It’s a good thing we eliminated polio in the 1950s because there’s no way in hell we could eliminate it under the 21st century health economics conventional wisdom

Imagine Ezra Klein interviewing Cass Sunstein and Tyler Cowen and nodding moronically as they say that if we sent government workers into rural villages with polio epidemics then the price of the McDouble might go up to $1.99, always a trade off

Some drug company charging $2 million for the polio vaccine with the calculation that it’s only fair because it’s order of magnitude in line with the actuarial value of a human life. Pete Butt proposing a tax-advantaged savings account so you can save for your kid’s vaccine.

Entire towns full of poor children with polio, Noah Smith nitpicking some legislator’s plan for the government to make the vaccine because the market is more efficient at it. Meanwhile every other country just administers the vaccine to kids for free.

r neoliberal accounts high giving each other about how universal polio vaccines would be regressive because mostly rich people pay for the polio vaccine anyway, and surely this is helping to spur R&D to make the vaccine cheaper

Ted Cruz trying his best to look empathetic while he tells the parents of a dying kid with polio that if he did something about it then their children’s children would have to pay the national debt. Hillary Clinton telling the parents that why don’t they go run for something.

The government sent people into rural areas to administer vaccines. Imagine the state of Texas fucking suing the government over this and Baseball Crank lauding the upholding of the rule of law when Gorsuch rules it unconstitutional.

Every stupid Econ wonk loves to sing the praises of capitalism for eliminating disease and improving human well-being, but basically every fucking regression monkey Econ phd who ever advised the government on health economics made things measurably worse.

The fact is if it wasn’t for the years 1932-1970 when our government mostly rightly ignored those fucking dickheads and didn’t wait for some Brookings asshole to run a regression to decide to do the right thing, America would probably be a third world country.