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Tainted Pills Hit US Mainland
Tech.Luver notes an AP story on tainted pills that have arrived in the US from — not China this time — Puerto Rico. The article details a disturbing number of incidents of contamination investigated by the FDA over the last few years. "The first warning sign came when a sharp-eyed worker sorting pills noticed that the odd blue flecks dotting the finished drug capsules matched the paint on the factory doors. After the flecks were spotted again on the capsules, a blood-pressure medication called Diltiazem, the plant began placing covers over drugs in carts in its manufacturing areas. But the factory owner, Canadian drug maker Biovail Corp., never tried to find out whether past shipments of the drug were contaminated — or prevent future contamination, according to US regulators... FDA officials say the problems in Puerto Rico are proportionate with the large number of pharmaceutical plants here and generally no worse than those on the US mainland."
More like Bioveil...
So you know, considering that most paint today is safe enough to use as a food coloring, in sunscreen or even toothpaste, I would prefer my elderly grandma consume the paint flecks accidentally with her medication instead of not being able to afford the medication.
So where's the story here? These paint flecks kill somebody? You want the FDA to get anal retentive on your medications, fine. Just realize those expensive drugs are going to get a little more expensive and sick people who are poor might not be able to afford them anymore.
Honestly I've heard of worse things being found in food than this.
My work here is dung.
Not our little territory!
Ask anyone in the pharmaceutical industry - there's no money in actually curing people.
A little paint never hurt anyone! When I was a child, paint was considered a delicacy! It was like getting a piece of plasterboard with a prize!
Check out Erie, PAs one and only industrial metal band: DisgraceD
We need to get the drug's manufacturing back into countries that can control their QA; USA, EU, Canada, Australia, japan, etc. This is absolutely insane.
Other interesting point is that the FDA chooses not to fine companies/enforce regulations because of the cost of responding to legal challenges from the manufacturers. What excatly is the point of having oversight and inspections, then? Basically, the FDA must have crystal-clear evidence of plant-to-market malefeasance before they can do anything.
I guess the pharma industry has gotten their money's worth with their campaign contributions. A hamstrung FDA on a shoestring budget means strong profits for big pharma.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Certainly, we should beware of iffy medication imported from abroad. But are the approved domestic drugs and treatments that safe? Have a look at these statistics: http://www.wnho.net/deathbymedicine.htm. Close to a million deaths in the US, each year.
Does that mean Mezaitlid has to go back to the 5th dimension?
(Kltpzyxm!! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mister_Mxyzptlk)
GMP or in this case the lack thereof. Where was their QA in all of this?
Blue is my favorite flavor of paint chips. Need to score me some of these drugs. Seriously though, I think this is ridiculous. I mean, sure, a little paint is probably not going to hurt anyone, but if paint chips are mixing in with the drugs, you have to wonder what else might fall in there (i.e. rodent droppings, etc.). It amazes me that the FDA is tolerant of operations that just leave bins full of drugs open out on the manufacturing floor.
Another problem has been pills that have low (or nill) active ingredient concentration. Some of these are generics - others are just flat-out counterfeit.
A particular problem is thyroid hormone - which even normally has significant variation of activity between brands. Fine tuning of the concentration during is necessary to prevent serious ill effects (including permanent brain damage or death). So substituting a pill with a different strength can be a serious hazard. (That is why endocrinologists prescribing it will normally specify the brand or manufacturer and "do not substitute".)
Unfortunately, both generics with virtually no active ingredient and actual counterfeit pills with no active ingredient at all have been making their way into insurance company pharmacy plans from foreign manufacturers. (Recently a doctor studying this had the experience of cutting a pill in half and finding that it was fake. The real manufacturer's product had an internal layer that was missing in the counterfeit.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The company was Canadian! And don't forget that Puerto Rico doesn't want to become a full member of the United States. THEY keep voting down becoming a STATE! They like all the money, but none of the responsibility...that spells Third World to me!
Got to love the rash of problems that are coming home from offshoring!
Better check your credit rating too since large numbers of people have had their identities stolen in Indian, Philippine, etc call centers.
Enjoy your New World Disorder suckers!
