By Andy Blom, The Economic Standard
There are three key groups of players in America’s evolving healthcare environment:
- The Medical Professionals – Researchers, Technicians, Physicians, Administrators – The Healthcare and Pharmaceutical Industry.
- The Government(s) — the Regulators, Adjudicators, Bureaucrats, Legislatures and sometime advocates.
- The Patients and Caregivers.
Unfortunately, these three intensely interested groups are seriously out of step with one another. As the researchers, practitioners and innovators surge ahead, with the help of ever emerging technology, learning of new diseases, maladies, cures, treatments and solutions…
The Government remains stolidly behind, with approval practices bogged down in complicated laws, processes and administrative territoriality, slowing the approval of new treatment opportunities to a snail’s pace. Often a very ill snail at that.
And the Patients and Caregivers? Not only are we the last on the list to know, we don’t even begin to know what we don’t know. We see ads for medicines and diseases we have never heard of. We have problems we don’t know how to describe or what they are supposed to be called. And meanwhile, some talented medical team is solving a problem we have that we didn’t know existed or had a name for, much less a cure. Although that cure probably won’t matter, at least not to us, because by the time it goes through the painful and archaic and bureaucratic processes necessary to come to market, we won’t be here to enjoy the benefits.
Of course, this problem only gets worse as America ages, the Boomers lose their bloom and require more and more medical assistance.
Let’s take Alzheimers, for an example. I edit The Economic Standard, an international, online publication that features opinion and discussion on taxes, finance, trade, energy, the environment, health and technology, among other topics. I am, alas, a member of the Baby Boom Generation. So is my lovely wife. We both notice, as we age semi-gracefully, that we have lapses of memory. Except hers are worse than mine. More frequent, more severe, more frustrating. Her mother had Alzheimers, probably. She was the tenth of ten children and it’s possible some of them did, also.
Does my wife have incipient Alzheimers? How the hell would we know? It could just be a reaction to the medication she takes for a cardiac issue. Or any one of a number of other things. Of course this problem could be, if not solved, at least understood and better handled, if she could be screened. In my position as Editor of TES we recently published an article (Want to Make America Healthy Again? Expand Access to Cognitive Screening ) on Alzheimer’s screening. So I know about this. A few thousand of my close friends (well, our Readers) do. But do enough people in Congress, in positions of power know? Will they begin to do something to change the process? Not just for Alzheimer’s screening but for the explosion of advanced medical understanding and treatment in the golden age of healthcare exploration we are experiencing?
It is not that long ago that people simply “died of old age”. “Lost their minds”. “Had dementia.” “Died of a broken heart.” Or the especially sad, “lost the will to live.”
We have learned so much, and we are on the cusp of so much more. It is past time that the regulators and the bureaucrats caught up with the scientists, researchers and healers. It is time to set healthcare in America free.
Andresen Blom is the Editor of The Economic Standard. A policy and political analyst and author he has been published in The Wall Street Journal, The Hill, and Politico, et.al.