The Future of the American Medicine Cabinet

All the wrong people are excited about Obama's FDA picks.

Ronald Bailey | March 17, 2009

(Page 2 of 2)

Evidence shows that the FDA has been increasingly driven by critics and Congress towards ever more risk averse behavior. The danger here is that bureaucratic timidity kills. A 2005 study by economists at the University of Chicago calculated that the speed-up in FDA drug approvals that occurred after 1992 may have been responsible for saving the equivalent of 180,000 to 310,000 life-years (the sum of the years of life that would have been lost had the new drugs not been available). Over the same period, about 56,000 life-years—at worst—were lost to drugs that were eventually withdrawn for safety reasons.

Perhaps Hamburg and Sharfstein will buck this trend toward excessive caution and help speed up the process of getting new medicines to patients. Unfortunately, the preliminary signs are not good.

Ronald Bailey is Reason magazine's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

Disclosure: I am an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Comments

Lefiti|3.17.09 @ 4:38PM|#

Shouldn't Ronald "Any Obscure Global Warming Skeptic Will Do" Bailey have some beat other than science. The man has a fucking BA in economics, for Christ's sake.

|3.17.09 @ 4:39PM|#

Shut up, Lonewacko!

|3.17.09 @ 4:42PM|#

In welcoming Hamburg and Sharfstein, Bill Vaughan, a Consumers Union health analyst, declared, "The American medicine cabinet has become a little shop of horrors. In recent years, the agency has been too slow to protect consumers and too willing to give industries a pass on safety."

Get ready for more expensive medicines. You are welcome to come to Tijuana and buy as many as you want - and it is not like people down here are dying in droves for being unprotected by a bloated, inoperative bureaucracy. You can get cheap Viagra for $10.00 a BOTTLE, not $10.00 a pill.

|3.17.09 @ 4:56PM|#

[i]However, the most recent data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control do not find a significant change, either up or down, in foodborne illnesses in recent years-although such illnesses are down appreciably from 10 years ago. Of course, that record could be improved, and Hamburg and Sharfstein have strong credentials in this area.[/i]

The link contained in this statement in your article wants me to log in, Ronald. Can you point to the same data somewhere else?

|3.17.09 @ 4:56PM|#

Insert proper tags where required. And I will preview my statements almost all the time from now on.

|3.17.09 @ 5:05PM|#

Just guessing here -

Bad for business.
Bad for consumers.
Good for regulators.

All new processes/regulations will affect the margins, they won't be easily quantifiable.


Oh yeah, it's a hand job for the activists. That is, not real satisfying but better that stroking your own pud.

Lefiti|3.17.09 @ 5:09PM|#

Where is that propagandist pimp Jesse Walker to praise the high level of discourse on display here?

Bosco|3.17.09 @ 5:13PM|#

Here's an interesting piece about diversity at Columbia:

The "diverse" contribution that black and brown students purportedly offer is not important enough to a college education to justify elevating difference over performance.

It certainly isn't even to them -- "diverse" students don't enjoy being called on it. "We are not here to provide diversity training for Kate or Timmy," black undergrads at Harvard have written in a guidebook for black students. In a poll of minority graduates of the University of Michigan's law school from 1970 to 1996 asking which of seven aspects of their education they had most valued at the school, the top two were "faculty ability as teachers" and "intellectual abilities as classmates." They rated "ethnic diversity of classmates" and "being called on in class" at the very bottom.

In that light I shudder to imagine objectifying my black students by focusing attention on them when we discussed W.E.B. Du Bois. It's also instructive to imagine asking a middle-class black student precisely what "diversity" she brings to a campus -- as opposed to a Mormon, a lesbian, or someone who raises clams as a hobby.


http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2009/03/i_have_been_teaching_a.html

O\'Taktix®|3.17.09 @ 5:15PM|#

Lefiti,

You're back man! I missed you soooooo much this morning! Where were ya? :)

SIV|3.17.09 @ 5:46PM|#

If I could abolish just one Federal agency it would be the FDA, unless the Justice Department is on the table.Then I'm kind of torn......

O\'Taktix®|3.17.09 @ 6:30PM|#

SIV,

Fuck that, FCC goes first, hands down...

|3.17.09 @ 7:42PM|#

Lefiti: Economics AND philosophy, thank you very much.

|3.17.09 @ 8:13PM|#

If the FDA tries to regulate vitamins, expect Obama's poll ratings to drop another five points.

Lefiti|3.17.09 @ 9:14PM|#

But just B.A.s, right Ron?