I've been seeing tainted foreign pills for years. If you're lucky you just get a bunk roll or a speed bomb, but this one blue Chanel I had was bad news and I don't think it was paint chips.
Pretty much all generic drugs are sold without a crazy profit margin, since there's a competitive free market in the manufacture of generics.
For brand name drugs, good business sense would dictate that they set the profit margin wherever it nets them the highest total profit - too high and not enough people will buy it, too low and they don't make as much as they could per pill, but if they get it just right they make the most money. Apparently there is enough demand for some of these drugs in the current system to make that "optimum" price level pretty high.
I think the important question to ask is "what system for developing and distributing drugs could maximize innovation and at the same time maximize everyone's access to these products?"
It's probably not the current system, and a lot of different factors are involved here - the nature of corporate-university relationships, current FDA regulations for testing (some of which are neither efficient nor safe), advertising, the influence of the corporate drive for profit on the actions of pharma companies, and the nature of the insurance industry.
Good luck getting all of that straightened out in our lifetimes...
My truck is like a series of tubes.
1. You take the blue pill and the story ends.
2. You take the red pill and you stay in Wonderland, and see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
3. You take the blue speckled pill and develop serious health issues.
and is not part of the United States of America (neither are Navassa Island, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Baker Island, Guam, Howland Island, Jarvis Island, Johnston Atoll, Kingman Reef, Midway Atoll, the Northern Mariana Islands or Wake Atoll). It is a commonwealth, and a US insular area.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
I, for one, would be more than a little disturbed if I thought I was getting the blue pill, but was in fact getting the red pill.
Simple solution:
First offense: The company has its patent for this specific drug revoked. Second offense: ALL drug patents of the company will be voided.
Make an example of the first one or two corporations that feel like testing the waters concerning this and see how now one else will be stupid enough to pull this off again.
Some preemptive refutals:
"The corporations have a right/obligation to turn a profit for their inventions": No, in this case they don't. The manufacturing company is clearly and maliciously not holding up their side of the contract, so why should the society need to?
"Drug corporations will simply not sell their drugs anymore in this country": If you make a good enough case, Europe and Japan will follow suit and react in the same way, since it will lower their healthcare costs. China is still too small a market for expensive medicamentation, so where will the drug corps sell their expensive products then, if they boycott North America, Europe and Japan?
Besides, when I was a young'un, the plasterboard would have been the prize. We had to make our own drywall from gypsum lumps and the paper we made by chewing up wasps nests and spitting out the eggs, larvae, and wasps to make pulp.
Right.
I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of dry poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down at the mill, and when we got home, our dad would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah!
You can't tell the young people of today that. They won't believe you.
The first warning sign came when a sharp-eyed worker snorting pills...
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
Keep my pills away from your taint!
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maintenance
I begin to wonder reading all these stories.
In the long run it is actually cheaper to do maintenance.
You want the FDA to get anal retentive on your medications, fine.
Is that where these little pills are coming from?
Just realize those expensive drugs are going to get a little more expensive and sick people who are poor might not be able to afford them anymore.
And since pharma companies spend twice as much on advertising as they do on research, it would mean fewer TV commercials to inform "guys like me, with eeee-deee", about the latest penis pills available. I'll have to turn off my spam filters to save my marriage!
Honestly I've heard of worse things being found in food than this.
When I was in fourth grade eating lunch in the cafeteria one day I saw a kid blow his nose into another kid's sandwich when he wasn't looking. Ever since then I've been eating dog kibble and saving $$$.
Mmmm'kay!
health issues aren't ruled by supply and demand, especially on brand name drugs since the supplier can artifically restrict the supply without fear of competition. it's not like someone dieing has any choice (what price do you put on life?) and drug companies exploit this.
capitalism is a decent system. but it's not an answer to everything, and one of those things is health care.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I thought it said a sharp-eyed worker snorting pills...
I agree. Many things should be considered a utility more then a market. Gas, Home heating oil, electricity, Public water, Medication and so on. There should be no or little market force on them outside the costs to deliver the products.
