Perhaps price controls aren't all that good an idea then?

Patients have described the effect on their health and wellbeing of the “new normal” of drug shortages in the UK, which has led to three-month delays and 80-mile round trips to acquire medication.

Simon Bell, a 43-year-old data analyst from Tyne and Wear, has cystic fibrosis and requires medication that allows him to digest food. “For people with cystic fibrosis, the part of our pancreas which releases enzymes and allows us to digest food doesn’t work, so we have to take these tablets, which does the job of what’s missing from our pancreas,” he says.

Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, Bell says he has been experiencing shortages of Creon 25000, the drug he takes, and once was unable to get his medication for more than three months.

If it’s being described as “the new normal” then this is something not specific to the one drug nor problem. And it isn’t either - the US has grand problems with Adderall, the UK has reported such with HRT.

The problems here are not from patents and single supply. The worst area is in fact in generics.

So, why?

We would suggest a path to investigate. No, we’re not insisting, not yet, but just suggesting.

You know that supply and demand curve stuff? Prices decline and fewer people desire to supply? That.

For what is the grand boast of the NHS and many other such health care systems? That as major, if not monopoly, (monopsonist that is) buyers they are able to push down the price paid for drugs. Further down than a free market would have such prices.

This is such a boast of such systems that the Americans - at least some Americans - insist that Medicaid should be able to do the same and they have, for a select handful of drugs, just started doing so.

And, umm, well, what is there we know about pushing the price of something down below the market clearing price? There will be a shortage of supply.

We have price fixing, we have a shortage of supply. Does Occam’s Shaving Kit require any other explanation here?

As we say, we’re not wholly wedded to an absolute insistence upon this as the only cause. But we really are very sure that price fixing has costs. As we seem to be seeing the predicted costs perhaps we should be thinking about the inadvisability of the price fixing?