Is the market for drugs really free though? I believe that in a free market there is supposed to be no coercion between the parties to a transaction. In the case of drug purchases there may be a kind of coercion involved -- a health issue (diabetes, cancer, etc.) that makes one party to the transaction unable to negotiate effectively.
Free markets mean that other sellers are free to compete. This is why food, an essential good, is generally cheap. Any seller of food can charge an arbitrarily high price but cannot exclude competing sellers.
In a free market no outside agent interferes with buyer and seller. Nature has no will and thus no agency and thus is not an agent. Indeed the free market is key to solving the disparity between what someone has versus what someone needs. It is one of the few systems we know that solves this issue efficiently
If I understand you correctly, then it does seem true to me that nature has no agency. However, when the choice a consumer has is to either pay the asking price for a <em>needed</em> drug or to die then I think the consumer has no meaningful choice at all. Given how unequal the bargaining power is between the buyer and seller in this situation, it's hard to see a free market solutions applies: it might be efficient, but it's also brutaly inhumane.
I know I've set up kind of a straw-man. It might be that the consumer could choose to forgo an expensive drug or medical procedure without fatal consequences, but that's not the interesting case.
The choice shouldnt be between whether they need the drug or not but rather who to buy it from. The fact that there exists someone who needs a product is what drives the profit to zero in a free market because newer manufacturers are incentivized to provide the product. The choice is among from whom to buy not whether to buy at all.
Right now insulin is expensive because the government is preventing companies that can produce it for cheaper from selling in the united states because of a lawsuit by the current market holder. That the government even has this power is a textbook example of the danger of governmental interference in the free market. People are literally dying because the government has made the market less free intentionally
Like food, right? If people stopped selling you food you would die, so surely they can charge extortionate rates for it.
Of course, there are competitive markets for both food and insulin in the US. Quoting from a letter to the WSJ yesterday,
> Eli Lilly makes three types of insulin, which in most states you can buy over-the-counter at Wal-Mart for $24 per 1000 unit bottle. One hundred syringes cost $12. I have serious diabetes mellitus and have managed it with Lilly insulin for a decade for under $100 a month.
For some drugs there aren't competitive markets, and in some cases the government prevents competition, but both are typically temporary situations (patents, first-mover advantages) that help to get the drug on the market in the first place. An extortionate price for a drug is better than no access at all, and doubly so when it is going to give way to genuine price competition.
The difference is (1) food isn't a specialty good, you can make it yourself and (2) food is provided by the government free of charge if you can't pay and (3) subsidized by the government to a massive degree even if you can pay. If this is the kind of system you're advocating for prescription drugs, I'm all in!
(1) Food producers unilaterally refusing to sell food could be just as disruptive as drug producers refusing to sell drugs. "You can just grow it yourself" isn't a reasonable distinction -- from a practical standpoint most people can't. The reason we don't need to prohibit that behaviour is that the market works.
(2) The government doesn't grow food. Sometimes it pays for it, and sometimes it gives people money so they can pay for it, but there isn't a public option in case farmers decide not to sell us beef, because the market works. (But yeah, the government does -- and should -- help people pay for drugs they can't afford when the prices are reasonable.)
(3) Food production is subsidised, but it shouldn't be. And these subsidies have little bearing on the possibility of extortion in the market.
If you feel like being specific, free markets have to exist without government regulation, without monopolies, without economic privilege, and without artificial scarcity, which doesn't really work in the real world under capitalism. Almost no markets are truly free markets, even the ones that look free, because there are general regulations you still have to follow (you can't legally sell poisonous handmade goods at a craft fair, for example -- laws about that act as a regulation).
