the people dying in the US because they can't afford life-saving medication like insulin.
The free market may be great for selling toys, but can fuck off when it comes to essentials to live.
>Tell that to the people dying in the US because they can't afford life-saving medication like insulin.
I think high prices did actually bring new supply to their market - some billionaire (Mark Cuban?) entered the market and undercut the existing companies.
"Supply and demand" is a kind of neoliberal myth. Frederic S. Lee had a useful chapter on some of this stuff in Post-Keynesian Economics. Volume 1: Theory and Origins (Oxford, 2013). His main points, drawn from empirical investigation of real world capitalist price systems were:
(1) externally administered prices make up over 70% of prices in modern market economies (and labour values capture about 91 per cent of the structure of observed market prices); for direct evidence for these percentages in, for example, the Eurozone, see Fabiani et al. 2006: 18, Table 4.
(2) prices are not primarily a mechanism for economic coordination in the neoclassical sense, but a method by which a business obtains and stabilises its income and profits (Lee 2013: 467–468). Administered prices are set long before the sale or exchange takes place and even before production (Lee 2013: 470), and overwhelmingly to hedge bets in a time of uncertainty. They are not the product of competitive bidding in a Walrasian auction-like market or a haggling process familiar from bazaars (Lee 2013: 474).
(3) Intense price competition is shunned by businesses because competition via flexible prices and price wars will drive many enterprises toward bankruptcy. Hence administered prices provide a way by which private businesses control and avoid the uncertainty attached to intense and destructive price competition (Lee 2013: 476).
(4) the most recent empirical evidence suggests that most modern businesses do not reduce their prices when factor input prices decrease or increase prices when demand increases. Instead, the business will increase its profit markup and maintain or increase prices – a factor that tends to re-enforce the rigidity of prices in modern market economies (Lee 2013: 475; Álvarez et al. 2006).
In other words, most prices aren't set by "supply and demand" and "voluntary, negotiating buyers and sellers".
Nice post, and thanks for sharing. In economics you'll always find some alternative view, no matter how absurd.
The idea of supply and demand being a myth would be laughed out of the room by the vast majority of economists. And, personally, as someone who has been a commodity market analyst for the last decade or so, I can assure this chap his views are categorically wrong (at the very least in commodity markets).
But he wrote a book and I cited it! And in the book he says he's right! So he must be!
Also lol at "the most recent empirical analysis [...] (2013) (2006)" how can you type that out without realizing you're just uncritically repeating someone else's take.
But anyway, I found a book on Modern Monetary Theory, and the chap who wrote the book says he's right, so I really don't know what all these central banks are thinking.
Haha. It's not much of an exaggeration to say that, in my experience, the people with the worst understanding of economics are economics students and academics who have read plenty of books but don't have even a day of real world experience of markets.
Yeah as somebody else has said here already, pharmacies most certainly can stockpile. I work as a dispenser and had to ring our suppliers the other day. Bloke on the other end of the line said yeah no sorry we have no problem with manufacturing but there's panic buying off of everyone in the area so there's no stock at the moment. I asked if there wasn't a limit in place to each individual pharmacy and he said no, not as of yet because it's too hard to actually differentiate between what is genuine use and what is panicking. All it takes is every local pharmacy, even those who have a couple of bottles of the shelves to order 10 bottles of one of the liquid antibiotics and then boom, supply gone before everyone actually gets some. You might be thinking well ten bottles that's excessive - but actually given there's usually two bottles to each childs dose then that's actually only securing supplies for 5 children.
If people only voted for a party that cared about paying healthcare staff, improving working conditions and protecting health research from industry maybe we wouldn’t be in this position.
That's the dumbest idea ever. Imagine the vast profits that would go directly into the public coffers for building infrastructure projects and social care, reducing the tax burden on the public. Total non-starter.
Pharmaceutical companies that make huge profits do so off of huge, huge investments, mostly on ideas that don't work. There would be no way to replicate that on a government scale in reality. The first failed project would get the whole thing canned.
Having the NHS make its own generics might work, but it wouldn't be some great profit making venture
That's basically the PR campaign. In reality the large pharmaceutical companies are parasites that profit from taking government sponsored research (mostly federal research in US universities, but some UK) and either cherry picking the promising stuff, or doing parallel research that's just *different enough* to capture patents.
The fact that they fund elections is IMO the only reason we (US/UK) favor their drugs over the very many cheaper alternatives most of Europe use without issue. Just look at the countries that were pushing the TTIP agreement through the EU.
You're describing the idea. Too much industry profit comes from overcharging for generics, and when international demand rises, we are vulnerable to price fluctuations. NHS manufacture of generics would not be to give us profits - it would be for the supply chain confidence
Making cheap generics nationally would be the ideal, and it would force pharmaceutical companies to work on the kind of economics you're describing - right now that is not actually the case
Pharmaceutical revenues are international, and the international overcharging of insulin is a massive source of revenue, despite it being 100 years beyond commercialisation and intended to be free
That's utter bullshit. Government grants pay for the VAST majority of biomedical research, the vast majority of which is conducted in research institutions like Universities and other RTOs. The IP outcomes are owned mostly by the private companies partnered in the grant. We pay for the research ourselves and private companies get to commercialise and profit off of it.
Where was the first COVID vaccine invented? Oxford University. Who paid for the research? Probably over 80% government grants, research councils etc.
Government grants pay for the vast majority of incredibly early stage biomedical research. They do not pay for a majority of biomedical research by any stretch of imagination.
From a macro level the process of drug/therapeutic discovery is unbelievably capital heavy and full of risk - hence why public research institutions take part in the cheapest/earliest area where the high chances of failure are an acceptable condition.
