Cancer Drugs

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The problem for me is that we give those drugs primacy over drugs that work really remarkably well or quite well. Instead, this works a little bit better. And so suddenly it gets the monopoly treatment that was created to incentivize the large and long approval process of pharmaceuticals. It's very depressing that that small improvement often entitles a drug to effectively monopolize the market.

Oncologist and epidemiologist Vinay Prasad argues that too many very expensive drugs get approved by the FDA that have very limited impact on the lives of patients. Prasad explains the incentives that distort the current system. The general problem, he explains to EconTalk host Russ Roberts, is the death of duty--too many players in the health care landscape and elsewhere stay quiet or do the wrong thing in order to serve themselves.