Utility seems to be a generic term I like to use. But I like to use it because it is the one thing in a capitalist society that people don't mind regulating the profit margins of. We should be including Gas to some extent and medication into those groups. Medication for the reasons you mention, and Gasoline because public transportation in the US sucks donkey balls. People depend on driving to get to and from work. It may be because of bad decisions in the past as far as locating housing and so on but that it no reason to penalize the people of the present and future who are dependent on it today.
does this affect viagra?
Now I am sad.
Remember too that "cheap generic drugs" is a euphemism for "expensive namebrand drugs whose patent has expired".
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
"Another problem has been pills that have low (or nill) active ingredient concentration."
Yep, they're called 'homeopathic remedies'. Seen a couple of ads on tv, one was at least a full minute long, pimping homeopathic crap. Very disturbing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWE1tH93G9U
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
FDA officials say the problems in Puerto Rico are proportionate with the large number of pharmaceutical plants here and generally no worse than those on the US mainland.
Wow, I'm sure glad there isn't any more paint in our meds here on the US mainland than Puerto Rico.
Remind me why the US pharmaceutical industry told us we were paying more for the same meds in this country? Something about safety...
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
By that "logic" Washington, DC is not part of the United States of America either as it too isn't a state. Much like Puerto Rico, it doesn't have the full rights of a state (neither DC nor Puerto Rico get congressmen or senators), yet it would be absurd to say that the capital isn't part of the USA.
i am sorry saying this but i am from puerto rico and i am not surprise to hear FDA not being ... proper in their stuff its not common to hear stuff like this but is not surprising some places especially inspection companys like FDA and USDA do some strange stuff. like picus chiken factory they closed because of if i recall right bad chickens or soemthing. :S
Since pharma companies make a TON more money on a drug before it's patents expire (Example, Zyrtec cost me $2 a 10 mg pill. Now that generics are out, you can get 100 for $14.99, about 15 cents a pill)
How about a moderate tax on patent protected drugs, to help fund the FDA, who can then improve their inspection process. That can help keep out counterfeit drugs, ensuring that potential customers will only get your genuine products.
That is, in exchange for the government granted monopoly, you give the government a small extra share of the profits. A percentage for every patent license. So that a patent owner pays a tax on what he gets from a 3rd party manufacturer.
Not a tax on aquiring the patents, or on the drug itself. Once the patent has expired, the tax no longer applies to anyone, inventor or copycat. If you want to not have to pay the tax, you can simply disclaim your patent rights, and allow competition; or just not make and sell the product, in which case you have little claim to damages for 'lost market share'.
Complications could include a patent on a non-therapeutic aspect of the drug, such as capsule design, coloring, labeling etc.
But once I had this idea, I thought: 'Hmmm, what if this applied to ALL patents?'
Claim your expensive software is 'patented', pay an few extra % to Uncle Sam. Patent your corporate 'Business Method', any revenue from that method is taxed a bit more.
I guess that wouldn't stop patent trolls who don't actually make or sell a product... and it would add costs to 'defensive' patents. But an extra few % from every court judgement, or out-of-court settlement to fund the patent office could got a long way towards speeding up the process, and making it more accurate. Ideally companies would think before filing "Is this patent worth the added taxes".
As a bonus to patent holders, anyone producing counterfeit goods would also be commiting tax fraud, meaning legions of IRS agents will help them find illegal copiers.
No idea how/if this would mesh with internation patent law treaties, but it's not like the U.S. gives a damn about those.
Still have the 'rule' that targetted taxes often affect unintended targets more than the intended ones. But what stops the drug companies from raising prices higher than they already are?
Please tell me they didn't make a full minute long version of "Head On! Apply directly to the forehead!".
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
"what price do you put on life?"
Let me turn that around for you. What price DO you put on life? Should drugs cost only what it costs to produce? Or should they cost what it's really worth? Keep in mind that the drugs only extend your life if they exist to do so.
Obviously, the price should land somewhere in between those values. If you know of a better system that capitalism to decide that number, let us know.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I begin to wonder reading all these stories.
In the long run it is actually cheaper to do maintenance. who cares about long term? we need to raise that stock price 2 more cents this quarter!
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Essentially, the present system is to publicly (under)fund the difficult work of the basic science and then allow the private sector to patent the discoveries, remove them from the public domain, and massively profit.
