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curious2
2014 Sep 3, 11:19am
Two related stories.
First, the bad news: according to federal projections, medical spending will nearly double within 10 years. While other parts of the economy are suffering, the medical industrial complex are looking forward to accelerating growth.
Next, a glimmer of hope for some eventual good news: "Oregon researchers developing a vaccine that has shown promise in preventing HIV infection in primates said on Wednesday they have been awarded a $25 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Oregon Health & Science University scientists, in announcing the award, said they hope to develop a vaccine that not only prevents the HIV virus from infecting people exposed to it, but also eliminates the virus from those already infected."
Notice the research money came from a private foundation, not the NIH (which reports to politicians, who are controlled by the entrenched revenue recipients of government policy). We have a government controlled by entrenched players to maximize their own power, but philanthropy provides occasional glimpses of a future in which people might be healthier while spending less.
"If so, the current funding system shares much of the blame.
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Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman once said, "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." Today, however, the hundreds of billions of dollars of government funding that supports the world's academic research ecosystem is distributed based almost exclusively on the opinions of senior experts (or ‘peers’). These experts review proposals and seek to find ideas impervious to criticism [e.g., from entrenched revenue recipients like PhRMA that pay them and their colleagues/rivals]. Unfortunately, a research idea that is immune to criticism during peer review will, by its very nature, be cautious and take minimal risks.
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“There’s a current problem in biomedical research,†says American biochemist Robert Lefkowitz, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize for Chemistry. “The emphasis is on doing things which are not risky. To have a grant proposal funded, you have to propose something and then present what is called preliminary data, which is basically evidence that you’ve already done what you’re proposing to do. If there’s any risk involved, then your proposal won’t be funded. So the entire system tends to encourage not particularly creative research, relatively descriptive and incremental changes which are incremental advances which you are certain to make but not change things very much.""
That is, you may be allowed to help PhRMA develop an even more expensive daily Rx pill that will be paid via insurance, but you may not be allowed to develop anything that might prevent people from getting sick in the first place, because that might threaten the entrenched industry revenue model.