So says Dean Baker. Yup, great idea. Best response so far:
Brilliant!
Have the politicians hire contractors to do the research. 20 billion is a vast amount of money. What percent of the contractors will be relatives of or major contributors to politicians. The government has a wonderful track record in dealing with contractors. This is an ideal task for Halliburton.
Tim,
even if every last one was a relative it would be a huge improvement over what we have today. The big difference would be that independent testers would have no incentive to lie about the results. I guess you don’t read the papers.
Do we have even the slightest reason to believe that a government-backed pharma development process would be any less woeful than the typical government-backed IT development process?
In so far as this guy thinks bringing politicians into the R & D process will increase the integrity of the process, I would suggest his pharmaceuticals are working just fine as they are.