In exchange, they do the technically simple tasks of clinical trials, production and assessing which drugs to release back to the public using the criterion of maximizing profit (eg viagra) rather than the health of the population (eg antibiotics or AIDs drugs for Africans).
The question should be "If you know of a worse system to develop drugs and therapies, let us know..."
Faced with 100 patients with fever, right lower quadrant pain, and vomiting, 50 of whom have appendicitis and 50 of whom don't, you do 100 appendectomies. There is no way to know who really has appendicitis till you open them up. If you operate on no one, 50 people will die. If you operate on all of them none or very few will die.
However, you can say retrospectively that you did 50 unnecessary surgeries.
The same can be said for Cesarean Section. If you have 100 babies in distress, 50 might come out fine if you don't do a section. The other 50 are placed at risk of serious complications or even death. If you know prospectively who will do great, then you will never do an 'unnecessary section'. However neither the OB or the patient knows that so both usually choose to err on the side of caution.
Of course that caution saves lives but allows fear-mongering pseudo-scientists whack-jobs to make statements like the World Natural Health Organization you cite. Its no wonder if you go to the main page they also don't believe in global climate change, are anti-gay-marriage, anti-vaccination, anti-flouride, anti-abortion, and anti-aspartame, whack jobs. They also hawk ministerial credentials, have a 'Responsibility in Free Speech' banner, a homeland security threat advisory, and a fetus near the bottom of their main page. http://www.wnho.net/
Those are definitely the people I'd go to for my health care info. I'm sure that's completely unbiased.
As a constructive suggestion though, the next time you'd like to make that point, you could do so without having to quote whack-jobs like those. The 1999 Institute of Medicine Report "To Err is Human" gives reliable figures, though the number of deaths is an order of magnitude less than the figure you quote. Its still an issue that needs to be addressed by systems change, but the sky isn't falling.
Not only are you right, but succinct. I can never say that in so few words. Can I copy that and use it later?
And yet, it still is. If drug companies make drugs too expensive, fewer people can afford them -- that's still capitalism, though it make seem more gruesome than the cost curve for coffee beans.
Also, letting drug companies make money, like any other company, to offset the cost of developing the drugs (including all the failed attempts) has been the most effective way we've found to come up with new drugs. I don't see anybody with a superior alternative to capitalist pharmaceutical companies, when it comes to cooking up new drugs.
Capitalism might suck at health care, but for pharmaceutical research, it's still doing remarkably well. Or as they say about democracy, it's the worst possible system, except for all the others we've tried.
*- still allowed to take bribes from lobbyists, just like 'real' congressmen,
The Puerto Ricans have had many opportunities to become their own country.
They have declined several times, it is speculated it's because they receive far more in U.S. subsidies than any perceived loss self-governance.
However, we should probably talk about Wales. Those guys have been living under the thumb of british rule for almost 1,000 years.
In EU there are quite strict rules about the coloring of pills and there's a company called Sensum producing machines that use computer vision to inspect and sort all kinds of pills. I guess Biovail Corp. needs to buy a pill checking machine such as this: http://www.sensum.si/
But wait! Puerto Rico has a non-voting delegate in the US House of Representatives, too! Oh, and as a resident of DC, the license plates are one of the many options you can get (you're not required to get that particular design). I suppose you would also say that everyone in Missouri now must have a "Choose Life" license plate.
I am surprised by the strong reaction to this minor contamination, when many people are quite happy to ingest unregulated herbal "supplements" with no oversight over purity or dosage. In fact, I predict that the strongest reaction to this will be from precisely those people.
Supplementary, Complementary and Alternative Medicine should be subject to the same controls (including proofs of efficacy) as actual medicine.
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
As a member of the Kaiser Permanente HMO, I actually asked why Kaiser will only allow their prescriptions to be sold through their own pharmacies. The pharmarcist specifically said they want to ensure that the pills being prescribed were legitimate and try to avoid as much as possible the problem that plagued a number of drug store chains in the past, namely selling prescription pills that were actually fakes.
common misconception.
it's not like someone dieing has any choice (what price do you put on life?) and drug companies exploit this.You don't have a choice to avoid death, but in some places like the US you do hav a choice as to how much you spend to stay alive.
capitalism is a decent system. but it's not an answer to everything, and one of those things is health care.Healthcare isn't free market. Most people are in insurance pools funded by employers (and I gather most of these plans are required by law). That means health benefits that at least partially seperate the cost of providing healthcare from the demand for healthcare. Demand will go up when someone else is paying for your healthcare.
