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If you are okay with putting a bullet in the head of anyone who uses medical care without expert opinion in any way that causes a societal cost then sure.
But we don't do that.
If you become disabled, or end up on dialysis, or increase the risk of a multi drug resistant organism other people subsidize you.
The cost with which we subsidize you is immense. Hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars per person. Society cannot afford to pay that more than necessary, and ethics prevent us from euthanizing people for their ineptitude.
Paternalism is good to some extent it's why we have building codes and financial regulations and you know....laws. Where you draw the line is a point of discussion but drug libertarians don't know anything about medicine and have zero idea what they don't know.
This is a wildly disproportionate and frankly bizarre thing to say. We could just not do that. Or are we currently required to be okay with putting a bullet in the head of anyone who works on their car without expert opinion in any way that causes a societal cost?
But let's be clear what you're doing here. You've become unable to defend your previous position that would imply that we must ban individuals from performing auto repair, so you're playing a two-part threat. Claiming that we must restrict supply because we've subsidized demand. It's a lucrative hustle in crony capitalism if you can control the government in this way. But we can easily dismantle the threat, cut the Gordian knot, and just not do any of that stuff. Just stop. Stop putting bullets in people's heads. Stop making everything either banned or mandatory.
This is completely absurd. If we have any law, we must have one particular set of laws that benefit your industry. Just utterly disconnected from reality. This sort of reasoning can justify literally any regulation, no matter how insanely stupid, no matter how insanely destructive, no matter how insanely corrupt. "What? You want no laws whatsoever?" Come on. Be serious.
You are advocating for people to do what they want and have others pay for their failure. People taking over their medical care without professional supervision directly hurts others and themselves, and society literally pays for it in terms of opportunity costs and DIRECT costs.
I haven't seen you engage with any of the examples I've given or actual content at play, just give a metaphor which is poor and repeatedly express your stance.
When given the ability to hang themselves in healthcare people do so. This is not a hypothetical. This is true right now and I gave examples, and that's for the simpler things.
If you want to continue this conversation please explain what antibiotic stewardship and why it's important, or argue why it isn't.
I cannot believe this is a good faith reading of what I wrote. You think that I am advocating for people to do what they want with their cars and have others pay for their failure?! h-What?!
Ah, yes, the one example people always go to when they want to defend the status quo. It may be the case that antibiotics have a significant externality. Perhaps some drugs are, as you put it, "complicated". We might have to figure out what to do about that one. It might be the current regime; it might be something different. But for now, let's do a little exercise. Let's put antibiotics to the side. They're "complicated", maybe even a special category. Now make an argument for the entire rest of the world of prescription drugs.
Testosterone/Estrogen (for hormone replacement, not trans issues). Any scheduled or formerly scheduled substances. Any medication with significant CYP interactions or other related interactions. Any drug that requires lab work and/or monitoring. Any medication that can impact renal or hepatic function if used chronically or to excess acutely. Any drug that makes someone feel good in a non-addictive way but causes significant side effects like steroids.
And that's just taking 30 seconds. Do you know which drugs you'd want to prescribe yourself show up in which categories? Do you have any idea the number of ways you could kill yourself or cause yourself permanent harm?
No.
We had a guy on here a few weeks ago who describing Tylenol usage that could have easily gotten him killed in a slow and agonizingly painful way, and this forum is mostly stuffed with high intellect and education people. And Tylenol is over the counter...
You have no idea what you don't know.
I have seen plenty of patient mortality and morbidity associated with misuse of prescribed medications, bullying NPs into giving them non-indicated medication, or outright ordering meds from another country. And that's right now with the safeguards we have in place.
Ok, great. Let's start here. What I'm missing in your comment is an argument concerning anything having to do with it. You just named the substance. What's the argument?
Do patients ask for these? What's the ratio of people who actually need them versus just think they need them? Are their side effects? Are they bad? Are the risks something that someone can easily understand and make informed decisions based off of? Are patients willing to try safer and more effective interventions first?
What's the evidence base and recommendations, how sure are we about them? Are their bad actors involved who are incentivizing certain behaviors? What is the level of excess supplementation that production can carry?
How many of these questions can you answer?
If you can't answer the analog of those questions for an item of auto repair, does that mean we have reason to ban people from doing it?
My read is that all of those things are directly in the vein of "they can hurt themselves" and "there is still possible value in expertise", not externalities. It's telling that you started with the one example of a clear externality, and as soon as we took that off the table, you completely abandoned the externality argument. Or should I pull a you and say, "If you want to continue this conversation please explain what testosterone stewardship and why it's important, or argue why it isn't." Because if that's not a thing, you're jumping to an entirely different class of argument and not even bothering to acknowledge it.
The point is Chesterton's Fence.
You know nothing about medicine or the risks and benefits of what you are proposing. Medicine is not auto repair.
That's kind of important.
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