The politicians manipulate the FDA approval process in order to lower the cost of prescription drugs.

Most people think new drugs arn't approved rapidly because the FDA acts to protect the interests/profits of the drug companies, when in fact just the reverse is true: New and potentially better drugs are routinely killed or at least put on hold by the FDA because the science just "doesn't quite prove" that new and more expensive patent protected drugs will produce BETTER* results than the cheap non-patent protected generic drugs that they would possibly replace. As a result, your options for drug thearapy are limited, and many potential life saving treatments are not available...Meanwhile drug costs are kept artificially low.

Its like telling a cancer patient: "Take a few aspirin and maybe the cancer will go away. Aspirin is cheap, so you should thank us for saving you money. Sorry, we just haven't seen enough science to prove that those more expensive and risky chemo-thearapy treatments are any better, come back in 10 or 15 years. We should have more data then..."

Scott

*Note: Drugs that perform about the same as existing FDA approved drugs are routinely rejected...The FDA pretty much takes the stand that if one treatment has already been approved, that's all that is needed... unless it can clearly be established that a new treatment is BETTER than the existing treatment. Thus the FDA often kills open competition in the hope that when the drug patent expires and generic drugs are available, the drug cost will ulimatly decline...Of course the killing of competition often has the opposite effect and drug prices increase instead of decrease (Surprise! The government is involved...)