Patrick Cox: The Regulatory Transformation Begins

US will adopt the more enlightened regulatory attitudes found elsewhere, this will solve numerous financial and healthcare problems, and greatly increase the value of investments.

by Patrick Cox
September 9, 2015

This essay isn’t going to be what I had planned it to be. Our household is in upheaval right now because an older relative just slipped hard down the slope of cognitive decline. My wife has experienced a truly unpleasant role reversal, taking the car keys away from her father following a couple of scary events. Routes that he’s driven for decades now baffle him. He’s been lost several times and recently had an accident.

The rapid onset of his dementia has been startling. When I started writing about Alzheimer’s and dementia, my father-in-law was fine. Now his ability to care for himself is slipping away fast.

For several years, I’ve been predicting that US policy makers would be forced to recognize the need for serious reform of the drug and device approval process. The reasons are pretty self-evident, but I’ll lay them out in case you missed it.

The biggest part of government spending is healthcare expenses (just as it is for many families). This isn’t rea…