> Yes, there are millions with some mutation. But changing around mutations needs to go through some form of medical process to see if it's safe. The current processes are there because historically there has been a lot of abuse for profit. We can't just platform allow any genetic editing. Some of these edits might be dangerous.
Let me rephrase this less charitably: You are willing to rob millions of suffering people the chance of a cure, by mandating a system that effectively prevents a cure from being developed. This is in order to save some of the very same people from the effects of unsafe treatment. It is patently absurd, but that's exactly the system that we have right now. Nobody wants to take on the legal liability of killing a terminal cancer patient with an experimental treatment unless they have military-grade legal assistance at their disposal.
It's also clearly not working when countless desperate people opt for "alternative medicine" and various quackeries that aren't held to those standards, simply because they're not advertised as "medicine" in the legal sense.
If you've ever asked yourself why health care is so expensive in the US, don't overlook the safety standards and the legal liabilities that medical practitioners incur. Look at the value of settlements in US courts. Practitioners require expensive legal insurance, and they'll charge you for it.
>You are willing to rob millions of suffering people the chance of a cure, by mandating a system that effectively prevents a cure from being developed.
The cure may be worse than the disease, I bet not every one of these one-off mutations is deadly, and how debilitating it is may vary. I'm not trying to rob anyone from the chance of a cure, I'm just saying that to save the most people, resource allocation makes sense.
Now if the incentives are misaligned by virtue of the laws we write, we might need to change those.
> I'm not trying to rob anyone from the chance of a cure, I'm just saying that to save the most people, resource allocation makes sense.
I wasn't arguing with resource allocation, I was arguing with your "safety concerns". My takeaway from the article is that with the current framework, any treatment needs to go through countless trials individually, hence it is literally impossible to do any trials to prove the safety or efficacy any treatment that is bespoke to a handful of people.
In our system, it's the responsibility of private companies to productize findings from research and development. As a result, resources aren't allocated to save the most people, they're allocated to make the most money. If you make it expensive to develop treatments for diseases, or you limit the profit that can be made from these treatments, those treatments will never be developed. No pharma company loses money just because people die. They lose money from dead people they could have treated at a profit.
> Now if the incentives are misaligned by virtue of the laws we write, we might need to change those.
The incentives are aligned towards not taking risks. You will not read a headline "Millions of people died as a result of overly strict safety standards". Even though that may very well be the case, it would just be a conjecture. On the other hand, if a handful of people die from some FDA-approved drug, it's all over the news, people will demand consequences, million-dollar lawsuits will be filed, and so on.
> If you've ever asked yourself why health care is so expensive in the US, don't overlook the safety standards and the legal liabilities that medical practitioners incur. Look at the value of settlements in US courts. Practitioners require expensive legal insurance, and they'll charge you for it.
Texas did some malpractice law changes back in 2003. It would be interesting to see if in impact their health care costs.
Let me rephrase this less charitably: You are willing to rob millions of suffering people the chance of a cure, by mandating a system that effectively prevents a cure from being developed. This is in order to save some of the very same people from the effects of unsafe treatment. It is patently absurd, but that's exactly the system that we have right now. Nobody wants to take on the legal liability of killing a terminal cancer patient with an experimental treatment unless they have military-grade legal assistance at their disposal.
It's also clearly not working when countless desperate people opt for "alternative medicine" and various quackeries that aren't held to those standards, simply because they're not advertised as "medicine" in the legal sense.
If you've ever asked yourself why health care is so expensive in the US, don't overlook the safety standards and the legal liabilities that medical practitioners incur. Look at the value of settlements in US courts. Practitioners require expensive legal insurance, and they'll charge you for it.