How about "Scathing Diatribe Highlights Growing Domestic Epidemic". Just saying.. it'd be hard hitting.
Of all of the things you mentioned, medication has the least elastic demand of all. Even home heating has an elasticity to it since you can (however undesirable) turn the thermostat way down and wear a coat to reduce use. Gasoline can be conserved through carpooling, cutting out unnecessary trips, and in some cases teleworking and walking.
OTOH, if you need life saving medical care, you have no viable alternatives. Taking it every other day or taking half doses may be worse than not taking it at all.
Capitalism only works when consumers are well informed and have many choices including the choice to opt out of the market if its offerings are unattractive or unaffordable. The big "dark secret" of the "Capitalism uber alles" crowd is that those conditions don't exist in utilities and especially healthcare.
Interesting logical thought: We have prescription laws based on the premise that the average consumer cannot know enough to decide for themselves what to take and how much. Capitalism cannot work when the consumer is ill-informed and cannot become adequatly informed. Lawmakers and economists in the U.S. claim that capitalism is effective in healthcare and pharmaceuticals. All three CANNOT be true at the same time.
Historically in the United States penalties for adulterated food and drug products are so small as to be laughable. For the last 100 years it has been far cheaper for drug companies to cast a blind eye toward safety and quality in favor of just eating the occasional penalty or lawsuit. Evem the larger penalties just result in a drug company reshuffling their ownership and credit credentials and just picking right up where they left off, poisoning and cheating their customers. Millions of people depend on prescription drugs and we're all basically helpless in the face of corporate malfeasance.
The pills were PAINTED, not TAINTED.
Bush has been bad but previous administrations have done their part to hack the FDA to the bone. In 1973, the F.D.A. undertook 34,919 food inspections; in 2006, that number had dropped to 7,783 according to the NY Times . And the number of inspectors has dropped by 1300 in the last 14 years.
Funny that we can spend as much as the rest of the world combined on defense, but can't afford to make sure the food and drugs we put in our bodies are safe.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Yep, they're called 'homeopathic remedies'. Seen a couple of ads on tv, one was at least a full minute long, pimping homeopathic crap. Very disturbing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWE1tH93G9U Homeopathic remedies are a separate issue.
What I'm talking about is products sold as a particular drug and strength which in fact are fakes with either a different (typically lower) strength or just no active ingredient at all.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
True, but, it is still better than having the US Fed. Govt. run it....
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Well, not to the extent your wanting to make it. Sure you can turn the heat down but what is a reasonable amount? I mean if you got kids and are keeping the house at 50 degrees F in the winter, your kids are going to be finding the state taking care of them and you might be finding criminal neglect charges. Is having your children taken away and facing charges any different then life and death choices that are in effect more of a quality of life choice?
I mean not all medications are prescribed to keep you alive. Some are to keep you functioning and a productive member of society. Some are to head off possible other conditions like heart attack or stroke which could be adjusted for by alteration in life styles too. And of course I doubt the antibiotics and decongestants people take to speed the recovery of colds wouldn't be considered life and death related. In all, a good majority of medications don't actually stop a person from dieing, it reduces risks to other conditions that could lead to death. So pretending that they are on some higher level is only skewing the situation. And ever with driving, not taking unnecessary trips or car pooling only results in a reduction of dependence, not a removal of it. Just like most blood pressure medication could be done away with or greatly reduce by dietary and lifestyle changes.
Sure. But lets compare apples to apples and not skew the situation. The vast majority of medical care doesn't treat life threatening conditions. Pain medication of instance treats a quality of life situation and so on. Not all medication or medical car is life or death and for the purpose of comparing life and death, we need to rule out excess in home heating, gasoline and so on. If your ride doesn't show, you have to make it to work or get fired which means you lose your house or something else that ends up putting you on the street or jail or taking your kids away or all of the above. I mean when we are talking about extreme conditions, Life and death, ability to survive, or to provide for yourself, we need to keep the perspective real. All these things should be treated like utilities and controlled to some extent, even if it is just enough to keep them affordable.
