Restricting and regulating medicine


How government prevents cheaper alternatives and encourages sickness
Gods, I was laughing over this one. If ever there was a collection of reasons why medicine should be deregulated and thrown open to the free market, this is it. Emphasis added.

A complicated system of mutual dependency distorts the incentives. "The FDA is like the FCC and Big Pharma is like the regional Bells" is what Mr. Kessler hears from Don Listwin, a former Cisco executive who now heads the Canary Foundation, a Silicon Valley-based effort to promote preventive medicine. In other words, in medicine as in telecom, the big players end up exploiting regulations more than opposing them, if only to preserve their monopolies. The Food and Drug Administration--understandably but narrow-mindedly--wants "cures" for cancer and other diseases. Thus tens of thousands of chemicals are screened, only a handful make it even to Phase I trials, and by the time a new drug is approved a billion dollars has been spent. Even then the new drug may help only 10% of patients.

Yet if someone were to invent a device with a wide, preventive usefulness--say, a nanotech implant that would spot the proteins that indicate the first minute presence of cancer--it would have to go through the same process of billion-dollar testing. Since the government and insurance companies are reluctant to add anything to their repertoire of coverage--and since such a device would be targeted at the much broader pool of people who are not sick--research might well stall in its earliest phases for lack of reimbursement-funding.

Yes, it is possible to object that doctors and insurance companies do engage in preventive medicine. Don't they urge annual checkups? Don't insurers even pay for them? But that's not the kind of preventive medicine Mr. Kessler is talking about. He means devices that bypass doctors completely. There are diagnostic tools that work as easily as a home pregnancy test. They're just hard to access.

In one hilarious sequence, Mr. Kessler recounts trying to draw his own blood sample, in the hope of checking his cholesterol. But clinics won't draw blood without a doctor's orders. Drugstores think you want the syringe to shoot heroin. Unless you want to just gouge your own finger, you're in the clutches of organized medicine. Imagine how tightly it grips something a bit more sophisticated.

Yep, regulation stifling the free market.

I read a study years ago that claimed that a dollar spent in prevention could prevent several hundred dollars in treatment. That kind of payback is worth watching. It's not available because of the way that the system is regulated.

Government is not your friend.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Tue - July 18, 2006 at 04:27 AM  Tag


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