“From Martin Shkreli to EpiPen, the outrageous costs of prescription drugs have fueled short-lived media storms with little reform to show for.
It can easily take 12 years and cost a pharmaceutical company $2 billion to pass the FDA's clinical trials and bring a drug to market. Meanwhile, patients dealing with serious or life-threatening illnesses have little access to potentially life-changing or life-saving drugs undergoing the approval process, extinguishing what little hope they had left…
One bold idea could easily change that, providing patients of all kinds with faster access to the drugs they need: Free to Choose Medicine.
Named after Milton Friedman's famous phrase, FTCM is a proposal by the health care researcher Bartley Madden to create a new track in the FDA's approval process…
Free-to-choose drugs could be available seven years earlier than the status quo and fundamentally change the economics of drug developmental costs and drug pricing — to the benefit of patients.”