We pay for that early stage / blue-skies research because the investment is worth the end product (a better / healthier society) - not for monetary gain. IP outcomes are not typically owned by industry, you are incorrect there for the context of the UK. Our Universities can actually be quite aggressive in retaining IP rights - though that money goes to their estates as private institutions as opposed to public coffers (unless you count their usage of those funds to improve/expand facilities - I don’t tbh).
The AZ vaccine was indeed invented in Oxford - though all capital intensive processes were carried out by the industrial partners - if it were so easy to do it in house it would be done as such.
Its a convenient example for you to use because it was a massive success - but the whole process is a lot messier in reality:
https://www.pharmaceutical-technology.com/features/featurecounting-the-cost-of-failure-in-drug-development-5813046/
https://pharmanewsintel.com/features/combating-high-drug-development-costs-clinical-trial-challenges
1-2 bn per drug to get the rolling, and perhaps 5-10% actually make it through the entire process. And that is for both drug targets isolated / characterised in academia & industry. It would not be sensible or simple for the government to shoulder those costs/risks.
The current system is nowhere close to perfect, but OPs statement is just objective fact.
I don't think the goal is to make drugs from scratch, the goal is to issue a threat, either you sell us your product at a reasonable price, or we'll go China on your ass, copy it and make a generic version of it ourselves in-house.
I think if it's a choice between IP theft and letting people die for profit, the latter is by far the greater evil.
Why would it have to come up with anything new? Just make generic versions of [WHO essential medicines ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHO_Model_List_of_Essential_Medicines) and try to source the raw ingredients from more varied sources than one country.
The other guy had oven ready plans for fixing social care anyway. Why bother creating a national drug company to tackle a problem when we already have it covered?
I'd imagine it'd actually go the opposite way. People would be appalled when they found out how much is spent on research, often for drugs that are unsuccessful, and drugs for rare conditions would be shunned as a waste of taxpayer money, and instead we'd be funding things based on what elicits public sympathy. Any kind of investment would have people crying about a waste of money too so we'd see very little innovation.
It really is a fucking terrible idea.
There is a sort of a nationalised drug company. The NHS trust in torquey makes a specific vasoactive agent used in anaesthesia and critical care (they may make more stuff but only aware of this drug due to the area that I work). However, not many people are aware and due to the nature of the contract as a NHS trust, it cannot advertise any of its products.
Some NHS trusts makes up chemotherapy and sells them on to other trusts.
>"What's important is patients are still able to access antibiotics, which they are," a spokesperson said.
That wasn't what all the parents were being told at the pharmacy I was in the queue for yesterday, when they were all being turned away being told the pharmacy had no stock.
Lovely, I currently have three children with Scarlett fever, it was a struggle to get the antibiotics because there is an outbreak in our school... I'm so glad other families will continue to struggle to obtain meds while people profit from the suffering of our children.... Truly horrible...
Slight caveat, this is supply and demand capitalism, it didn't used to be this way, it used import more in hopes of selling more.
Still though capitalism needs to die off and something else brought in because it's seems to be killing the human race from every angle it can
Who would have thought that a system that demands constant growth in a world of finite resources would be completely unsustainable?
I get your point, this isn't the capitalism of 40 years ago, but it's an evolution.
> this is supply and demand capitalism, it didn't used to be this way
Capitalism has always worked like this. How do you think that all the wealth got into so few hands.
They interviewed a chemist yesterday on the Jeremy Vine show. The price of the med has gone up from £1 per dose to £12 ! He gets £1.80 per dose from the NHS despite the rise.
Chemists get similar prices from the NHS for prescriptions of paracetamol and ibuprofen and purchase those meds for pennies.
Chemists are not short a few Bob.
Actually not true. Take paracetamol 500mg tablets for example, in this month's drug tariff pharmacies get reimbursed £2.31 for a pack of 100, currently the cheapest we can get it at our wholesalers is £2.31 and if that one goes out of stock, then the next cheapest is closer to £3. The pharmacy gets a nominal fee of £1.27 per item on top of the drug reimbursement so that's neither here nor there but the likes of amoxicillin will really affect the independents, getting paid £2.06 for a bottle of amoxicillin 250mg/5ml sugar free plus that £1.27 dispensing fee but paying out £18 per bottle.
In England in particular, pharmacies have been subject to cuts for years and it's going to cause pharmacies to close.
Supply and demand is a fundamental law. It exists in communism too, the only difference being that communist economics works against it (to negative results such as shortages) while capitalism works with it.
It cannot possibly be deliberate. Businesses predict demand spikes all the time. They spike production in order to meet it. You make a lot more money by selling stuff than by running out of stuff to sell.
The market price is where the supply and demand intersect.
Demand for medication is not exactly elastic, but the supply side it.
Increasing the price is how the market satisfies the demand.
(The alternatives would be shortages, or government planning.)
Increasing price is not the only economic solution.
A better solution would be to hold prices, ramp production, and profit from the increased sales.
Price gouging is lazy and unethical.
> hold prices, ramp production
That is not how a market works, and it is not how production works, either. There is a growing opportunity cost that is reflected in the supply curve.
But the issue with this is that the increase in prices doesn't do anything to affect demand when people need a specific medicine. Its not like you can just buy a cheaper alternative or go without. Its just getting quick and easy profits and the only ones that suffer are the ones that need the medicine.
I'm aware, which is why I only spoke about the production end of things. And that's not strictly true that there aren't alternatives available, Amoxicillin is a broad-range penicillin antibiotic, and there are multiple penicillins available, or beta-lactam antibiotics which may be suitable.
>A better solution would be to hold prices, ramp production, and profit from the increased sales.
