“There’s this wild disconnect between what people are experiencing and what economists are experiencing,” says Nikki Cimino, a recruiter in Denver.
“There’s this wild disconnect between what people are experiencing and what economists are experiencing,” says Nikki Cimino, a recruiter in Denver.
The last half-century of economic trends supports my expectations, actually. Treatments have been getting cheaper as technology advances. New treatments tend to be expensive, yes. But then as they become older they too get cheaper.
Insulin was discovered over 100 years ago and it took policy, not improvements in manufacturing, to lower the price (which only happened last year).
In America, they don’t get cheaper because it got easier to make.
That’s not true. Originally insulin had to be isolated from animal pancreases, a costly procedure. The first handful of humans to be treated with it were literally the children of wealthy politicians, a congressman and the secretary of state. They were the only ones who could get access to it. It’s now produced in industrial quantities using recombinant bacteria to synthesize it. It’s routine.
I’m speaking about large-scale trends here. Obviously the prices of things have their localized ups and downs when you look at them on the scale of a few years. But I’m not expecting to need elder care for quite a few decades yet.
Here’s the first picture I found on Google for the search “insulin prices worldwide”