The antibiotic paradox: why companies can’t afford to create life-saving drugs
&quot;Antibiotics present an enduring economic puzzle. These drugs changed the world. Yet despite their unique power, the free market doesn’t value them.&quot;<p>No. The free market -- people -- values these drugs. If there wasn&#x27;t demand, this article wouldn&#x27;t have been written. The problem is that drugs are too expensive to bring to market for their developers to profit, and that the single greatest cost is often FDA approval.<p>The article implies that the solution is to funnel more BARDA grants to companies in order to make drug development profitable. This amounts to using taxpayer money to help private companies pay government fees, with lots of bureaucratic overhead (employees, forms, computer systems, buildings) at each end of the transaction. This is dramatically suboptimal.<p>Instead of this, the FDA process should be cheaper, or the FDA itself should be privatized, and operate as an entity like Consumer Reports or any other review organization. Government need only be involved with prosecuting fake producers. The consumer requires only access to information, and assurances that a substance they bought is the same they have researched.<p>Paying government expenses with taxes is an unsustainable Ponzi scheme, and takes us further away from a real solution.