That's not a solution. It wouldn't solve today's problem as it takes a while to expand supply, and wouldn't make economic sense as demand will almost certainly revert to normal next year.
You still pay the same as you would for any other drug because the NHS subsidizes it.
Market conditions always exist, we’re just lucky that we live in a country that insulated the most vulnerable from them (for now…)
My son has scarlet fever. We went to the doctors yesterday and he was unable to prescribe the “right” antibiotic as it is not available (in Leeds, so not a small place). He prescribed another antibiotic and advised that of the 6 pharmacies within walking distance of where I live, only one had any stock, and that “stock” was three bottles only.
It doesn't matter if they were 1p or £20,000 each there's none left. I work in a pharmacy and have been trying to order any antibiotic for 4 days. The suppliers are out.
Also please stop shouting at the pharmacy team about it. There's nothing we can do.
My kid has strep. I went to the local pharmacy two days ago and while they said they were out of tests due to demand, they were able to prescribe antibiotics anyway and they were like £10.
They're generic drugs, usually very cheap, and the prices increases are driven by temporary very high demand. You can check the historical prices here:
[https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/drugs-and-pharmaceutical-electronic-market-information-emit](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/drugs-and-pharmaceutical-electronic-market-information-emit)
Amoxicillin oral suspension cost hardly anything from Jan - June earlier this year. An increase in price limits the likelihood of shortages. If the price was kept the same they'd be totally out. It's temporary and will resolve quickly
Why is no one ever asking where this sudden strep A emergency came from? Why is it suddenly a few dozen children are dead in a matter of weeks from the same disease?
This is the first winter we've had with zero covid restrictions and people finally mixing properly again. For kids especially thats 2 years of immunity to be built up that they've missed. I know a lot of people that have been completely knocked out by illness this autumn/winter and its not really surprising.
There’s some speculation (note: unconfirmed afaik) that previous COVID infections might be making the impact of subsequent illnesses worse for people. There is apparently research into whether it can damage the immune system for example.
Note all the qualifiers above: I’m certainly not claiming to know and the sensible bet is to wait for the research to be published.
More kids died from it in 2018 though.
https://www.nationalworld.com/health/strep-a-how-many-cases-of-scarlet-fever-and-igas-have-there-been-in-2022-compared-to-2018-outbreak-3945727
More kids died of it in 2018, I’ve no idea why it’s become such a big story.
Source: https://www.nationalworld.com/health/strep-a-how-many-cases-of-scarlet-fever-and-igas-have-there-been-in-2022-compared-to-2018-outbreak-3945727
As an aside, I currently have strep throat/tonsillitis. Thankfully had no problem getting antibiotics for it.
That’s just morally wrong. I can’t cope with that, it’s disgusting. Actually stomach churning. Profiting off desperate parents fear stricken for their poorly children. Media has done an excellent job scaremongering yet again.
Reddit learns that supply and demand applies to health care, pharmaceutical companies divert resources away from more profitable drugs to meet demand so naturally we can expect price rises. Its better than the alternative of just running out
This is about a generic drug - amoxicillin, it's usually very cheap for pharmacies to buy (like less than £1) but the rise in demand has caused low stocks so the prices have increased. Its a pretty messed up situation really, amoxicillin is a fairly widely prescribed antibiotic.
Jesus, pretty sure S. pyogenes doesn’t only cause strep throat. Also, pretty sure amoxicillin doesn’t only kill S. pyogenes, it’s a broad-spectrum antibiotic so treats a huge array of infections, no fookin’ need for it to be that expensive.
Yet again outsourcing everything comes back to bite us in the arse. The raw materials are sourced from China.
China itself is experiencing a shortage of ibuprofen and paracetamol at the moment and most of the world sources the raw materials from there. Expect shortages of those next.
These are all WHO essential medicines. They very much should be some produced domestically.
Its happening in the US. Some of these drugs are only produced in China these days. Due to the supply shortages and national security risks of being dependent on China, there has been an effort to start domestic production of some important drugs.
https://www.fiercepharma.com/manufacturing/reopening-penicillin-plant-tennessee-jackson-healthcare-relieves-u-s-dependence-china
They don't. But the pharmacies do. If the price is above the tariff price the pharmacies lose money giving it out (happen from time to time) if the price is too high it can be really damaging. The tariff price is usually altered monthly so when prices spike unpredictably the tariff price can be too slow to react. Then obviously if the price is high for a long time the NHS is paying more - and in this case for such a widely used medicine it could have quite a bad effect on health service finances.
The system is working as intended, and it's no bad thing.
The more profitable it is, the more companies will work to produce the required drugs, the more the required drugs will be available so fewer kids die.
Remember when people used to know how evil pharmaceutical companies were, but then somehow the pandemic caused the narrative to say they were heroes and paradigms of good. Funny how little it takes to fool people.
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This is depressing. Profiting off people's suffering. I hate how British healthcare is slowly going the same way as US healthcare.
It’s not new, sadly. The manufacturers prices always fluctuate. Thankfully we as patients don’t feel the direct knock on in our prescription costs. It’s one of the many benefits and challenges of the NHS.
We do though. Our NHS pays these extortionate fees and WE fund the NHS. In many cases WE pay twice, we fund the NHS but can’t access the services on The NHS so are forced into the hands of the private vultures. The whole thing is a giant shit show. A prime example of personal recent experience. Wife needs a cortisone injection. NHS wait is months and months so advised by NHS to go private for speed. £500 an injection. Drug is available OVER THE COUNTER in Romania for £1.70. Bought two vials. A saving of £998.30
versed sink pie market fear screw brave divide fade amusing -- mass edited with redact.dev
When they started pulling away from self production of medicine this was what was warned. It was called alarmism.