Kevin Carson|3.17.09 @ 10:57PM|#

You'd never guess it from the boilerplate the pharma apologists churn out, but most of the high cost of developing drugs comes not from the cost of developing the version actually marketed, but rather from gaming the patent system. The drug companies do all kinds of extra R&D to secure patent lockdown on the different possible variants of a drug, to prevent a competitor from marketing it.

I'd like to see a REAL free market policy:
1) eliminate drug patents;
2) eliminate FDR testing requirements and let civil liability and insurance premiums drive safety; and
3) eliminate all R&D subsidies.

Lefiti|3.18.09 @ 1:07AM|#

I, of course, have a PhD in every scientific field, and received the commandments from God on high telling me how everyone should live their lives, which is why I'm qualifiied to come here every night to call you irrelevant assholes. God I hate my life!

Lefiti|3.18.09 @ 1:10AM|#

Stop spoofing me, you free-market fundamentalist fucktard asshole dickhead Reptilian Jews from the center of the Earth! Or else I'll spoof you! Yeah, I know you're there, Episiarch! I'll own you so badly with my spoofing that you'll cry like a little girl and go running out of your squalid apartment weeping.

Yeah, I'm that good.

Lefiti|3.18.09 @ 1:11AM|#

Being angry gives me a hardon.

Lefiti|3.18.09 @ 1:11AM|#

I didn't write that! AAARRRGHH!

Beelzebud|3.18.09 @ 2:01AM|#

2) eliminate FDR testing requirements and let civil liability and insurance premiums drive safety;

Are you for real? Correct me if I'm misreading you, but are you saying that after a few deaths the drug company and insurance companies will be forced to "do the right thing?"

What planet do you people live on where you actually hate government enough to advocate just letting people die or be injured so the free market can regulate itself?

This is why libertarians will NEVER be taken seriously by rational people. So much for 'reason'.

|3.18.09 @ 2:37AM|#

Correct me if I'm misreading you, but are you saying that after a few deaths the drug company and insurance companies will be forced to "do the right thing?"

How many people are you willing to kill while they're waiting for the bureaucratic maze to be navigated? How many people are you willing to kill whose lives could be saved by taking a drug that has a rare but serious or fatal side effect, but you won't allow it to be approved because you think people are too stupid to make the decision for themselves?

Beelzebud|3.18.09 @ 12:52PM|#

Unless someone is a PHD in medicine then they are too stupid to make a decision like that.

Or do you think we should just get rid of universities now too?

Individualism is fine, but you take it to the irrational unreasonable extreme.

|3.18.09 @ 1:16PM|#

Unless someone is a PHD in medicine then they are too stupid to make a decision like that.

Ah, the fallacy of credentialism. I wondered when it would show its ugly head. That medical degree (hopefully) gives the doctor competence regarding knowledge of the uses and side effects of the drug in question. It gives them no, none, zero, zilch, nada competence to decide what side effects I should be willing to suffer. That is properly my decision, not the doctor's.

|3.18.09 @ 4:32PM|#

I heard Obama's going to tax aspirin, because it's white and it works.

Beelzebud|3.18.09 @ 6:04PM|#

mike proves why this site is a waste of time.

One set of people are fine to let the market decide what drugs are safe, which really means let companies do what they want until the pile of bodies gets too high to ignore; and another set that can't do much but make stupid racist jokes.

Old Soul|3.19.09 @ 8:12AM|#

You all can insult each other all you want, but as someone with a chronic, incurable condition, I find parts of this extremely disturbing. Most of the medications that are effective are used "off-label." They weren't developed for my condition, but they are the only things that keep me functional. To prevent educating doctors on the other potential uses of a drug doens't make a lot of sense and is preventing the treatment of serious conditions for no good reason.

|3.23.09 @ 10:13AM|#

I was on a date the other day with this girl I've been seeing, and while she thought doctors should be able to prescribe marajuana (since her father had cancer a few years ago) she doesn't believe we should even be looking into genetics, or doing research or understanding beyond what we already do. "that's scary to even know, that's god's domain we shouldn't know that"

wtf? Let people suffer and die then out of fear? I didn't say it like that but maybe I should have, it is disgusting how people are more than willing to put others through suffering out of their own fear or so that they can enforce their own morality.

|3.23.09 @ 10:21AM|#

"but are you saying that after a few deaths the drug company and insurance companies will be forced to "do the right thing?"

people are already suffering and dying, we should not pat our selves on the back for getting in the way of those that want to help them, out of fear that they might harm some percentage of them instead.

Which is better, a doctor informing a patient about the possible effects and the patient making an informed decision, or a lawyer or accountant making the decision for him, no matter what the patient or the doctor thinks? that's why I am no longer in an HMO.