For example, the cost of approving new medications in Australia is incredibly high. It takes years of regulatory hassle to get a medication approved
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It then takes further years to get it added to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, because you have to prove quite a few things to do so
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But how do you calculate the benefit? What does this enormous cost to business confer on the average Australian?
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Vioxx is an imperfect but useful example. It was a drug that was approved through some shady machinations by the manufacturer
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Basically, Vioxx roughly doubled your risk of having a heart attack, but this was not recognized for 5 years, at which point 100,000s of people had taken it
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The cost to society of this single drug being approved was in the hundreds of millions
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Now, there are probably hundreds - thousands - of drugs that have been prevented from coming on the market that, like Vioxx, would cost us millions if they were sold to patients
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The COST here - the number of dollars that the government spends on the Theraputic Goods Administration, the dollars that businesses spend on regulatory procedures - is easy to calculate
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It's a simple sum: how many $ did we spend this year?
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But the BENEFIT? That is ~really hard~ to get. How much money did we save by NOT putting drugs into circulation, or funding them through the PBS?
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So when someone estimates that Evil Bad Red Tape costs Australia $176 billion, take a skeptical view
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Realistically, there are probably places you can cut red tape and see a benefit to society There are also plenty of places where red tape saves us enormous amounts of money
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Moreover, there are MANY places where red tape saves us something more ephemeral but no less important - endangered species, water quality, children's lives
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Presenting it as "Red tape costs x" without also estimating the benefit is misleading at best
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End of conversation
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