Have you tried to buy amoxicillin lately? Hope you don't have to because no one has it
I’ve always thought that the NHS is big enough as a group of organisations that manufacturing of generic drugs and other medical supplies should be done by a NHS owned and operated organisation. Not only could it steady the price fluctuations, they could be sold to other countries to offset the cost of care here. Until the cut backs during the coalition government onwards the brand of the NHS has taken a massive beating, they should’ve made the most of the skill and knowledge of NHS staff to expand in to markets that are paid healthcare away from the UK. A bit like how other counties put their public owned enterprises to work (such as the French and German utility companies)
Can you buy the injection needles along with the drug and have them posted to the UK? Aren't they controlled?
Yes needles as well. Not sure if they will send to the UK but as I understand, it’s similar to buying some paracetamol over the counter. Luckily people we know who live there can walk in and get it for us. If things continue as they are in the UK, it wouldn’t surprise me if people started bringing medications to order from all over the world.
> If things continue as they are in the UK, it wouldn’t surprise me if people started bringing medications to order from all over the world. Trans people are already resorting to this. Why wait 5 years for a heavily gatekept psychological assessment, in order to see if you'll be allowed to wait another 9 months to maybe be given the minimal hormone dose... when you could instead get it delivered by post from another country in a couple of weeks at minimal cost. So of course, the tories are looking at blocking them from ordering it from other countries, not improving the nhs.
Not hating on trans, but it’s normal to have some checks and balances in place before such a big transformation surely. Of course 5 years is too long, but you can’t compare a life changing medication for antibiotics. I’d expect antibiotics that can save your life to be cheap and easy to access whilst hormones for a sex change to be more regulated to make sure each pacient actually understands the full effect and is also understood and listened to
Other countries get by fine on an informed consent model. Most trans people spend months or years exploring and understanding their gender before seeking medical treatment. If a trans person can explain what it is they want to change, and can show they understand the effects of treatment, and they consent to it... What more is really needed? Why stop a grown adult from making a decision about their future. We don't gatekeep other big life decisions like marriage or children. **Edit:** Also, with the number of trans people killing themselves while on the waiting list (and hrt is recognised as life saving medication) I think it's clearly better to give easy access without your checks and balances than to continue to try a gatekeeping model where people end up waiting multiple years.
Absolutely valid points, not disputing what you said. But there are also many cases of people regretting their change, thus the need for checks.
> But there are also many cases of people regretting their change Except there aren't. The number of cases of regret has been vastly blown out of proportion, and we have good evidence that of those who do detransition, the vast majority do so because their family/ social group aren't supportive not because they decided that they are not trans. If you get as far as surgery, less than 1% of people getting surgery end up regretting it later. For comparison, *knee* replacement is at around 17% 'moderate or severe regret' with only 44% 'no regret', yet we don't see the same 'regret fear' for hip replacements...
I buy OTC meds when I visit home as well. UK needs to remove the stick from its butt regarding meds. If doctors don't intend on seeing patients then let us get what we need more easily. Obviously not talking about glugging morphine but you get my drift.
Or take a 3 day trip to wherever to get/do these things, kind of like the Poland dental industry.
Do you know where and how to inject…?
Are your friends buying otc for you or are you ordering online and getting posted? Or just the needles they are getting?
Friends buying everything OTC
Needles are freely available and not restricted in an capacity in the UK
Aren't certain kinds of medical grade needles restricted on who can purchase them?
You can just go to the pharmacy or local needle exchange and ask for them.
Boots are questionable about selling you them, I tried to buy some for a non-medical project and they gave me the 5th degree, then said no. Ebay however will sell you as many as you can afford.
I buy my injection needles and syringes on Amazon, saves the endless faff with getting gp to issue them. I just get a script for the actual medication.
Im not sure if they’re controlled but even if they were I wouldn’t worry about that. Just order it anyway.
Hypodermic needles and syringes are cheap and easy to get in bulk and 100% legal to buy
Or you can just get them for free from the pharmacy.
It's not "my" NHS. It it was things would change.
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There is talk of legislation for the manufacturers, which I’d certainly support, to mitigate against it.
The big problem for those who wish to fully privatise the UKs health system is that most people in the UK could not afford it. UK salaries are terrible in comparision to the USAs, certainly as regards 'middle-class' jobs. That isn't going to change any time soon. The UKs middle-class are as dependent on the welfare state as 'the poor', just a different aspect of that welfare.
I’d the UK privatised healthcare, salaries would rise as the tax burden would plummet. We could abolish shit like employer-side NI for example, which drives wages down like crazy. I probably isn’t worth it, but it’s not like for like
Theres nothing to suggest that employers would pass on the savings to employees. As always, it'll probably all just go to the shareholders who will now be paying even less tax on what they earn through it, resulting in even less money going healthcare. Its why they push to get rid of the NHS so hard. Its why the party that represents people who own for their money want it too.
I always thought the NHS agreed a fixed price throughout the duration of the contract.
Contracts last for very fixed duration - I have to have antibody treatment\* for an immune system disorder, and in the 6 years I've been receiving this treatment I've had 4 different brands (Inflectra, Remsima, Zessly, Infliximab) dependant on which is cheapest, so the contracts seem to last 18months - 2 years. \*Antibody treatment has been spectacularly effective - I can live a pretty normal life, but the cost to the NHS is of the order of £10k a year, just for the drugs (and it's one of the cheaper biologics). It boggles my mind that they'll spend that on me.
It's cheaper for the NHS to treat you so you can remain an active productive member of society as long as possible. The alternative would probably involve you slowly becoming a nursing case with frequent hospitalisations, which would cost the NHS a lot more than the 10,000 quid they're paying for your medication. It's a simple cost-benefit calculation. I say that as someone who's legally disabled and getting around 1,000 Euros in pain meds per month so I can work full-time.
