The great American drug shortage isn't an accident, it's artificial (from Organized Money)

An Arm and a Leg

Society & Culture, Medicine, Health, Health & Fitness, Documentary

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 18 July 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As a follow-up to our series The Prescription Drug Playbook — all about how you can get the meds you need at a price you can (maybe) afford — we’re stepping back to look at the big picture.

From the start of this podcast, we’ve been trying to answer a major question: Why do my meds cost so freaking much? And we’ve highlighted the profit-seeking games that insurance, pharma, and middlemen play all around us in more than a half dozen episodes.

But there’s one set of players on the field that we’ve never talked about: drug distributors, and how they play a role in another reason you may not be able to get your medicine: drug shortages.

This story comes from our friends at Organized Money, a podcast about monopolies, from writers and journalists David Dayen and Matt Stoller.

We think you’re going to like it.

In the meantime, check out the latest installment of our First Aid Kit newsletter for a rundown of our previous coverage of drug costs.

Here’s a transcript of this episode.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Joshua McNichols.
0:02.4	And I'm Monica Nicholsper.
0:04.2	We host KOWW's economy podcast, booming.
0:07.7	For decades, Washington's iconic timber industry has been on a long decline.
0:12.4	On the latest episode, President Trump wants to bring those lumber jobs back.
0:17.3	Could his strategy revive the industry in the Northwest?
0:20.9	This could present an opportunity, but it's probably not a permanent lifeline.
0:25.7	Find booming on the KUOW app or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:30.0	Hey there.
0:30.8	We've got kind of a follow-up here to the series we just finished about prescription drugs.
0:36.6	And through that whole series, we stayed super focused on one thing, how to get the medicine
0:42.3	you need for prices you might be able to afford, you know, patches, workarounds for this
0:47.5	broken system.
0:49.1	And we mostly held ourselves back from talking about the system itself.
0:55.4	And we've talked before,
1:01.0	we will again, about why meds are so expensive, about the role of pharma companies and of middleman entities called pharmacy benefit managers. But it turns out, there's another set of
1:07.9	players in this system who we've never looked at.
1:11.7	And they have a role in another reason you might not be able to get the drugs you need
1:16.0	because some of the most important life-saving drugs, they're in shortage.
1:21.6	And those shortages, they're not really an accident.
1:25.4	They're the result of a monopoly.
1:29.4	So, this story comes from our friends Matt Stoller and David Dayen at the podcast Organized
	...

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