Conceited? What? So your signing over rights of decision-making to government bureaucrats is an act of humble graciousness? Good Lord. You’re grasping at straws.
Tyranny of the majority. Sounds great. I assume you were on board with George Bush and all of his policies from 2000-2008.
If the majority is a bunch of right-wing fundamentalists, you’re cool with that? You’re “down with that noise”, as the young people like to say?
Or do you only want Good Benevolent Dictators to tell you what to do, and take offense if the wrong flavor of politician happens to occupy the big white marble buildings in Washington, D.C.?
The Medicare example provided by furt is another great example of the need to refine regulations in response to changing conditions. Pass legislation to change the reimbursement rate, and the problem is solved. Yet some would have us conclude that this outcome requires us to eliminate Medicare altogether.
40% of food poisoning occurs in the home, are you ready to open your doors to health inspectors?
I’m required to have a food managers certification from the health department, would you also like to be required?
What you’ll soon realize is that by pretending to keep us safe, the government has made people ignorant. Do you know what’s in the ground turkey you bought today? Do you know where it came from? Are you sure it won’t be part of tomorrow’s recall?
I am “down with” neither example, but I am down with the system that brought them to power. I know that, though the inexorable arc of history is toward more liberal and progressive ideals, there will be temporary losses. Under your feudal system, I see no mechanism for long term liberal change, so I reject it.
And what if that attitude has made you less safe? What if ceding your right to determine your own safety has lowered safety to the lowest-common denominator? What if a government inspector was corrupt or bought off?
If the FDA didn’t exist, how do you think prescription drugs would make it into the marketplace? Remember, we’re talking prescription drugs, so a doctor is in the mix. Let’s walk through how safety of those drugs might be ensured:
First, the doctor has a vested interest in not killing you, or giving you drugs that won’t do anything. The doctor likely has malpractice insurance. That insurer has a vested interest in not paying out millions of dollars in malpractice lawsuits.
So… You can bet that there will be drug testing labs set up by insurers, just as the IIHS exists for auto makers, and UL exists for electrical devices. Those testing labs are going to require that doctors only prescribe drugs they have improved, or the doctor’s insurance will be invalid.
Now, what happens if this agency becomes too risk-averse, or lets too many risky drugs through? Competition will arise. Some insurance companies will see a need to set up their own tests. The best of these testing companies will have a stronger brand recognition.
Drug manufacturers seeking the widest market penetration will seek out and advertise those certifications. Drug bottles might have “DIA (Drug Insurers of America)” approved drug for migraines." stamped on them.
Because we’re dealing with free markets instead of one set of government regulations, we can also adapt to patient conditions. We can recognize that perhaps it’s reasonable to take a greater safety risk on a drug to treat Stage IV Cancer than for a drug to treat shingles. Doctors will have discretion.
Also, drugs will enter the market slowly, just as products enter the market slowly in other industries. Early adopters - people with high risk tolerance or serious health issues - will take the drugs first. We’ll learn from them. If a drug slips through all the testing regimes and turns out to be dangerous, we’re more likely to catch it before it hits the wider market.
Now, what happens when the government certifies a drug? Everyone assumes it must be safe, and it penetrates the wider market immediately. If the government gets it wrong, disaster can ensue. Because of this, the government becomes overly risk-averse. Drug trials get longer and longer, and more and more expensive. If the whole process gets way out of whack, there’s no way to correct for it like there would be if the market regulated drug safety through competition.
Again, we already have examples of this - you could remove government safety testing from the auto industry tomorrow and no one would notice, because the private market has already created safety standards higher than the government minimums.
And now, given all the strong mechanisms that already exist, ask yourself how much stronger they might be, and how much more market value safety might have, if people no longer assumed that everything met a minimum level of safety because after all, the government wouldn’t allow it to be sold if it wasn’t safe.
As an aside, that assumption of safety and efficacy actually aids the herbal/homeopathic/crank medicine market. There are a lot of people out there who don’t do their own due diligence on these products simply because they assume they must be safe and work because the government allows them to be sold. They don’t understand the nuances in regulation between these drugs and manufactured drugs. The snake oil merchants don’t get around government regulation - they COUNT on it to provide them cover.
Maybe if people learned that they’re ultimately responsible for their own safety we’d see even healthier markets and less snake oil and shoddy crap.
When ever I see this baloney, I put my hand on my wallet and back away. Any time somebody says I am healthier, safer or stronger by myself than I am in a collective of like-minded citizens, I know the only thing they are interested in is dividing and conquering for their own interests. No thank you.
You are in a collective of like minded citizens - all the people in the same market you’re in. It’s just that with government, that ‘collective’ generally breaks down into two parties which then go at each other’s throats for control of the levers of power. In the marketplace, collective action is much more efficient and selective, and occurs without rancor, except for people who follow sports or put stickers of Calvin peeing on a Ford on the back of their Chevy trucks.
