It is easy to calculate the cost of red tape It is hard to calculate the benefit Bottom line: red tape is REALLY IMPORTANT (mostly) - a threadhttps://twitter.com/JanePrentice_MP/status/1001991573956104193 …
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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
The cost to society of this single drug being approved was in the hundreds of millions
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
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
It's a simple sum: how many $ did we spend this year?
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?
So when someone estimates that Evil Bad Red Tape costs Australia $176 billion, take a skeptical view
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
Moreover, there are MANY places where red tape saves us something more ephemeral but no less important - endangered species, water quality, children's lives
Presenting it as "Red tape costs x" without also estimating the benefit is misleading at best
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