“Most drugs should be over the counter or at least available without a prescription.”
That’s one of my pet peeves. When I was about 30 years old I started bodybuilding. I wanted to take steroids. I was an adult, and informed. I also trained with a medical doctor who used steroids. But to get them involved dealing with, well, drug dealers, and that was beyond my level of acceptable behavior. As a mentally competent adult, who’s business is it if I want to walk into a drug store and buy steroids, or anti-bacterial eye drops, or just about any other medication? It’s all about control and profit.
That’s exactly what it is
I’m just on a tear about this today because I walked out of a drugstore yesterday with a new medicine my doc put me on that was $1613/month. I have pretty much Cadillac insurance through my work so it was $0 for me, but if my self employed neighbor with two kids needed it he’d have to pay $1613 which might as well be a million because he couldn’t afford it. His options would be to drive to Mexico and buy it for $260 (no prescription required), get a telehealth doctor to prescribe it to a Canadian pharmacy & get it shipped to him for $300, get it in the EU for $85, Dubai for about the same, or India for about $10 (just guessing on that one). We’re in the most advanced nation on the planet and half our citizens effectively don’t have access to drugs that the average person in some third world chithole can easily obtain.
Of course if he was one of the democrats protected voting class that has never had a job and procreates for a living it would be free for him. He’s just an average working American so it’s unobtainable to him unless he jumps through his ass to get it. Somebody will pipe in and say “but it’s subsidized, do you want that in the US?”. It’s more like price controlled, not subsidized, the governments are limiting the amount they can charge but they’re not subsidizing it. They’re still making a profit at $85, just not the profit they’d make selling it at $1613. Letting the free market work should always be the default choice but we DO NOT have a free market in pharmaceuticals and health care. Between insurance companies setting pricing and government regulations restricting access and guaranteeing monopolies to pharmaceutical companies who contribute more to Congress than any other industry, we have the illusion of a free market where there is none. Big insurance, pharmaceuticals, and government are bleeding us dry and they punish guys like my neighbor for not toeing the line & being part of the collective.