It's almost always dangerous to be right too soon.
One thing about pioneers that you don't hear mentioned is that they are invariably, by their nature, mess-makers. They go forging ahead, seeing only their noble, distant goal, and never notice any of the crud and debris they leave behind them.
Over the last ten years, technological advances have dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been.
There are downsides to every technology. Fire kept us warm, but also burned down our villages.
It's not that I don't believe in creativity and innovation and new ideas, and the creativity that comes with fashion, which I really respect. But one of my biggest concerns is just how cheap we expect everything to be.
Imagine if we had stopped science in 1904. Yes, there would have been no nerve gas and no Bhopal, but there would also have been no penicillin. All science is a trade-off.
To ensure that America remains the leader in medical innovation, we must reduce the costs of developing life-saving drugs and ensure that there are appropriate economic incentives in place to produce them.
One of the banes of successful innovation is that companies may be so committed to innovation that they will give the innovators a lot of money to spend.
You can think of the Health Impact Fund as a mechanism that would keep the benefits and burdens of pharmaceutical innovation for the affluent roughly as they are while massively reducing the burdens presently imposed upon the poor. This sounds like magic. But it really works because the current system is not Pareto efficient. It's a system that generates hundreds of billions of dollars in litigation costs and deadweight losses that HIF-registered medicines would sidestep. By avoiding these losses, the HIF reform can bring improvements all around - including for pharmaceutical innovators.
