It has been a while since I posted. I was busy putting together the launch event held Wed. May 14 for CMPI's Odyssey Project on Entrepreneurial Capitalism and Biomedical Innovation. Innovation has hardly been mentioned by anyone who is covering or involved in what is a non-debate about health care reform. And yet without innovation, the ability to commercialize discoveries, we can forget about improving care, increasing access or reducing the cost of treating disease, assuming we are not willing to allow government to kill people to save money.
I think inside the Beltway there is this belief that if the executives of each patient group can be called in and massaged/threatened by pols that innovation will be protected silence can be bought. Perhaps it can for a while. But obvious discomfort of comparative effectiveness supporters have in even talking about the process -- they would rather try to silence those who have legitimte questions by attacking them as reactionaries -- suggests that their motives are less than pure. And in any event the measure of process will be the extent to which it targets new technologies instead of trying to develop tools for selecting treatment options that encourage preventive and prospective care.
Which brings me to the event itself. Mike Ferguson, the former Congressman and CMPI fellow moderated the event which included three of his friends and colleagues, Congresswoman Anna Eshoo D-CA, Mike Rogers, R- MI and John Crowley, CEO of Amicus Therapeutics. Unfortunately Elijah Alexander, the former NFL linebacker who has battled multiple myeloma could not join us because early that week he was admitted to the ICU with an infection and low blood cell count.
I can't do justice to the eloquence and passion of our speakers. Eshoo spoke of the importance of encouraging future biotech investment. Mike Rogers talked about how comparative effectiveness guidelines would have "guided" his doctor away from tests that flagged his cancer when he was a teenager. And John Crowley, who's search for a cure to treat his twins rare disease is now the subject of movie with Harrison Ford talked movingly about how government regulation could have made his investment imposslbe. There was bi-partisan agreement that we shouldn't give an inch on any effort to limit incentives or access to innovation for the sake of cost control. Second guessing at any point could easily stifle or discourage research or technologies deemed a waste of money that years in the future could or have culiminated n transformational cures. It is not just a matter of the inability and ineptness of government planners in determining what thousands of patients, scientists and physicians can decide. It is also because innovation generates it's own excitement and inspiration that can be undermined by centralized planning.
As the absence of Elijah and John’s comments underscored, innovation is incremental but also inspirational. To paraphrase Robert F. Kennedy, it is numberless diverse acts of freedom, inspiration and belief that sustains innovation. Each time someone pursues an idea, or acts to improve the lot of others, or seeks to battle a disease that has no cure, that individual sends forth a tiny ripple of hope. Those ripples cross each other from a million different centers of energy and daring and build a current which sweeps away the most daunting afflictions, to energize yet another wave of innovation. Only the impatient hand of government possessed with the arrogant sense it has absolute knowledge can fully stop this process.
I think inside the Beltway there is this belief that if the executives of each patient group can be called in and massaged/threatened by pols that innovation will be protected silence can be bought. Perhaps it can for a while. But obvious discomfort of comparative effectiveness supporters have in even talking about the process -- they would rather try to silence those who have legitimte questions by attacking them as reactionaries -- suggests that their motives are less than pure. And in any event the measure of process will be the extent to which it targets new technologies instead of trying to develop tools for selecting treatment options that encourage preventive and prospective care.
Which brings me to the event itself. Mike Ferguson, the former Congressman and CMPI fellow moderated the event which included three of his friends and colleagues, Congresswoman Anna Eshoo D-CA, Mike Rogers, R- MI and John Crowley, CEO of Amicus Therapeutics. Unfortunately Elijah Alexander, the former NFL linebacker who has battled multiple myeloma could not join us because early that week he was admitted to the ICU with an infection and low blood cell count.
I can't do justice to the eloquence and passion of our speakers. Eshoo spoke of the importance of encouraging future biotech investment. Mike Rogers talked about how comparative effectiveness guidelines would have "guided" his doctor away from tests that flagged his cancer when he was a teenager. And John Crowley, who's search for a cure to treat his twins rare disease is now the subject of movie with Harrison Ford talked movingly about how government regulation could have made his investment imposslbe. There was bi-partisan agreement that we shouldn't give an inch on any effort to limit incentives or access to innovation for the sake of cost control. Second guessing at any point could easily stifle or discourage research or technologies deemed a waste of money that years in the future could or have culiminated n transformational cures. It is not just a matter of the inability and ineptness of government planners in determining what thousands of patients, scientists and physicians can decide. It is also because innovation generates it's own excitement and inspiration that can be undermined by centralized planning.
As the absence of Elijah and John’s comments underscored, innovation is incremental but also inspirational. To paraphrase Robert F. Kennedy, it is numberless diverse acts of freedom, inspiration and belief that sustains innovation. Each time someone pursues an idea, or acts to improve the lot of others, or seeks to battle a disease that has no cure, that individual sends forth a tiny ripple of hope. Those ripples cross each other from a million different centers of energy and daring and build a current which sweeps away the most daunting afflictions, to energize yet another wave of innovation. Only the impatient hand of government possessed with the arrogant sense it has absolute knowledge can fully stop this process.
