You agree it’s ridiculous but in a fashion that makes it seem like you hold fast to your earlier, fabricated counterpoint with which you were arguing?
I’ve been trying to make that point for years, every time some conservative says we should “unleash the power of the free market” to reign in healthcare costs. Would you shop in a market that didn’t display prices and refused to give out that information even if you asked? The main reason healthcare can never be a true marketplace is that a marketplace requires that buyers and sellers are participating voluntarily. That’s almost never the case when it comes to healthcare. If you’re in a car accident or need an emergency appendectomy or slip on ice and break your wrist you do not research local hospitals to see who has the best success rate for the procedure you need or call around for prices and negotiate rates. You are hurt or sick or in shock or unconscious and all you want is to feel better and go home. In this situation providers have you over a barrel and they act accordingly by charging whatever they think they can get away with. Hospitals literally have the power of life and death over people and that tips the scales drastically in their favor when it comes to charging for their services. We need laws and regulations to prevent providers from taking unfair advantage of the situation.
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If my tone was facetious, the underlying point isn’t fabricated. Hospitals use every event as a cost center. It does cost a substantial amount of labor to dispense a pill. If we assume a nurse is doing half administrative and half actual nursing and we assume that the wage he receives is 1/3 of his bottom line contribution to the hospital and the nurse makes $25/hour, actual nursing care is $75 an hour – but only half of that is actual for care – so $2.5/minute or so. Plug in whatever numbers you care to, but once you acknowledge the US hospitals need to take in every dollar from an outside payor, the numbers quickly drive you to a $10 or $20 pill.
Now, I can agree that’s completely insane but still be perfectly clear-headed about why the numbers get you to where they do.
Was really just genuinely confused as to what you meant. You were refuting a claim no one had made, with some reasonably stated evidence, I guess.
But that does sort of indicate that you were towing a specific line and just eager to do so without waiting for that point to actually be made in order to counter it.
When the further point, that you were responding to something no one had said, was made, you then went on to provide further information as if you were continuing to make a germane refutation. Without addressing the fact that you had erected and then continued to argue against a strawman. Your own strawman.
I think by now, we’re mostly aware of the circumstances that lead to such insanity, but that’s not to say that providing information about the state of affairs is without value, it certainly is valuable. Perhaps you could have chosen a better method of introducing that information?
Steel sharpens steel and all that, and the process of sharpening one’s arguments and wit is an important one. But I saw a good argument and some questionable wit, and I find it difficult to hold my tongue. 
A birdy once told me a few years ago that hospitals get a lot of supplies for free or practically nothing. Manufacturers do it for promotional purposes as there’s a strong endorcement value to haveing a name-brand product visible in such a professional setting.
Yet I don’t know if this practice is widespread today or if it was limited to Lysol and cotton balls, not aspirin and certain drugs. I do remember my doctor giving me a two week course of antibiotics when I was a kid, and they were all samples.
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