I am less skeptical of this claim than Fear Itself, but I would like to know your opinion on why this wasn’t the case prior to the FDA’s founding. Patent medicines and the like were rampant, and were a leading cause of the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act (as well as abuses in the meat-packing industry).
Is it your contention that information levels were simply too low back then and are higher now? Or that the Pure Food and Drug Act was an overreaction then?
A combination of those. The Pure Food and Drug Act was a response to political pressure due to a couple of highly publicized cases. And society was much poorer then - a common mode of criticism of markets has people comparing today’s regulated markets with the unregulated markets of the 1800’s - ignoring the fact that the quality of products we have today has far more to do with our higher level of wealth than with regulation. Everything was worse in the early 1900’s than it is now, whether or not government eventually got into the act.
We also had less scientific knowledge, less ability to test goods, less free time to read, no TV or internet, etc. Conditions change. The regulations just get heavier. The original Pure Food and Drug Act wasn’t that bad - it was the Kefauver amendments in the 1960’s the gave the FDA so much power over drugs - in particular efficacy testing instead of just testing for safety.
This is why I think it’s much better to compare industries today that have varying levels of regulation. Making comparisons between us and the people who lived 100 years ago isn’t as interesting because there are too many other factors. But if you can show that a current industry that is not regulated has better or as good safety standards than one that is, given the same population and the same environment, that’s a much stronger argument.
I would point out as well that all those regulations hasn’t stopped snake oil from being sold. Homeopathic medicine is a big industry - and it’s all a fraud. Stuff like that will exist whether or not you have regulation. I wouldn’t argue that a privately-regulated drug industry will be absolutely free from scams or mistakes - just that on balance it would be better than what we have now, given that the cost of drugs is exploding and the amount of R&D in drugs is falling, which is what’s happening today. I would also argue that a lot of this snake oil exists precisely because of the assumption of safety given by a wide government safety net. If people don’t know where the net exists and where it doesn’t and assume it exists everywhere, they’re more likely to assume products are safe when they’re not.
So what you’re saying is that all the government regulation didn’t get rid of the snake oil? But I thought that’s what it’s for? Did you just admit that the FDA has failed in one of its primary missions?
Let me guess - this is an argument for MORE regulation?
That’s the argument I hear about markets. Every time something happens in the market that has a bad outcome, there’s a call for government regulation. But if government regulation screws up - it’s proof that we need more government regulation.
That’s because I trust the government more than I trust the market. I would much rather be the victim of government incompetence and indifference than be deliberately sacrificed on the altar of corporate greed.
First, could you explain how wealth has anything to do with it?
You neglected far more important difference. With the primitive state of medicine back then, a drug that helped lots of people but had a few percent mortality rate might have been considered fine, if anyone even realized what the mortality rate was.
Second, though we have the internet, we also have a much more detailed understanding of how the body works, and drugs that work a lot more subtly than drugs did back then. My wife is a biologist and writes for on-line medical encyclopedias, and she needs all her background to understand how the drugs and diseases she writes about work. I wouldn’t want to pick or evaluate a drug, and I have a good bit of statistical background. How do you think Joe Average would do?
You’d also have to select for equal risk - PCs are very safe, after all. Plus other things. China may have more or less equivalent regulations as us, but if they are not enforced due to corruption the situations are not comparable.
An excellent example - since “supplements” are not regulate due to political influence - and from a Democrat I’m sorry to admit. Homeopathic remedies are an excellent case for efficacy testing. They certainly won’t hurt you directly, but they won’t help you either. If you are imagining an ailment, they are perfect, but if you have a real one you might be in trouble. They can’t make health claims, imagine what things would be like if they could. How many people would choose the cheaper solution with the same health claims, not the more expensive but effective one? You rightly call them a fraud, but you seem to want to increase their market share.
See, that’s the thing. Regulation hasn’t necessarily screwed up in many cases. It’s just not been 100% effective, and the alternative would be worse.
Yes, we are a good deal more advanced technologically, and on the whole we’re better educated now than we were in the 1800s. If we adopted the positions you and emacknight espoused, we’d gradually regress to that era. People wouldn’t have time for schooling or for specializing in a chosen field, because they’d be too busy watching their backs. Innovation would slow as people refused to try new things, preferring to stick with what’s been tried and tested. Wealth would flow into the hands of only a few, leaving the rest of us killing ourselves to maintain a lifestyle of poverty.
Regulation that prevents people from preying on others is a good thing. It’s what got us where we are today. It’s why you feel safe enough to advocate throwing it out, believing your safety and prosperity is due wholly to your own personal intelligence and guile.