No, capitalism works when there is a "real" choice. When there isn't a choice because or market conditions, regulation, or whatever else, then the process goes out of ballance and becomes skewed to the benifit of companies. IT doesn't have to be an educated or informed choice, but there has to be a real choice there.
I do agree that the conditions for capitalism doesn't exist in utilities though. Often with deregulation, it is only a partial deregulation and we are given the illusion of choice which fails to deliver. California is the biggest example I know of where the illusion was there and it failed miserably. Granted, they had one of the largest energy suppliers in the state illegally screwing them by committing fraudulent acts that drove costs up where is wasn't natural (price fixing and locking out competitors). They had been doing that before deregulations too but the effect incre
Sure. But lets compare apples to apples and not skew the situation. The vast majority of medical care doesn't treat life threatening conditions. Pain medication of instance treats a quality of life situation and so on. Not all medication or medical car is life or death and for the purpose of comparing life and death, we need to rule out excess in home heating, gasoline and so on. If your ride doesn't show, you have to make it to work or get fired which means you lose your house or something else that ends up putting you on the street or jail or taking your kids away or all of the above. I mean when we are talking about extreme conditions, Life and death, ability to survive, or to provide for yourself, we need to keep the perspective real. All these things should be treated like utilities and controlled to some extent, even if it is just enough to keep them affordable.
I can assure you, pain medication can be life saving. Since earning a living is manditory in capitalism (if you like eating), treating a condition that prevents working is no more elastic than a condition that is directly life threatening.
I don't by any means argue that only healthcare is inelastic or even that all healthcare is, just that it TENDS to be moreso than other utilities. Agreed, freezing the kids (or even not actually endangering them at all, but making an uncommon choice in energy use) can cause problems from DFACS. However, it's perfectly acceptable to have the kids sleep in one room with a space heater while letting the rest of the house be cold. In more rural areas, a wood stove is a viable option.
Electrical use by the elderly in summer is less elastic. Death from heat stroke is all to common for the elderly in summer.
WRT to consumers being informed, I stand by my statements. Real choice is necessary, but no more or less so than informed consumers. You can't maximise value if you have no way to determine value in the first place. Poorly informed buying leads to mal-investment in cheap shoddy goods rather than the ones that cost twice as much and return 4 times the value.
This ties back into the inelasticity of healthcare. Given adequate knowledge an informed healthcare consumer will know to request generics or even that the doctor may be 'overselling' antibiotics, perhaps as a CYA move. They might even be well enough informed to know when they don't actually need healthcare beyond first aid.
well, it is a good thing we don't live in a true capitalist society. Pain medication might mean no work, but then you would be poor and the government already steps in and it becomes a quality of life thing.
I know where your going with this and to a degree I support your decision. But I know a young mother who had her kids removed because the electricity was shut off at her house for a week in the middle of summer. I think your giving this idea of acceptable sacrifices a little too much credit. She eventually got them back but had to submit to random house hold inspections to ensure the utilities were on (water, electric, heat whether gas or electric)and there was a stock of food on hand. they even set basic guidelines on how she cleaned house. All this because a utility truck pulled the service line in the alley behind her house in an accident with the truck being taller then the lines. It yanked stuff from the meter box and it took the landlord about a week to get someone licenses (as required by law) to repair and certify the service meter so the electric company could schedule an appointment and come out to reconnect service. The neighbor made a comment to someone else about how the kids must be roasting without being able to turn a fan on or the air conditioner and this goody goody person though calling DCS would speed the process up. Instead, it was treated as a complain for inhumane treatment which took her 2 toddlers away for two months and forced her into the court system to get them back. I ended up contributing to her legal fees (there was about 7 of us that paid her legal fees to help her out)
You would really be surprised at how little it takes to get them involved and how hard it is to get them out.
