The INSULIN Act aims to tackle this problem by capping the price of insulin at $35 a month. Insulin affordability is a worthy goal, but the INSULIN Act puts a Band-Aid over a bullet hole. Any legislation aimed at reducing insulin prices will be ineffective until legislators enact a structural overhaul to remove the administrative bloat surrounding insulin production.
Insulin has long been used as the poster child for the failures of a market-based health-care system. But as anyone who has taken an introductory economics course knows, when firms have to compete, prices fall, quality increases, and firms are more innovative.
Jordan McGillis of the Manhattan Institute writes about the trade-offs involved in energy policy:
The environmental case for instituting policy frameworks to reduce pollution from the electric sector is strong. But a tipping of the policy scales in favor of renewables, particularly absent crucial regulatory reforms, courts energy-security disaster.
Public policy is an exercise in trade-offs. Rarely can one commitment be fully endorsed without it coming at some expense to another. Issues pertaining to the environment invariably display this. For example, regulating the dumping of industrial waste into waterways improves health outcomes but elevates industrial costs and prices for consumers. While that is a worthy trade-off, it is a trade-off nonetheless. Sometimes, as the displacement of coal by lower-cost natural gas has shown, markets themselves will yield positive environmental outcomes, even if unintended. When markets fail to account for polluting emissions, it may be appropriate to accept a cost trade-off and implement a framework to account for them.