I dunno anything about the user but they sumbit lots of stories every day. Just a wild-ass guess: there's a script underlying the submissions, which works from a finite pool of Tomte-curated links.
I would say the cost of a vial of medicine for neuromuscular spasms and dystonia (the initial purpose, not cosmetic) is cost prohibitive for a lot of people. Usually, insurance should cover it, but the cost is $1,000/vial for a medicine that was approved over 30 years ago, and the price has only gone up, not down. Some plans (off the top of my head, some Blue Shield plans and anyone who is on straight Medicare/Medicaid) won't cover the cost.
There are a couple of competitors that work roughly the same and are slightly cheaper but it def seems like an oligopoly to keep the costs artificially high.
You go to any country outside of North America and you can get medicines the exact same ones for a fraction of the cost on the dollars. US generally is up charged due the ability squeeze insurance and then the patient. So definitely greed, some regulations should be applied. Insurance companies would be happy to not be squeezed, if some sort of regulation was made to prevent squeezing it would be nice. Even a culture where doctors were glorified over YouTube stars would help too. Asia for example if you're a doctor you're making money! But the scary thing is that doctors in Asia don't charge 100,000 USD for said surgery. Just think about it.
> Insurance companies would be happy to not be squeezed, if some sort of regulation was made to prevent squeezing it would be nice.
Insurance companies are bound by ACA profit caps where 80% of revenue has to go to “medical claims”. This leads to a perverse situation where their theoretical maximum profit is tied to higher cost of services. If they’re at that limit and actually negotiated lower prices, they’d be in violation of those (perverted) profit caps.
I'm the last to defend the drug companies, but at a basic level, they get the right to sell at high prices because of the cost to bring to market which is absolutely enormous.
Once it goes to market the cost of producing the drug is often very low compared to the price but it's in order to encourage companies to invest in future drugs.
> So definitely greed, some regulations should be applied.
Regulations are what prop up the high prices. Allow people to import drugs from overseas or Canada and you would see prices start plummeting overnight.
> But a study published in 2001 in the Journal of the American Medical Association said that a single gram in crystallized form, “evenly dispersed and inhaled, would kill more than 1 million people.”
Given the potency, how does the manufacturer make sure that dosages are dispersed equally during manufacture?
That one is a serious problem with the heroin/fentanyl/carfentanyl opiate family - more than a few people have died because their dealer didn't mix the fent with the heroin properly.
Well, they use trained chemists and not drug dealers. Its easy to correctly dilute a compound if you know what you are doing. They already do it for the fentanyl used in hospital settings without much risk, for example.
For bio-terrorism you can just use dirty homemade version. For injection (for cosmetics and valid medical reasons like spasms) you'd want to use clean lab-produced. So I think that is the reason justifying its production. The security theater around, beyond the basic security, is I think mainly just a part of the moat and the politicians having to look tough on anything resembling a possibility for terrorism. I think it is similar to say marijuana research - in half the states one can do at home all the research one likes, yet the the official academia would have to jump through impossible hoops to do any marijuana research.
There are no meaningful bio-terrorism risks to production and supply chain.
The bacteria that make botulinum toxin are found naturally in many places, but it’s rare for them to make people sick. A hypothetical bio-terrorist does not need to break in to a medical factory to procure it
While it's true the toxin is found naturally, is it really so easy to make such a large quantity? Making one gram, for instance, might require a very large factory.
Clearly yes since there hasn’t been any cases of weaponized botox attacks. This probably goes to show old fashioned ways of terrorism are significantly easier or more effective for whatever reasons. If botox was an attractive weapon it would have been used already but clearly there is some Great Filter in place preventing that today.
"Allergan says Botox has more than 90 percent of the market for medical uses of neurotoxins and 75 percent of the market for cosmetic uses. “I used to say, ‘How often do you see that distribution of market share in any category—not just drugs, just in anything?’ "
Readit News
Interestingly it looks like it this made it to the front page via the second-chance pool: https://news.ycombinator.com/pool
Why are almost all the submissions on /pool by the same accounts (I see ~4 Tomte)? Are they the ones curating the pool?
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20 CDs curated by Steve Jobs & the iPod team - submitted 20 times over 7 years:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
Prefix for SQLite Tmpfiles - submitted 10 times over 7 years
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The submissions do seem to be good though. Perhaps they just re-read old articles occasionally and re-submit them.
I do that because they've never gained traction and I would like to see discussion about them.
If OP gets some karma every time he posts it, like he did from me this time, what's wrong with that?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
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There are a couple of competitors that work roughly the same and are slightly cheaper but it def seems like an oligopoly to keep the costs artificially high.
Insurance companies are bound by ACA profit caps where 80% of revenue has to go to “medical claims”. This leads to a perverse situation where their theoretical maximum profit is tied to higher cost of services. If they’re at that limit and actually negotiated lower prices, they’d be in violation of those (perverted) profit caps.
Regulations are what prop up the high prices. Allow people to import drugs from overseas or Canada and you would see prices start plummeting overnight.
Given the potency, how does the manufacturer make sure that dosages are dispersed equally during manufacture?
That one is a serious problem with the heroin/fentanyl/carfentanyl opiate family - more than a few people have died because their dealer didn't mix the fent with the heroin properly.
The bacteria that make botulinum toxin are found naturally in many places, but it’s rare for them to make people sick. A hypothetical bio-terrorist does not need to break in to a medical factory to procure it
It thinks that the risk of catastrophic outcome is low, while benefit to individual quality of like is high. I don't know if I agree with this.
Pro-tip, hypotheticals don't really work with LLMs. The rest of your interaction was contaminated by the sentiment proposed.
Yeah, uh, buddy, EVERYWHERE.