Informed decisions is only part of choice. Choice can happen without it or you can become informed along the way. Let me tell you yet another story. At a place I used to work, they would cut us a $30 or $40 check twice a year for a work boot allowance because we needed steel towed boots. I used to go buy the cheapest ones I could find and pocket 5 to 10 bucks. After talking about my feet hurting, a coworker told me he never has that problem but he kicked in about $50 to buy his boots. I decided to buy a pair and give them a try. These are Rocky Boots and while I haven't purchased a pair in over 15 years, I would still run for them if I needed another pair. But not only did I find that my feet didn't hurt after long shifts, they lasted a little over a year. So I would buy one pair a year with my own money, use the old pair for stuff around the house or going into the woods when it is muddy out and I would just pocket the boot allowances when they came. In the end, I think I was only out $10 or $20 over what the company gave us. After I stopped working there, I purchased one other pair which has lasted m
I wasn't educated on their products at all, I made a choice at the recommendation of someone I worked with and found the differences in the quality and costs soon after.
What we have here is a terminology problem. Initially, your boot choice was uninformed, then your friend informed you and you made a better choice.
If by elasticity, you meaning all the fluff in the layers above, then you might be right
More terminology. The fluff is the elastic part. Your demand will stretch and contract based on your income, market prices and your valuation of the product. The hardcore parts you can't do without are the inelastic parts. You will be in that market even if the prices are unreasonable and the value is poor.
As far as DFACS goes, I don't have kids, but I have certainly heard more than enough credible horror stories. As far as I can see, they are primarily in the business of yanking kids out of loving homes suffering minor setbacks or simply a few degrees off from cultural norms and stuffing them into stranger's homes where standards are even worse. Occasionally they may accidentally improve the child's quality of life.
Being informed isn't literally essential to choice. One can always flip a coin or otherwise choose blindly. However, that sort of choice does not 'drive the invisible hand' of the market towards better value and more efficiency at all. Back to your story, when you made the uninformed choice, you placed your economic support behind the maker of a poor quality product that ultimately wasn't worth the price they charged. When your choice became informed, you switched your economic support to a manufacturer that made a better value trade-off between price and performance. As a result, they were rewarded for making the better choice, your quality of life went up, and you likely became a more productive worker.
Expanding your individual situation to the market for work boots, if everyone made the uninformed choice the superior producer would have been forced towards the bad price/performance tradeoff or out of the market. OTOH if everyone makes the informed choice, the poor quality producer is forced to make better choices as well or exit the market giving someone smarter a shot at it. In the event that there is no choice, demand elasticity is what allows consumers to either leave the market or participate to a minimal degree. The resulting untapped demand in turn provides incentive for a (hopefully better) supplier to enter the market and restore choice. Where the market is wholly inelastic and choice is essentially random, there is no incentive to improve quality or reduce price. For those reasons, a healthy capitalist economy requires elasticity and informed consumers.
But you see, I wasn't fully informed until after owning the boots for a little over a year. I don't think capitalism suffered. And besides, the old boots were adequate if you didn't wear them for long periods of time and perhaps only needed to used them occasionally instead of every workday. Sure becoming informed helped me make a choice but it wasn't deterministic to having that choice.
Then I think we are talking about two separate ends of the spectrum here. I am assuming that life saving health care weeded out all the non-life-threatening portions of health care like getting doctors excuses to miss work, stuff to help get through a cold, and so on. This is why I stripped off the joy riding and quality of life stuff from the others examples being tossed around when doing my considerations. And in that respect, you are probably right but that should undermine the fact that below all the quality of life stuff, there is a basic need just as important as life saving medical care.
and that is putting it lightly. I would have more respect for them if they appeared to have some common sense in their actions but that seems to be asking too much.
But you see, people have this ability, even though they attempt to suppress it, but they have the ability to learn from their experiences. The invisible hand of the market is a result of this. And more to the boot point, the old boots wouldn't be bad for occasional use or use in a way that was different then I used them. They would be fine for someone who doesn't need to spend 8-10 in them 5 or 6 days a week. You see, capitalism isn't always about always getting the very best product for the very best value. It is about having the choices available so you can match the products to your needs. And if something doesn't fit your needs, someone else can step in to do so. SO yea, while I ultimately found a better deal, having the old choice of boots available for others who's needs aren't the same as mine if a key to capitalism.