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Drugs
TB — (archived)

Some background on the Mucinex thing here.

The FDA is one problem with our pharmaceutical industry. Given the many hoops a drug has to go through to get final approval, the cost of the approval process is in the $800 million range. Drug companies pay this, not the government, and they pay it whether or not a drug is approved.

Of course after that there's a huge pressure to make a lot of money off an approved drug before it goes generic. That profit has to cover not just the cost of developing that particular drug, but all the ones that failed.

That, and the years it takes to get approval may actually cost more lives than a less-stringent approval process would.

A more rational and streamlined regulatory approach, including the informed option to use partially-approved or unapproved drugs, might go a long way to making drugs both more available and cheaper. It would also help open up the drug industry to smaller firms that wouldn't have to swing billions around just to get something on the shelves. More competition.

The other "side-effect" of huge FDA approval costs is that there's no real incentive to test natural or low-cost remedies for effectiveness. What are we missing?

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