£10k is nothing. I've had one drug, one dose - that was £11k... (and that's still nothing.)
There are treatments now into the millions, and its well worth it. They're weaving miracles with medicine, and it's amazing.
I too have had 3 of the four you mentioned (Inflectra, Remsima and Infliximab). I was on one brand, then they switched me to a bio similar as it was cheaper for the NHS to provide. I've also for the past year been self injecting my infliximab as a trial every two weeks, which works out better than having hospital visits every 6 weeks for lengthy infusions, and my marker levels are better as they aren't dipping near the 5th week like they were before. The brand of tablets I take daily are often switched around, and sometimes mixed when I get my prescription. I suppose it depends on what they have in stock. I also asked my GP to give me three monthly prescriptions at a time to save some money.
You've been moved onto different treatments because biosimilars have become available - the "original" formulation of infliximab (Remicade) was super expensive but when the exclusivity period (normally 8-10 years) expired generic versions (Remsima etc) became available which pushed the price right down.
You're worth it. According to your mum
If there are shortages, prices are allowed to fluctuate. If prices go up, typically it isn't just in the UK. Medication is just a product to these manufacturing companies. They will sell to whoever pays the most. The NHS increases the amount it will pay to ensure the product can be supplied. Quite often the NHS takes a month to put their prices up. In that month if a pharmacy supplies the medication they will make a loss as they will have paid the new higher price to obtain the medication but the NHS reimburse at the old lower price. Times like this you will find some pharmacies telling patients the medication is out of stock but in fact it isn't. They just can't afford to lose the money. The difference can be immense, jumping from 30p to over £50 for a box of 28 tablets. I saw this happen with Temazepam a few years back.
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Everything that reddit should be: [lemmy.world](https://lemmy.world/)
As well as bringing new supply to the market. People hate it, I get that, but not interfering with the normal functioning of supply and demand has always proved to be far better than the alternatives.
Tell that to the people dying in the US because they can't afford life-saving medication like insulin. The free market may be great for selling toys, but can fuck off when it comes to essentials to live.
>Tell that to the people dying in the US because they can't afford life-saving medication like insulin. I think high prices did actually bring new supply to their market - some billionaire (Mark Cuban?) entered the market and undercut the existing companies.
That’s more a marker of the health service over there in general. Everything in healthcare is extortionate over there. Including most medications.
Yes it is, because they leave their healthcare to the "invisible hand of the free market".
"Supply and demand" is a kind of neoliberal myth. Frederic S. Lee had a useful chapter on some of this stuff in Post-Keynesian Economics. Volume 1: Theory and Origins (Oxford, 2013). His main points, drawn from empirical investigation of real world capitalist price systems were: (1) externally administered prices make up over 70% of prices in modern market economies (and labour values capture about 91 per cent of the structure of observed market prices); for direct evidence for these percentages in, for example, the Eurozone, see Fabiani et al. 2006: 18, Table 4. (2) prices are not primarily a mechanism for economic coordination in the neoclassical sense, but a method by which a business obtains and stabilises its income and profits (Lee 2013: 467–468). Administered prices are set long before the sale or exchange takes place and even before production (Lee 2013: 470), and overwhelmingly to hedge bets in a time of uncertainty. They are not the product of competitive bidding in a Walrasian auction-like market or a haggling process familiar from bazaars (Lee 2013: 474). (3) Intense price competition is shunned by businesses because competition via flexible prices and price wars will drive many enterprises toward bankruptcy. Hence administered prices provide a way by which private businesses control and avoid the uncertainty attached to intense and destructive price competition (Lee 2013: 476). (4) the most recent empirical evidence suggests that most modern businesses do not reduce their prices when factor input prices decrease or increase prices when demand increases. Instead, the business will increase its profit markup and maintain or increase prices – a factor that tends to re-enforce the rigidity of prices in modern market economies (Lee 2013: 475; Álvarez et al. 2006). In other words, most prices aren't set by "supply and demand" and "voluntary, negotiating buyers and sellers".
Nice post, and thanks for sharing. In economics you'll always find some alternative view, no matter how absurd. The idea of supply and demand being a myth would be laughed out of the room by the vast majority of economists. And, personally, as someone who has been a commodity market analyst for the last decade or so, I can assure this chap his views are categorically wrong (at the very least in commodity markets).
But he wrote a book and I cited it! And in the book he says he's right! So he must be! Also lol at "the most recent empirical analysis [...] (2013) (2006)" how can you type that out without realizing you're just uncritically repeating someone else's take. But anyway, I found a book on Modern Monetary Theory, and the chap who wrote the book says he's right, so I really don't know what all these central banks are thinking.
Haha. It's not much of an exaggeration to say that, in my experience, the people with the worst understanding of economics are economics students and academics who have read plenty of books but don't have even a day of real world experience of markets.
But you can't buy antibiotics in the UK. So nobody can stockpile what they can't purchase. It's prescription only.
Everything that reddit should be: [lemmy.world](https://lemmy.world/)
Yeah as somebody else has said here already, pharmacies most certainly can stockpile. I work as a dispenser and had to ring our suppliers the other day. Bloke on the other end of the line said yeah no sorry we have no problem with manufacturing but there's panic buying off of everyone in the area so there's no stock at the moment. I asked if there wasn't a limit in place to each individual pharmacy and he said no, not as of yet because it's too hard to actually differentiate between what is genuine use and what is panicking. All it takes is every local pharmacy, even those who have a couple of bottles of the shelves to order 10 bottles of one of the liquid antibiotics and then boom, supply gone before everyone actually gets some. You might be thinking well ten bottles that's excessive - but actually given there's usually two bottles to each childs dose then that's actually only securing supplies for 5 children.
