Democrats, Health Care Monopolies, and Market Failures

Market health care is a fatal disease

As the US health care system reels under shortages and capacity issues, Matt Stoller reminds us that the brittleness of the US health care supply chain predates covid, and is directly attributable to monopolization, and its handmaiden, corruption.

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/the-villains-behind-our-medical-supply

As Stoller writes, the last decade has seen the health care industry plagued by shortages of basics: “from saline to epinephrine to chemotherapeutic agents to antibiotics, to sterilized water.”

The FDA has maintained a drug shortages advisory page for years, long before covid hit, with doctors prescribing less-familiar, more error-prone meds to patients because the standard-of-care drugs were unavailable.

https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-and-availability/drug-shortages

Now, obviously covid exacerbated this situation, and in response, a lot of manufacturing has shifted back onshore — but it’s not really helping. It turns out that the same system that created the brittleness in health supplies is now maintaining it.

Stoller identifies Group Purchasing Organizations (GPOs) as a key culprit. GPOs originated as hospital…