Commentary

Freedom from the FDA
The FDA adds billions of dollars to the cost of developing new drugs and delays their use for years. Yet it is so obsessed with predicting exactly how each drug will perform for any patient—with any condition, in any dosage, for any length of time and in any combination with any other drug or combination of drugs in any dosage—that it often loses sight of safety. So a few years ago the FDA proposed the creation of a new "Drug Safety Board" to provide for drug safety. One would have thought that was the purpose of the whole agency. . . . Read more

Finding Alternatives to the Food and Drug Administration
First of all, we need to realize that neither the FDA nor anyone else can do the impossible. When a new drug comes to market, no one can know all of its side effects, nor the impact on all other medical conditions that a patient might have, nor how it might interact with any dosage of any combination of an infinite number of other drugs—nor the cumulative effect of ten, twenty, or thirty years of use. If omniscience is required, no new drug will come to market. The good news, however, is that computers and the Internet now provide excellent tools to accumulate and tabulate data on the impact of every new drug. Unexpected consequences can now quickly be detected and dealt with. The incredible benefits to health and longevity that new drugs have achieved in recent years clearly require that we make it possible for new drugs to come to market at reasonable cost. . . . Read more

Free Markets: The Key to New Drugs at a Reasonable Price
The U.S. pharmaceutical industry spends $22 billion a year on research and development of new drugs. Unlike government-funded research—which can be spent to develop drugs that no one needs or that duplicate existing drugs—pharmaceutical companies must get results. In order to recover their investment, their new drugs actually have to work. The continuing flow of new drugs that these firms produce is the best hope we have to treat and cure our ailments. . . . Read more

A Prescription for Disaster
At a cost of $400 billion over 10 years, Congressional Republicans have agreed in Conference Committee—with the enthusiastic encouragement of a Republican president—to the greatest expansion of government in two generations. This new Medicare program can only result in what government supplied health care has always produced in the U.S. and elsewhere: fewer new drugs and a lot more government. Of course, after a few years in practice we all know the program will end up costing a lot more. . . . Read more

About FreedomFromFDA.org

Our objective is to provide a resource for all of those concerned about the power of the Food and Drug Administration to damage the free practice of medicine in the United States and to restrict the individual rights of physicians and patients to seek the medical care that they consider most appropriate for their practices and good health.

This Web site is presented by Americans for Free Choice in Medicine (AFCM). AFCM is a national non-profit, non-partisan educational organization that AFCM promotes the philosophy of individual rights, personal responsibility and free-market economics in the health care industry. AFCM advocates a full, free-market health care system by promoting health savings accounts (HSAs), tax equity for the individual, and AFCM teaches the history of HMOs, which were instituted by a long, incremental process of government intervention.

Members include patients, Medicare recipients, physicians, nurses and health care professionals, insurance industry professionals, including agents, pharmacists and pharmaceutical industry professionals, financial services professionals, businessmen, employee benefits professionals and hospital staff. AFCM was founded in 1993.

As this site expands, we will present information and reasoning from a number of non-profit organizations that share an interest in these issues. Each contribution will provide a link back to the organization that provided it, and readers of these pages are encouraged to seek further information from these organizations.

Within the general scope of the purpose of this site, there may exist a range of opinion. The views of each organization are their own, and participation in the content of this site does not imply agreement with all of the points of view that are expressed.

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