It was warm in Boston today, much too warm for November. I have lived in the Northeast for all of my life, so I know.
Everything before "use the money to fix America's water and environmental infrastructure" is destructive to America's, and the world's, water and environmental infrastructure, so I wish that President Trump wouldn't do those things. It's like saying "Breaking our kneecaps will help us pay the medical bills for fixing our kneecaps."
There's a lot of corruption among the FDA, the pharmaceutical industry, pharmaceutical lobbyists, and Congress. If there are people at the FDA who are blocking the approval of some medications, it might have something to do with safety concerns about them; it might also have to do with political maneuvering within the FDA and Congress by competing pharmaceutical companies. Particularly for generic medications; when a generic is approved and can be sold by several companies, the company that sells the brand version immediately begins to lose money, and it's a lot of money. The price of a medication can drop hundreds of dollars per prescription once the generics are being sold.
It would also be helpful if there were additional conflict-of-interest-free government funding for scientific research. Pharmaceutical-industry-funded research has some obvious built-in pressures for data that indicate success.
Falsification of data, suppression of data, ghost writing, doctors being paid to sign off on industry-funded reports for medical journals, challenges to the integrity of what are supposed to be impartial review boards; these are all problems that result in permanent injuries, deaths and FDA recalls.
You can't be too careful with the medications that people take; they can die, and they do. The crux of the FDA's problems might be corruption rather than red tape.
Everything else from Mr. Trump's plan is something that a lot of people are probably talking about, so I'll leave that to them.
I hope that Mr. Trump won't take my word about any of these issues, but that he will do his own research and talk to as many people as he needs to in order to feel like he has as much information as possible. I hope that he will do that about everything that I write or say that he reads or hears during his Presidency.
This the address for the NPR article called "Here Is What Donald Trump Wants To Do In His First 100 Days":
Copyright, with noted exceptions, L. Kochman, November 9, 2016 @ 8:44 p.m.