Slowly? Seems pretty rapid post brexit.
It's a lie ffs -you don't pay for your antibiotics and amoxil used to treat strep A is cheaper than buying a coffee from Starbucks.
If people only voted for a party that cared about paying healthcare staff, improving working conditions and protecting health research from industry maybe we wouldn’t be in this position.
Has to be EU’s fault, has to be!
>children are dying quick this is a great opportunity to price gouge! Truly grim…
That's capitalism for ya.
Yep it pretty much ruins everything... Seems like we may need a change....
well people keep voting for it
Dumb people like hurting themselves - look at Brexit as an example
its really sad. The issue is the people vote for capitalism. this is capitalism at work. demand up, price up to compensate
Capitalism doesn't give businesses a moral incentive, only a profit one unfortunately
Someone proposed a nationalised drug company at last election. Can't remember who.
That's the dumbest idea ever. Imagine the vast profits that would go directly into the public coffers for building infrastructure projects and social care, reducing the tax burden on the public. Total non-starter.
Pharmaceutical companies that make huge profits do so off of huge, huge investments, mostly on ideas that don't work. There would be no way to replicate that on a government scale in reality. The first failed project would get the whole thing canned. Having the NHS make its own generics might work, but it wouldn't be some great profit making venture
That's basically the PR campaign. In reality the large pharmaceutical companies are parasites that profit from taking government sponsored research (mostly federal research in US universities, but some UK) and either cherry picking the promising stuff, or doing parallel research that's just *different enough* to capture patents. The fact that they fund elections is IMO the only reason we (US/UK) favor their drugs over the very many cheaper alternatives most of Europe use without issue. Just look at the countries that were pushing the TTIP agreement through the EU.
Painful reading takes like this when working in the area.
Apparently benefitting from open research is parasitism now?
I think the best way forward would be to take an Indian approach to letting companies make a generic version without infringing local copyright.
You're describing the idea. Too much industry profit comes from overcharging for generics, and when international demand rises, we are vulnerable to price fluctuations. NHS manufacture of generics would not be to give us profits - it would be for the supply chain confidence Making cheap generics nationally would be the ideal, and it would force pharmaceutical companies to work on the kind of economics you're describing - right now that is not actually the case Pharmaceutical revenues are international, and the international overcharging of insulin is a massive source of revenue, despite it being 100 years beyond commercialisation and intended to be free
That's utter bullshit. Government grants pay for the VAST majority of biomedical research, the vast majority of which is conducted in research institutions like Universities and other RTOs. The IP outcomes are owned mostly by the private companies partnered in the grant. We pay for the research ourselves and private companies get to commercialise and profit off of it. Where was the first COVID vaccine invented? Oxford University. Who paid for the research? Probably over 80% government grants, research councils etc.
Government grants pay for the vast majority of incredibly early stage biomedical research. They do not pay for a majority of biomedical research by any stretch of imagination. From a macro level the process of drug/therapeutic discovery is unbelievably capital heavy and full of risk - hence why public research institutions take part in the cheapest/earliest area where the high chances of failure are an acceptable condition. We pay for that early stage / blue-skies research because the investment is worth the end product (a better / healthier society) - not for monetary gain. IP outcomes are not typically owned by industry, you are incorrect there for the context of the UK. Our Universities can actually be quite aggressive in retaining IP rights - though that money goes to their estates as private institutions as opposed to public coffers (unless you count their usage of those funds to improve/expand facilities - I don’t tbh). The AZ vaccine was indeed invented in Oxford - though all capital intensive processes were carried out by the industrial partners - if it were so easy to do it in house it would be done as such. Its a convenient example for you to use because it was a massive success - but the whole process is a lot messier in reality: https://www.pharmaceutical-technology.com/features/featurecounting-the-cost-of-failure-in-drug-development-5813046/ https://pharmanewsintel.com/features/combating-high-drug-development-costs-clinical-trial-challenges 1-2 bn per drug to get the rolling, and perhaps 5-10% actually make it through the entire process. And that is for both drug targets isolated / characterised in academia & industry. It would not be sensible or simple for the government to shoulder those costs/risks. The current system is nowhere close to perfect, but OPs statement is just objective fact.
I don't think the goal is to make drugs from scratch, the goal is to issue a threat, either you sell us your product at a reasonable price, or we'll go China on your ass, copy it and make a generic version of it ourselves in-house. I think if it's a choice between IP theft and letting people die for profit, the latter is by far the greater evil.
Why would it have to come up with anything new? Just make generic versions of [WHO essential medicines ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHO_Model_List_of_Essential_Medicines) and try to source the raw ingredients from more varied sources than one country.
The other guy had oven ready plans for fixing social care anyway. Why bother creating a national drug company to tackle a problem when we already have it covered?
Maybe he was thinking about crematories?
Oven ready care homes. "Vote Tory to keep you old folks warm for the rest of their life"
I'd imagine it'd actually go the opposite way. People would be appalled when they found out how much is spent on research, often for drugs that are unsuccessful, and drugs for rare conditions would be shunned as a waste of taxpayer money, and instead we'd be funding things based on what elicits public sympathy. Any kind of investment would have people crying about a waste of money too so we'd see very little innovation. It really is a fucking terrible idea.
There is a sort of a nationalised drug company. The NHS trust in torquey makes a specific vasoactive agent used in anaesthesia and critical care (they may make more stuff but only aware of this drug due to the area that I work). However, not many people are aware and due to the nature of the contract as a NHS trust, it cannot advertise any of its products. Some NHS trusts makes up chemotherapy and sells them on to other trusts.
