Comment by takinola
3 years ago
I love the innovative thinking here but I can easily think of a way to game this system. Snake Oil LLC mounts a PR campaign claiming the governmen is trying to shut them down by delaying approvals so they can't get their money so they can't undercut Big Pharma. If Snake Oil (TM) doesn't work, why have patients ponied up $X billion in fees over the years?
You have enough stories like this (plus there will inevitably be some mistakes by the FDA that will be shown to be proof of government perfidy) and the conspiracy theories will have a field day and fuel a black market.
I mean, this is just a “sufficient misinformation” argument that could be levied against literally any kind of policy. No policy can survive sufficient misinformation.
The point I am making is not a rebuttal to this specific proposal but that any such change will have an attack vector. Hell, the reason we are having this discussion is because of the (unfortunate) case of someone not being served by the current policy. Any new change to the policy will have such cases which will lead to this same discussion.
Creating an equitable drug approval process is a true dilemma.