Can someone please create a cure for stupidity? (Nope, R&D is too high.)
This semester I'm fulfilling my last Business Breadth requirement with a Healthcare Management course. Thought it would be useful.
It is. But right now my studying is severely hampered by bouts of anger. Is the public simply brain-dead? (Never mind, we all know the answer to that.) Can anything good come about without full dependance on the nature of politics? (Well, we know that, too.)
OK, folks. I love low prices. Really, really love 'em, a frickin' lot. And generic drugs rock my world. But the new technology has to come from somewhere. Someone has to figure out what new molecules will make unpleasant (debilitating, life-threatening) illnesses go away. So do not make it any harder for the drug companies to get their products to market, or to sell them. They are not the big bad wolf.
Have any of these advocates looked into how many failed attempts these research firms have, how much it costs for one drug to come from idea to realization and then pass the FDA's stringent tests--the FDA that has a significant political incentive not to approve new medicines? How long it takes? Do they even think about that? This scene of drug prices is part of a big picture. For once this is not about big firms just trying to screw people over, and all these people want to do is look at the short-term solutions. As always.
Seriously, that Donna Shalala had balls to refuse to enact the importation law that politicians on both sides used in election year in lieu of facing the Medicare crisis as a pretend show of love for the public. Fortunately she had evidence from the actual proposed law to back up her action, not just the fact that it would actually help lead to a drug crisis of medicines not existing a decade or so in the future. But to keep going with this example, if we look at all the crises that our country has faced over the years, consider how many of them could have been prevented if politicians hadn't been pressured by the short-term-oriented, dumb-but-vocal* segments of the population to make pretenses of bringing about solutions that only ultimately compounded the problem.
Come to that, a great many individual medical crises (e.g. heart disease) could be prevented or greatly reduced if people just looked a few years in the future and made some minor lifestyle changes now, rather than waiting to get bitch-slapped by a coronary or other severe symptom to start caring about solving a problem that could have been kept from arising in the first place?
Seriously, it is painful for me to read about all these changes and attempted changes to the drug industry that come about because of the public's dumb perspective on just and only the immediate present.
Take the FDA for example. It was made to regulate food (after some public outcries over media attention on a few specific cases). We should have an FA and a DA, and that DA should be held just as accountable for statistical lives lost because of standing in the way of a wonder drug as it currently is for identifiable lives impacted when it approves a drug that causes too many or too extreme adverse "side"-effects. It should not take drug companies pairing with advocacy groups for various illnesses (like breast cancer) to give the FDA some incentive to consider blocking drug approval an unacceptable error. (Or lower the goddamn repercussions for letting a "bad" drug get through. Balance, folks.) Speaking of which . . .
So, the FDA is never scrutinized by Congress for statistical lives lost/negatively impacted, only identifiable ones. They only get pressure when an advocacy group can catch media attention and bring a political incentive for the FDA to move its ass on approval. (This is a bad situation to start with, asking the impossible of an already-screwed-up government organization that I am usually criticizing, not siding with.) But when it takes media attention for a political push, it means that only groups that can gain sympathy can get that push. While breast cancer supporters have sponsored Walks to gain funding for medical research, supporters of mental health patients are having Walks to stamp out stigma. The people who commit suicide or just have no real lives because the FDA hasn't approved a certain drug (yet) are hardly even identifiable as statistics, so much less than patients with physical health problems. It doesn't capture the public goodwill to stand up and say, "Because XYZ Drug Company had to overcome so many scientific, economic, regulatory, and political hurdles to bring drug A to market, I've been lying in bed all the time for the past twenty years, living off of welfare." If statistical mental health patients adversely affected by drugs not being invented or coming to market try to become identifiable human beings, those identified will be ostracized. This is the most invisible bunch.
So people make a million contradictory demands of the FDA, making a fuss whenever something spectacular happens, wanting short-term results, and ignore all the invisible victims of this mess. I've cut so many examples of idiotic things out of this post because it just made me too upset to hash through them again. We can't have everything. I hate it, too. But I'd rather have drugs on the market that can dramatically improve or even save my and other people's lives than have them not get created because people bitched about high coinsurance for the drugs that were improving and saving their lives at the time--and got political support for it. The money to research and invent the drugs has to come from somewhere, so suck it up. I have. I will continue to do so. Because people need those drugs to have good lives, and I want them available to me and those I love when one of us comes down with a severe illness.
We live in a big picture. Putting a Band-Aid on a ruptured artery will only help for a millisecond.
Besides, can't these people at least bitch intelligently?
Back to the books. Let's see how far I get before I have to vent to someone again to prevent my head from exploding in seething anger at the dumb masses in a society that only changes with political support, or get mortally bored from the book telling me things that I already know while sprinkling in infuriating examples of said stupidity. Until next time, folks.
