George Gilder writes in the latest Forbes magazine (the article also appears here) that overly meddlesome federal government bureaucracy is standing in the way of real improvements in American health care.
To paymaster politicians, health care is a huge cost center. Health care is not really a problem but a huge opportunity for new drugs, medical instruments and biomedical advances. No U.S. health care cost crisis looms, after all, in paying the bills for smallpox, polio, TB, cholera, typhoid or malaria.
Obscuring the huge opportunity of new knowledge in pharma, though, is the obsolete apparat of government power. With 16,500 new IRS agents and no new doctors, ObamaCare pushes on with its bureaucratic grab-and-gouge.
Meanwhile, in the face of a flood of biotech innovations, the Food and Drug Administration inflicts an average $2.3 billion toll on each new drug. Getting to market through the government gauntlet now takes three times longer and costs a hundred times more than in 1950. …
… The message of genetic information theory is that every human is different and most diseases and cancers are constantly changing, like AIDS. The FDA’s pursuit of level playing fields and average patients eliminates all the crucial knowledge that makes drugs work with a particular person. As Huber says, “For a drug to perform well, we need to select the patient to fit it.” Even thalidomide, the notorious cause of grisly birth defects, has become a lifesaving drug for victims of myeloma and leprosy.
In the absence of the crucial knowledge of the interactive molecular science of patients and drugs, no exercise of bureaucratic government power can achieve any gains in health care.
Crippling both the vaccine and the antibiotic industries, with most large companies abandoning antibiotic research, the FDA is in the process of prostrating U.S. defenses before the threat of bioterrorism.
To break the failed health care paradigm, dispersed knowledge must be complemented by dispersed power of patients and their physicians. Knowledge must prevail over power in a new paradigm of information-age medicine.