4 ms·

I should have slid in the word 'significantly' like I did in the previous sentence. You're willing to take significantly more risk that a routine drug prescrip

by jbooth 13y ago

I should have slid in the word 'significantly' like I did in the previous sentence. You're willing to take significantly more risk that a routine drug prescription harms/kills you in order to streamline the process for drug companies? (Note that there already is a process in place for those with advanced diseases that justify a high-risk drug to take experimental drugs with knowledge of the risks).

dllthomas 13y ago
Without pinning things down quite a bit more into specific proposals, I'm not willing to do much of anything. I'm just saying that sometimes increased risk for decreased money and increased time can be a good trade-off, and any given proposal should be evaluated on its merits.
- jbooth 13y ago
  Sure. If the proposal is "government is tyranny, abolish the FDA!", there aren't any merits, the proposal is fundamentally unserious and comes from a place of deliberate ignorance. That's the kind of idiocy I was objecting to. Any realistic proposal (as in, we have an idea of how much extra risk we're incurring) is going to have a lot of technical details and probably require a huge amount of research to justify it -- it's human lives that we're talking about here. The potential $ savings are big but that doesn't matter if you're dead. Like I said way upthread, there is plenty of room for improvement, but "libertarian pixie dust will make everything better automatically" is the same thought process that led to collective farming and killing 10s of millions in Russia and China.
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    Savings doesn't matter if you're dead, but the other side can't be ignored either. If those billions permits more competition and leads to new drugs, that too can save lives. We need to do what we think is most likely to lead to the best outcome. There's a point beyond which that's no longer "more research", at which point researching more isn't taking it seriously. I have no particularly strong feelings about just where we are in that space - I'm busy saving the world along other lines.

by jbooth 13y ago

dllthomas 13y ago

Without pinning things down quite a bit more into specific proposals, I'm not willing to do much of anything. I'm just saying that sometimes increased risk for decreased money and increased time can be a good trade-off, and any given proposal should be evaluated on its merits.

jbooth 13y ago
Sure. If the proposal is "government is tyranny, abolish the FDA!", there aren't any merits, the proposal is fundamentally unserious and comes from a place of deliberate ignorance. That's the kind of idiocy I was objecting to. Any realistic proposal (as in, we have an idea of how much extra risk we're incurring) is going to have a lot of technical details and probably require a huge amount of research to justify it -- it's human lives that we're talking about here. The potential $ savings are big but that doesn't matter if you're dead. Like I said way upthread, there is plenty of room for improvement, but "libertarian pixie dust will make everything better automatically" is the same thought process that led to collective farming and killing 10s of millions in Russia and China.
- dllthomas 13y ago
  Savings doesn't matter if you're dead, but the other side can't be ignored either. If those billions permits more competition and leads to new drugs, that too can save lives. We need to do what we think is most likely to lead to the best outcome. There's a point beyond which that's no longer "more research", at which point researching more isn't taking it seriously. I have no particularly strong feelings about just where we are in that space - I'm busy saving the world along other lines.