Is There a Trade-Off?

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Bob Greene: If you had an opportunity to extend your life by a few months, most people would want to know how much money they'd have to spend. He says the FDA combined with the way we've decided to subsidize healthcare is what's making it worse. Greene: We're taking all this societal money in the name of cancer patients. We're choosing to do one thing with it, not the other thing.

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.