Precription Drugs and its Market Inequality:

Yes, I am going to post another entry tonight, mostly because I really do not want to write my essay for my biology class. Anyways, I want to briefly tackle one a particularly grave market inequality. Often when discussing prescription drugs, proponents of the status quo will give you an argument that runs along these lines, "The drugs that people want and will cure their lives will be the ones that drug companies spend their time creating, thus leading to a perfect market equilibrium where cures for AIDS and cancer are demanded and tirelessly worked on to create a supply."

As nice as that sounds, considering how complex meddling with health care always is, it is just wrong. Think about it for a second, what have been the largest advances in prescription drugs over the past five years? Although AIDS, pain, and heart medication have had very impressive advancements, we have also seen dozens of medications that battle depression, social stress, and everyone's favorite: erectile-dysfunction. Now I do not intend to demean the importance that all of these drugs have in people's lives, because all have greatly improved the living of thousands if not millions. But their success is beside the point, because it points to where prescription drug companies invest their money. They invest it in drugs that will make money. Even though malaria kills millions every year, the market for such a cure would be limited to sub-Saharan Africa and other tropical areas, areas that all share one thing: poverty.

Luckily for much of Africa, its other terrible affliction, AIDS, has also hit the United States, because if not, would drug companies care all that much? I suspect that they would not and I would not expect them to. I am not here to derided drug companies that are doing what the market tells them to do. Rather I think this is something that the world community should be looking at much more closely than it seems to be. Some type of market mechanism ought to be created which would create incentives for curing terrible yet unprofitable diseases. Especially considering the economic cost in production suffered every year from the destruction that AIDS and malaria have on Africa.

Unfortunately I do not have a solution, but hopefully those bitches who claim market perfection in the creation of prescription drugs will cram it.

-Mr. Alec