Government Should Stay out of Drug Business

On December 2, the news provided vivid, painful proof that drug innovation is indeed a very risky business. The American pharmaceutical firm Pfizer was in the final stages of testing a new drug for heart disease that would not just lower bad cholesterol, as its Lipitor does, but also increase good, artery-clearing cholesterol. The drug, torcetrapib, would have been a blockbuster, offering huge promise of actually reversing heart disease--the nation's number one killer.

The independent researchers monitoring the trial, however, alerted Pfizer that the late stages showed a higher death rate among participants. The company quickly pulled the plug after having invested close to $1 billion and 15 years on it, taking a $20 billion hit on its market capitalization.

It would be wise for members of the incoming Congress to pay attention to the riskiness of this business. Pfizer has other promising drugs in the pipeline, but if Congress decides to put price controls on the industry, it will certainly dry up the resources needed for new drug development and the capital required to take risks like this to tackle heart disease, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, obesity, and the many, many other killer diseases that could be treated and even cured.

For proof, we need only look at Europe's dying pharmaceutical research industry, which has been decimated by shortsighted government policies and price controls that dry up the resources for research. We don't want to go there.

Source





Australia: Review urged of selection for medical education

Politically correct approach not working

Experts have called for an urgent rethink of selection processes used by medical schools after finding the tests used to admit students fail to identify the best applicants. Researchers who measured the subsequent performance of students who did well in the tests said good results bore little correlation with how well the students performed during their course.

The study -- published today in the Medical Journal of Australia -- also found the structured interviews used by many medical schools with the tests were too subjective, and there were "serious qualms" over their ability to highlight the best candidates. The findings are likely to reignite a controversy revealed by The Australian last year, after senior doctors criticised interviewers for asking would-be students their views on gay marriage, the Iraq war and whether their parents were doctors.

In three accompanying editorials also published in today's MJA, experts condemned other aspects of medical education, including poor tuition of newly-graduated doctors working in hospitals, and the adoption of "problem-based learning", which had displaced traditional teaching methods in many university medical schools. Queensland medical education expert Richard Hays, currently head of the medical school at Keele University in Britain, said despite its enthusiastic uptake, problem-based learning had not been based on strong evidence.

Chris McManus, a British professor of psychology and medical education, and Australian psychology professor David Powis, said the "sad reality is that surprisingly little is known" about how best to select students. Professor Allan Carmichael, chairman of Medical Deans Australia and New Zealand, said entry processes were under review and welcomed the findings as adding to the evidence of what worked. However, he said the editorials were individual opinions, and the new study was based on a small sample. Previous studies disagreed with it, he said. "One would take note of it, but not go in for a wholesale change of selection processes on the back of this study," he said.

Source

***************************

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL hospitals and health insurance schemes should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the very poor and minimal regulation. Both Australia and Sweden have large private sector health systems with government reimbursement for privately-provided services so can a purely private system with some level of government reimbursement or insurance for the poor be so hard to do?

Comments? Email me here. If there are no recent posts here, the mirror site may be more up to date. My Home Pages are here or here or here.

***************************