Slashdot Mirror
Baking Soda Shortage Has Hospitals Frantic, Delaying Treatments and Surgeries (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Amid a national shortage of a critical medicine, US hospitals are hoarding vials, delaying surgeries, and turning away patients, The New York Times reports. The medicine in short supply: solutions of sodium bicarbonate -- aka, baking soda. The simple drug is used in all sorts of treatments, from chemotherapies to those for organ failure. It can help correct the pH of blood and ease the pain of stitches. It is used in open-heart surgery, can help reverse poisonings, and is kept on emergency crash carts. But, however basic and life-saving, the drug has been in short supply since around February. The country's two suppliers, Pfizer and Amphastar, ran low following an issue with one of Pfizer's suppliers -- the issue was undisclosed due to confidentiality agreements. Amphastar's supplies took a hit with a spike in demand from desperate Pfizer customers. Both companies told the NYT that they don't know when exactly supplies will be restored. They speculate that it will be no earlier than June or August. With the shortage of sodium bicarbonate, hospitals are postponing surgeries and chemotherapy treatments. A hospital in Mobile, Alabama, for example, postponed seven open-heart surgeries and sent one critically ill patient to another hospital due to the shortage.
Is this shortage happening in countries with "socialized medicine", or just in free market America?
We don't have a free market medical system. We have a cronyist monopoly enforced by laws written by hospitals and pharma company. If the medical system produced computers, a PC would cost about the same as a Lamborghini.
There is :
- ensuring everything is done in a sterile environment
- ensuring its purity
- testing of batches
- tracing and tracking the whole process
- precise weighing and packaging
- ensuring everything is in tamper proof packaging
- auditing of the whole process
All the equipment used in the manufacture, testing, packaging and the people involved are also traced and certified, with everything going back to calibrated National Standards and tested annually (or more). The temperature, humidity, raw materials, etc etc etc etc etc are all tracked right through the whole system in triplicate.
This is not a "throw a teaspoon full in" and it will be all OK.
Ingesting something (and we all swallow a low of bugs, insects, dirt, etc every year) is totally different to having it injected into the blood stream,
>"Is this shortage happening in countries with "socialized medicine", or just in free market America?"
If we had a really free market (with safeguards to prevent monopolies or near-monopolies), then plenty of other companies would make such "drugs" available, too (in this example, it is not really a drug, it is just a commodity). Besides, even if a shortage occurred in such a market, it would send the price up and other companies would rush to market with completing product and pricing would go down and supply would then increase then eventually stabilize.
In a perfectly free and elastic economy (and part of that freedom *is* preventing monopolies with take away from free trade), supply and demand and pricing is completely self correcting. If anything, the more "socialized" a place is (with more government controls on supply and demand, limiting competition, restricting price changes, tampering with demand) the more likely shortages will occur.
No system is perfect. But free markets have generally been proven to work better than anything out there.
That is literally the Free Market at work.
It purchased legislators to bypass the concept of being regulated.
Critical systems should have redundancy built in.
That isn't the same thing as inefficiency.
The problem is that medical services may require economies-of-scale such that having say 7 competitors in a given market, especially rural areas, is just not realistic. Medical services are just not the same market profile as manufacturing light-bulbs.
Personnel are not even so much the problem. Medical salaries are only a small percentage of total costs, and if a real shortage develops we could always turn on the H-1B spigot.
It's more about the total opaqueness of all pricing: nobody knows what anything costs. Pharma keeps insisting that "nobody actually pays $120,000 for Harvoni." My brother didn't, for example - but what did his insurance plan actually pay for it, and why aren't we allowed to find out? And if nobody actually pays it, why is that the advertised price?
We expect higher prices for newly branded compounds, but how can the supply of generic drugs, which anyone can make, be monopolized? What can't we have our prescriptions filled on the world market, through Amazon?
See, without the great and wise FDA's policies of looking out for the people by allowing the concentration of critical supplies and medicines into the hands of 2 such wise and benevolent entities we'd not be in a position where decisions made entirely for profit could affect the lives of the general public. As much as I hate to see people suffer, I almost wish there would be deaths as a result of this and that forced some legal light onto the situation. Critical basics that are free from patent should required to be multiply sourced to ensure a steady interruption free supply chain, not concentrated into one or two 'most' profitable and controllable streams.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Yeah, but a lot of people would have those Lamborghinis. You wouldn't just buy a computer though. You'd make computer payments. You wouldn't just buy stuff online. You'd make a $0.50 copay for each $100.00 iTunes or Netflix purchase because nobody actually buys directly from online retailers. I'm just guessing at what things cost, because the price list is secret. You could apply for a new computer right around the same time every year, along with a bunch of other people, unless your computer broke down our you got married, or needed a computer for your child, or Congress had gas. Then it's hard to say. You wouldn't be on the internet unless it was in your network. Maybe your state would only support the Bing network, unless you wanted to pay a lot extra. You could Google if you really wanted to; but then your next computer payment would be higher. You get free antivirus though, so you use that to feed some kind of delusion that this is all working out for the best. Sometimes reality intrudes and you get depressed. Then you fork over a copay for a program from Big Gaming that may or may not cause your computer to self-destruct. If that happens, it's GAME OVER.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The ordinary Walmart product is pure enough for human consumption, as a tooth powder and stomach remedy. My example is chemical reagent purity.