Nationalized industry in the UK is of course famous for its creative track record and global competitiveness
Satan?
Worse than Satan a man who said “I want a world of peace. I’m not interested in bombs. I’m not interested in wars. I’m interested in peace.” *Shudder*
Vile. Glad the good guys won in the end.
They always do, with a little help from those sweethearts at the media. Its good to have friends
Sounds like a tool. Who'd vote for that idea?
Oh the tories for sure. The idea of people being taken advantage of by private companies wouldn't be acceptable to them........
To manufacture medicines?
Lord Buckethead might have actually said this
>"What's important is patients are still able to access antibiotics, which they are," a spokesperson said. That wasn't what all the parents were being told at the pharmacy I was in the queue for yesterday, when they were all being turned away being told the pharmacy had no stock.
Access is American healthcare speak. Access doesn't mean obtain, it means you have the opportunity to be price gouged.
Aren't antibiotics prescription only, why would so many be queuing up
Every single one was there to collect a prescription for the antibiotics from their GP.
https://comenzi.farmaciatei.ro/medicamente-cu-reteta/medicamente/amoxicilina-atb-500-mg-10-capsule-antibiotice-sa-p315899
Lovely, I currently have three children with Scarlett fever, it was a struggle to get the antibiotics because there is an outbreak in our school... I'm so glad other families will continue to struggle to obtain meds while people profit from the suffering of our children.... Truly horrible...
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This is capitalism functioning as designed. If you don't like this you don't like capitalism.
Slight caveat, this is supply and demand capitalism, it didn't used to be this way, it used import more in hopes of selling more. Still though capitalism needs to die off and something else brought in because it's seems to be killing the human race from every angle it can
Who would have thought that a system that demands constant growth in a world of finite resources would be completely unsustainable? I get your point, this isn't the capitalism of 40 years ago, but it's an evolution.
> this is supply and demand capitalism, it didn't used to be this way Capitalism has always worked like this. How do you think that all the wealth got into so few hands.
Oh no not liking capitalism, a decision worse than death itself
Prices should be controlled. How can you hike prices Nat a time like this? Greed
Tories
They interviewed a chemist yesterday on the Jeremy Vine show. The price of the med has gone up from £1 per dose to £12 ! He gets £1.80 per dose from the NHS despite the rise.
No wonder they don’t have stock…
Chemists get similar prices from the NHS for prescriptions of paracetamol and ibuprofen and purchase those meds for pennies. Chemists are not short a few Bob.
Actually not true. Take paracetamol 500mg tablets for example, in this month's drug tariff pharmacies get reimbursed £2.31 for a pack of 100, currently the cheapest we can get it at our wholesalers is £2.31 and if that one goes out of stock, then the next cheapest is closer to £3. The pharmacy gets a nominal fee of £1.27 per item on top of the drug reimbursement so that's neither here nor there but the likes of amoxicillin will really affect the independents, getting paid £2.06 for a bottle of amoxicillin 250mg/5ml sugar free plus that £1.27 dispensing fee but paying out £18 per bottle. In England in particular, pharmacies have been subject to cuts for years and it's going to cause pharmacies to close.
Cool so if nurses and doctors are also in demand, it's time to pay them more. If that's what we're doing....
The problem is that nurses and doctors do not operate in a free market.
Standard supply and demand Capitalism at its finest
Supply and demand is a fundamental law. It exists in communism too, the only difference being that communist economics works against it (to negative results such as shortages) while capitalism works with it.
Gotta wonder if the shortage was deliberate? They would have known 2 winters of kids not mixing would mean lowered natural immunity.
It cannot possibly be deliberate. Businesses predict demand spikes all the time. They spike production in order to meet it. You make a lot more money by selling stuff than by running out of stuff to sell.
The market price is where the supply and demand intersect. Demand for medication is not exactly elastic, but the supply side it. Increasing the price is how the market satisfies the demand. (The alternatives would be shortages, or government planning.)
Increasing price is not the only economic solution. A better solution would be to hold prices, ramp production, and profit from the increased sales. Price gouging is lazy and unethical.
> hold prices, ramp production That is not how a market works, and it is not how production works, either. There is a growing opportunity cost that is reflected in the supply curve.
The market works in whichever way it is regulated to work.
Ramping production isn't easy as that, and can sometimes cost significant amounts and take enough time that the demand no longer exists.
But the issue with this is that the increase in prices doesn't do anything to affect demand when people need a specific medicine. Its not like you can just buy a cheaper alternative or go without. Its just getting quick and easy profits and the only ones that suffer are the ones that need the medicine.
I'm aware, which is why I only spoke about the production end of things. And that's not strictly true that there aren't alternatives available, Amoxicillin is a broad-range penicillin antibiotic, and there are multiple penicillins available, or beta-lactam antibiotics which may be suitable.
>A better solution would be to hold prices, ramp production, and profit from the increased sales. That's not a solution. It wouldn't solve today's problem as it takes a while to expand supply, and wouldn't make economic sense as demand will almost certainly revert to normal next year.
Increasing prices is not a solution that benefits anyone other than pharmaceutical company shareholders.
It takes time to increase production, meanwhile children are dying because of shortages.
People don't matter. The environment doesn't matter. Animals don't matter. Profit is King.
You still pay the same as you would for any other drug because the NHS subsidizes it. Market conditions always exist, we’re just lucky that we live in a country that insulated the most vulnerable from them (for now…)
My son has scarlet fever. We went to the doctors yesterday and he was unable to prescribe the “right” antibiotic as it is not available (in Leeds, so not a small place). He prescribed another antibiotic and advised that of the 6 pharmacies within walking distance of where I live, only one had any stock, and that “stock” was three bottles only.
