If the only way to eat was to buy food insurance (offered as a benefit by your employer, of course) and get a prescription for one specific brand of that food, and the only foods available were those screened by the FDA for a decade and cost the food company $10 billion to bring to market, I predict three things:

1. Food would be extremely safe. Nobody would die of food allergies.

2. Food would be far more expensive than it is today.

3. More people would die of starvation.

If you ask any economist why the prices of certain drugs are so high, they will point out the lack of competition, the onerous and costly approval process, and consumer inability to comparison shop. They will not say it is because drug company execs are selfish bastards. The benefit of competition is that it doesn’t matter if people running the companies are purely selfish. The system forces them to provide a compelling product or they go out of business.

>They will not say it is because drug company execs are selfish bastards.

Because that is a given. Dealing with a selfish bastard is ok as long as you can walk away from a transaction if it is not to your liking. People bargaining for their life don't really have that freedom.

I can buy a watermelon from a guy selling it out of the back of his pickup on the side of the road and be pretty confident that it won't kill me. You won't ever be able to say that of medicine. Many of the regulations are there for a reason.

There will never be as much competition in medicine as there is in food (unless it is in the 'Uh, oh, a handful of companies own all of the farms' direction). So, even if we eliminate all regulation it still wouldn't solve the problem of competition.

So, we will have few players in a market that is difficult if not impossible for your average consumer to understand selling items that are essential for people to continue to live no matter which direction we go. So the only question is: would the threat of government forces keep these players in line better or worse than self-policing under the fear of market punishment if what they do goes badly?

My thought is that the government is going to have the resources to effectively go after bad actors where the surviving relatives of individuals harmed will not. And there won't be enough market players in any case for those trying to make a decision based on what news they get of such bad market behavior to effectively stop them by spending their money elsewhere.

It's the difference between being able to pump the brakes on a bad situation or relying on coasting to a stop.

I think you're making a false assumption here though, particularly with this line:

>There will never be as much competition in medicine as there is in food (unless it is in the 'Uh, oh, a handful of companies own all of the farms' direction). So, even if we eliminate all regulation it still wouldn't solve the problem of competition.

This may be true, we don't necessarily need that level of competition and a lower level, but still competitive market can handle this. Rather, we're at the other extreme, where regulatory barriers are heavy enough essentially prevent competition, effectively ensuring monopoly.

A good example here would be the list of off patent drugs with no generic alternative. In particular the infamous case of Daraprim, where generic Daraprim could be made, but would have to go through the FDA approval process.