Honest question: consumers are notoriously ill-informed, companies are good at propaganda and fake "clinical" evidence, and finding out if medicines ate effective AND safe is really complex.
How do you imagine abolishing the FDA would improve outcomes instead of increasing supplies (and marketing) of snake oil?
You know who is also good at propaganda? Government and state.
Can you prove that FDA improves the outcome? Is FDA somehow free from lobbying, or are the people working there consistently uninfluenced by certain counterproductive incentives? How could we go about ever proving that the absence or existence of a government agency has improved conditions overall? Sorry if this comes off as lecturing, but these are questions that I think should be asked and is not intended for you specifically.
In any case, you cannot take away that FDA approval likely costs millions of dollars and makes it more costly to introduce a drug. It is self-evident that making something more expensive to do reduces the incentive to do it (weighed against the potential profit).
> It is self-evident that making something more expensive to do reduces the incentive to do it (weighed against the potential profit).
No argument - but you didn't answer my questions at all other than to say "FDA is fallible!"
I can't prove the FDA is non-evil/non-fallible. I don't have numbers to share, so I'm going off of very fallible impressions. However, those impressions are that the FDA has done a better job of keeping crappy products off the market than a free-market world.
You complain about the opposite - good products being prevented because of lack of incentives. It's impossible to measure what hasn't happened, but do we have evidence that lack of incentive cause more harm than preventing crap/toxic/poisonous products that we have a recorded history of?
We have a solution today, a solution with problems, but a solution that I'm confident is better than the original problem. What is your basis to claim that removing the solution will in fact be better than the problem?
How do you imagine abolishing the FDA would improve outcomes instead of increasing supplies (and marketing) of snake oil?