prolifeproliberty:

libertybill:

nightsarmament:

sadoeconomist:

surfcommiesmustdie:

When nearly 100 drugs became scarce between 2015 and 2016, their prices mysteriously increased more than twice as fast as their expected rate, an analysis recently published in the Annals of Internal Medicine
reveals. The price hikes were highest if the pharmaceutical companies
behind the drugs had little competition, the study also shows.

The authors—a group of researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and one at Harvard Medical School—can’t say for sure why
the prices increased just based off the market data. But they can take a
shot at possible explanations. The price hikes “may reflect
manufacturers’ opportunistic behavior during shortages, when the
imbalance between supply and demand increases willingness to pay,” they
conclude.

“There aren’t a lot of industries where if a manufacturer botches the
production of a product and is responsible for a reduction in supply
that they are able to profit from that… It is the federal government,
underinsured, and uninsured patients that are picking up the
tab,“ co-author William Shrank of the University of Pittsburgh noted in an interview with Bloomberg.

Their look into the connection between price increases and shortages
adds to a long-held observation among hospitals and analysts that such
shortages are costly. When a preferred drug is hard to come by, doctors
can turn to less-effective—potentially more-expensive—drugs, as well as
delay treatment or cut back on dosages. Together, with the hikes in
prices, those changes have led advocates to estimate that drug shortages
overall cost $230 million in additional healthcare costs each year.

To get a better handle on how the costs of drugs change under
shortages, Shrank and colleagues analyzed data on 617 drug formulations
for 90 different drugs that appeared on the Food and Drug
Administration’s drug shortage database between December 2015 and
December 2016. They then pulled pricing figures for those drugs from a
database of wholesale acquisition costs.

Overall, they found that the drug prices tended to increase by about
seven percent in the 11 months leading up to a shortage—but then
increased by 16 percent in the 11 months after a shortage. Moreover, the
size of that increase for individual drugs was linked to competition.
The scarce drugs that had three or fewer competitors collectively held
their price increase rates at about 12 percent before shortages. That rate leapt to 27 percent afterward.

On the flip side, drugs with plenty of competition (more than three
competitors) saw their rates increase by just 2.5 percent before a
shortage and a little under five percent afterward.

Modeling the pricing data, the researchers found that shortages
pushed pricing increase rates from an expected nine percent to 20
percent. For drugs with little competition, the rate increases from 17
percent to 30 percent.

To combat potentially exploitative hikes, the authors offer a recommendation:

If manufacturers are observed using shortages to increase
prices, public payers could set payment caps for drugs under shortage
and limit price increases to those predicted in the absence of a
shortage.

——————

The Law of Demand is literally day 1 stuff in any basic economics course

Imagine being a physicist and seeing a news article saying something like ‘scientific proof thin privilege exists! We applied the same amount of force to push two objects and the one with less mass accelerated more quickly, demonstrating that our oppressive society clearly has a long way to go toward fat acceptance’

Imagine if you read something like that every day

And at first you were like ‘this is a joke, right? Isaac Newton? F = ma? You guys are pulling my leg, right? Someone on your staff at your news organization has to understand basic high school physics, right?’

But they’re not pulling your leg, and in fact they get mad at you and tell you you’re a bad person who doesn’t care about other people if you try to explain it to them

That’s what being an economist is like

The first two paragraphs read like really blatant satire.

Holy shit not the onion

TAKE AN ECONOMICS CLASS PEOPLE

Look I even found a gif:

When supplies of drugs run low, drug prices mysteriously rise, data shows