Kansas Health

FDA as racketeer

[Sunni Maravillosa, "The FDA is Going to Kill Me," The Price of Liberty, 7 December 2004.]

The chains of regulation wrap tightly around the pharmaceutical industry, and the cost to bring a new drug to market now reaches to $800 million. At the same time, though, it should not come as a surprise that these same pharmaceutical companies receive some benefits from this regulation. As Sunni Maravillosa explains, regulatory agencies serve to some degree the same role as the mafia - exacting a toll on those they oversee, but also providing "protection" from others. On balance, everyone loses in this scenario but the ones who get to set the rules:

The FDA is the main agency involved, and it's responsible for very much of what's wrong with health care in America. For an excellent, highly informative examination of the FDA, see the Independent Institute FDA Review web site. The history page is not to be missed. It lays out the wholesale power grab by the agency -- a sneaky effort that involved codifying a private, voluntarily adopted standard, and twisting a law intended to get consumers more information into today's prescription-only and OTC (over the counter) categories of drugs. The process has had far-reaching consequences, including: anointing one class of health-care providers as The Chosen Ones, who wield the power to dispense potent nostrums even though they very often have a poor understanding of what they're doing; making it extremely difficult for consumers to obtain intelligible information, or to evaluate claims and counterclaims; and sucking almost all power and dignity from an already-vulnerable individual, using the guise of "informed consent" as a disguise that few Americans seem to see through.

I chose the title of this essay because I do think it will be the FDA that ultimately kills me -- as it's done thousands of individuals before me, and will continue to do until it meets its own richly-deserved death. I'm increasingly unwilling to do what it requires of me to get the health care I need. I know the medicine I need, the proper doses and such, and know how to tell if it isn't working -- who has the right to tell me that I can't obtain it in a private transaction free of gatekeepers and permission slips? Who has the right to keep any individual from obtaining easy to understand, accurate information about any medical condition and treatment options? Who ought to decide what treatment an individual is able to try?