A Nuanced Opposition to the FDA and Similar Regulatory Agencies

As regular readers will know, I am no great admirer of medical regulation as it presently exists in the wealthier parts of the world. It is a burdensome system, in which whatever power good intentions have to make the world a better place has long been eroded away by the short-term human incentives present in any large bureaucratic organization. What is left is a system in which it costs multiples of what it should cost to bring medicine into the clinic at an appropriate level of risk, a system that acts primarily to suppress rather than encourage development of new medical technology, and a system that tramples upon the rights of patients to make their own informed choices. In the past my prescription for a better future has been one in which medical tourism flourishes: the use of regulatory arbitrage to bring medicine to the clinic in a responsible way in places outside the US. The eminently dysfunction US medical system, in which no party is incentivized to control costs, the most influential parties collude to prevent cost discovery, and quoted costs have little relation to actual costs, leads to a situation in which it is cheaper to fly halfway around the world to another country to receive even modest procedures. So let medical tourism grow as a form of pressure upon the existing regulatory system, because competition from outside is the only thing that has a hope of resulting in significant reform. Any number of people work within the system on initiative...
Source: Fight Aging! - Category: Research Authors: Tags: Politics and Legislation Source Type: blogs