Oh that’s right, everyone voted tory didn’t they. I remember now
Doesn’t matter who you vote for, all parties prioritise big corp over their own people sadly.
Not that the PM or people in charge will notice, they all have private care.
Why are some humans so fucking shitty to eachother?
It doesn't matter if they were 1p or £20,000 each there's none left. I work in a pharmacy and have been trying to order any antibiotic for 4 days. The suppliers are out. Also please stop shouting at the pharmacy team about it. There's nothing we can do.
My kid has strep. I went to the local pharmacy two days ago and while they said they were out of tests due to demand, they were able to prescribe antibiotics anyway and they were like £10.
They're generic drugs, usually very cheap, and the prices increases are driven by temporary very high demand. You can check the historical prices here: [https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/drugs-and-pharmaceutical-electronic-market-information-emit](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/drugs-and-pharmaceutical-electronic-market-information-emit) Amoxicillin oral suspension cost hardly anything from Jan - June earlier this year. An increase in price limits the likelihood of shortages. If the price was kept the same they'd be totally out. It's temporary and will resolve quickly
The headline ‘prices hiked up to take advantage of demand’ shows little understanding of economics.
Why is no one ever asking where this sudden strep A emergency came from? Why is it suddenly a few dozen children are dead in a matter of weeks from the same disease?
This is the first winter we've had with zero covid restrictions and people finally mixing properly again. For kids especially thats 2 years of immunity to be built up that they've missed. I know a lot of people that have been completely knocked out by illness this autumn/winter and its not really surprising.
There’s some speculation (note: unconfirmed afaik) that previous COVID infections might be making the impact of subsequent illnesses worse for people. There is apparently research into whether it can damage the immune system for example. Note all the qualifiers above: I’m certainly not claiming to know and the sensible bet is to wait for the research to be published.
More kids died from it in 2018 though. https://www.nationalworld.com/health/strep-a-how-many-cases-of-scarlet-fever-and-igas-have-there-been-in-2022-compared-to-2018-outbreak-3945727
More kids died of it in 2018, I’ve no idea why it’s become such a big story. Source: https://www.nationalworld.com/health/strep-a-how-many-cases-of-scarlet-fever-and-igas-have-there-been-in-2022-compared-to-2018-outbreak-3945727 As an aside, I currently have strep throat/tonsillitis. Thankfully had no problem getting antibiotics for it.
Why the fuck are companies allowed to do this. Surely by now there should be a way to block companies from doing this.
That’s just morally wrong. I can’t cope with that, it’s disgusting. Actually stomach churning. Profiting off desperate parents fear stricken for their poorly children. Media has done an excellent job scaremongering yet again.
Reddit learns that supply and demand applies to health care, pharmaceutical companies divert resources away from more profitable drugs to meet demand so naturally we can expect price rises. Its better than the alternative of just running out
Strip them of their patents and buy generics. Its time to bring the pharma companies to heel.
This is about a generic drug - amoxicillin, it's usually very cheap for pharmacies to buy (like less than £1) but the rise in demand has caused low stocks so the prices have increased. Its a pretty messed up situation really, amoxicillin is a fairly widely prescribed antibiotic.
Jesus, pretty sure S. pyogenes doesn’t only cause strep throat. Also, pretty sure amoxicillin doesn’t only kill S. pyogenes, it’s a broad-spectrum antibiotic so treats a huge array of infections, no fookin’ need for it to be that expensive.
Yet again outsourcing everything comes back to bite us in the arse. The raw materials are sourced from China. China itself is experiencing a shortage of ibuprofen and paracetamol at the moment and most of the world sources the raw materials from there. Expect shortages of those next. These are all WHO essential medicines. They very much should be some produced domestically.
Its happening in the US. Some of these drugs are only produced in China these days. Due to the supply shortages and national security risks of being dependent on China, there has been an effort to start domestic production of some important drugs. https://www.fiercepharma.com/manufacturing/reopening-penicillin-plant-tennessee-jackson-healthcare-relieves-u-s-dependence-china
The UK is becoming more indistinguishable from the US with each passing day
Colour me shocked! Pharma owners are evil and should be treated as such. :)
I understand that it's supply and demand but it's just playing with peoples' lives at this point.
So another profiteering adventure again, this is disgraceful. People get sick equals people make money by jacking prices to the moon
Lol when did you last pay for your antibiotics in the UK?
They don't. But the pharmacies do. If the price is above the tariff price the pharmacies lose money giving it out (happen from time to time) if the price is too high it can be really damaging. The tariff price is usually altered monthly so when prices spike unpredictably the tariff price can be too slow to react. Then obviously if the price is high for a long time the NHS is paying more - and in this case for such a widely used medicine it could have quite a bad effect on health service finances.
Aren't there laws to prevent and punish price gouging?
didn't martin shkreli do this but he went to prison, sure the tories will aswell...
He didn't go to prison for that, it was for securities fraud.
The system is working as intended, and it's no bad thing. The more profitable it is, the more companies will work to produce the required drugs, the more the required drugs will be available so fewer kids die.
Is that why oil prices are high? Because oil companies saw how profitable it was and maximised production?
No, it's why you can get oil products at all. Why do you think companies invest so much money in oil infrastructure? They're not charities.
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Remember when people used to know how evil pharmaceutical companies were, but then somehow the pandemic caused the narrative to say they were heroes and paradigms of good. Funny how little it takes to fool people.
Supply and demand is just a fact of life. The real travesty is the lockdowns which caused this lack of immunity in the first place.
Have cases reached double figures yet? When it gets to 100 we need a lockdown.