*pun not intended, but fully accepted
It is. But right now my studying is severely hampered by bouts of anger. Is the public simply brain-dead? (Never mind, we all know the answer to that.) Can anything good come about without full dependance on the nature of politics? (Well, we know that, too.)
OK, folks. I love low prices. Really, really love 'em, a frickin' lot. And generic drugs rock my world. But the new technology has to come from somewhere. Someone has to figure out what new molecules will make unpleasant (debilitating, life-threatening) illnesses go away. So do not make it any harder for the drug companies to get their products to market, or to sell them. They are not the big bad wolf.
Have any of these advocates looked into how many failed attempts these research firms have, how much it costs for one drug to come from idea to realization and then pass the FDA's stringent tests--the FDA that has a significant political incentive not to approve new medicines? How long it takes? Do they even think about that? This scene of drug prices is part of a big picture. For once this is not about big firms just trying to screw people over, and all these people want to do is look at the short-term solutions. As always.
Seriously, that Donna Shalala had balls to refuse to enact the importation law that politicians on both sides used in election year in lieu of facing the Medicare crisis as a pretend show of love for the public. Fortunately she had evidence from the actual proposed law to back up her action, not just the fact that it would actually help lead to a drug crisis of medicines not existing a decade or so in the future. But to keep going with this example, if we look at all the crises that our country has faced over the years, consider how many of them could have been prevented if politicians hadn't been pressured by the short-term-oriented, dumb-but-vocal* segments of the population to make pretenses of bringing about solutions that only ultimately compounded the problem.
Come to that, a great many individual medical crises (e.g. heart disease) could be prevented or greatly reduced if people just looked a few years in the future and made some minor lifestyle changes now, rather than waiting to get bitch-slapped by a coronary or other severe symptom to start caring about solving a problem that could have been kept from arising in the first place?
Seriously, it is painful for me to read about all these changes and attempted changes to the drug industry that come about because of the public's dumb perspective on just and only the immediate present.
Take the FDA for example. It was made to regulate food (after some public outcries over media attention on a few specific cases). We should have an FA and a DA, and that DA should be held just as accountable for statistical lives lost because of standing in the way of a wonder drug as it currently is for identifiable lives impacted when it approves a drug that causes too many or too extreme adverse "side"-effects. It should not take drug companies pairing with advocacy groups for various illnesses (like breast cancer) to give the FDA some incentive to consider blocking drug approval an unacceptable error. (Or lower the goddamn repercussions for letting a "bad" drug get through. Balance, folks.) Speaking of which . . .
So, the FDA is never scrutinized by Congress for statistical lives lost/negatively impacted, only identifiable ones. They only get pressure when an advocacy group can catch media attention and bring a political incentive for the FDA to move its ass on approval. (This is a bad situation to start with, asking the impossible of an already-screwed-up government organization that I am usually criticizing, not siding with.) But when it takes media attention for a political push, it means that only groups that can gain sympathy can get that push. While breast cancer supporters have sponsored Walks to gain funding for medical research, supporters of mental health patients are having Walks to stamp out stigma. The people who commit suicide or just have no real lives because the FDA hasn't approved a certain drug (yet) are hardly even identifiable as statistics, so much less than patients with physical health problems. It doesn't capture the public goodwill to stand up and say, "Because XYZ Drug Company had to overcome so many scientific, economic, regulatory, and political hurdles to bring drug A to market, I've been lying in bed all the time for the past twenty years, living off of welfare." If statistical mental health patients adversely affected by drugs not being invented or coming to market try to become identifiable human beings, those identified will be ostracized. This is the most invisible bunch.
So people make a million contradictory demands of the FDA, making a fuss whenever something spectacular happens, wanting short-term results, and ignore all the invisible victims of this mess. I've cut so many examples of idiotic things out of this post because it just made me too upset to hash through them again. We can't have everything. I hate it, too. But I'd rather have drugs on the market that can dramatically improve or even save my and other people's lives than have them not get created because people bitched about high coinsurance for the drugs that were improving and saving their lives at the time--and got political support for it. The money to research and invent the drugs has to come from somewhere, so suck it up. I have. I will continue to do so. Because people need those drugs to have good lives, and I want them available to me and those I love when one of us comes down with a severe illness.
We live in a big picture. Putting a Band-Aid on a ruptured artery will only help for a millisecond.
Besides, can't these people at least bitch intelligently?
Back to the books. Let's see how far I get before I have to vent to someone again to prevent my head from exploding in seething anger at the dumb masses in a society that only changes with political support, or get mortally bored from the book telling me things that I already know while sprinkling in infuriating examples of said stupidity. Until next time, folks.
*pun not intended, but fully accepted