In a spirit of patriotism … I have a modest proposal: I think that we should give the regulators watching over medicine (and that means you and me) over to the Treasury to watch over the financial system.
Where will these regulators come from? Regulators don’t grow on trees and finding good ones may be no mean feat. I worry that we may not have enough regulators around to keep the financial big boys on the straight and narrow.
In a spirit of patriotism to help our country reform, I have a modest proposal: I think that we should give the regulators watching over medicine (and that means you and me) over to the Treasury to watch over the financial system.
In the past decade, medicine has been different than other parts of the economy. Whereas deregulation fever took over the banks, in medicine, it was just the opposite as regulation fever sent our temperatures soaring. There are now rules governing just about everything. Soon, I am sure that we have a rule specifying the number of bathroom breaks a house office needs in 24 hours.
Consider a piece of news I heard on “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC. According to Maddow, the form required for a bank to get money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) is just two pages long. Perhaps Maddow was exaggerating (she is on MSNBC after all) and other forms are needed. If the claim about the form is true, all I can say is “yikes” and I am going to put whatever money I have left under the mattress. It seems safer under there if that is how TARP will work.
I was struck by this story because, in my realm, regulations and red tape have proliferated like kudzu. Indeed, virtually everything I do has been subjected to increasing regulatory oversight and requires voluminous documentation with forms that are chock full of complex, confusing, and redundant questions. A recent protocol I submitted to use 200 mice was almost 50 pages long, and a request to collect a few more de-identified sera took two months of review and another gargantuan form.
CME is a thicket of regulation and miles of red tape. For every lecture I deliver, I complete a disclosure form that seems to ask about everything including the contents of my kids’ piggy banks. My PowerPoint presentation is then uploaded for the eyes of some grand inquisitor who will search for bias or recommendations of drugs for unapproved indications. (As you know, important parts of rheumatology therapy involve the off-label use of drugs. We are in a quandary here.)