2019
Pfizer says it will price Covid treatment Paxlovid at nearly $1,400 for a five-day course, which researchers estimate only costs Pfizer $13 to produce. That's a 10,000%+ markup. Shameful. (mastodon.world)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 20 points 2 years ago (1 child)

Because they think government is inefficient by default, and a commercial business is motivated towards max efficiency to cut costs. Maybe all of this is true, but in capitalism companies also sell for the optimal price based on price elasticity. No competitors + essential live saving product = high prices.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    Actually in human societies, not just in capitalism.

    People talk about capitalism being bad as if only there people try to eat each other to become richer.

    If you read something about reasons the USSR wouldn't have more efficient centralized planning, while having necessary machinery and resources, or why it wouldn't have standardized something, while having the standardization apparatus and planned economy, or why all the Internet-like projects went nowhere in USSR while being much more ambitious due to, again, planned economy, or why despite less fragmentation scale wouldn't make things cheaper to produce in USSR, but the opposite, and so on - that's because every reform would mean someone losing influence, and that someone would naturally use that influence to resist reform.

    It's actually fascinating to read how some of those people really believed in Marxism and Communism, and were even very competent sometimes, but the general architecture made the whole thing less than just a sum of its parts. Really sad, though.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    I agree that the problems aren't just in Capitalism. However, the country with the unofficial historical tagline, "and then it got worse", may not be the best example. I think China is a really good example of influence peddling outside a free market.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    Well, China, when its ruling organization still had some consistent ideology, was a copy of Stalin's USSR, bigger and weaker, give or take. Only it started later.

    Its way off that track started with reforms like Kosygin's reforms, would those not be neutered.

    I'd say the reason in China this happened was exactly that it was bigger and weaker. It didn't quite have anything like Soviet industrial establishment, and it had the issues of poverty, hunger etc.

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