Faster Cures and the Costs of Medical Regulation

I think that it's no great surprise that many people see the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and its ilk in other countries as a gargantuan ball and chain dragging down progress. Yet few of these take the fully libertarian position that the FDA should be removed and the demand for safety assurance provided by a marketplace of review and certification organizations. Instead most such advocates argue for a return to the smaller FDA and much less onerous review process that existed in the past. They note that FDA administrators have perverse incentives to block as much progress as possible, and that they have followed these incentives across recent decades to greatly increase the amount of time and money required to obtain approval for new medical technologies. FDA bureaucrats are blamed for letting through any technology that causes even a tiny amount of harm, while receive no personal benefit for approving something that is safe, and receive no personal penalty from slowing down or blocking perfectly safe technologies from approval. There is no such thing as a perfectly safe medical technology: it is always a cost-benefit analysis for even the most beneficial technologies developed to date, and the mass media tends to inflate every harm done without taking account of the benefits. Everything else proceeds from that, and the consequence is that ever fewer new medicines are approved, there is less funding for development, and many lines of research are abandoned because t...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Politics and Legislation Source Type: blogs