A quick search finds recent firings [1] and [2]... who would lead a change?
[1]: https://floridianpress.com/2025/06/rep-wasserman-schultz-sla... [2]: https://fortune.com/2025/02/16/trump-cuts-fda-layoffs-food-s...
Neither's parties people wants to be poisoned.
Voters for one party keep taking horse medicine and we can't seem to stop them when they experience negative side effects, and we couldn't get them to get vaccines even as their friends and loved ones were dying begging for it at the last minute. There's definitely a party divide here.
But.
My assistant at my last job was all in on it during COVID. It cures everything, according to her. The moment when her cognitive dissonance hit its peak was when she gave her husband ivermectin for a cold, and was absolutely astounded that he ended up in the emergency room with diarrhea and dehydration. She was convinced it was "vaccine injury" and that he did a sneaky and got the COVID shot without her knowing. Spoiler; he did not get vaccinated.
It really was pretty funny at the time, but also sad. She was sort of my bellwether for nuts behaviors. When she started spitting Q-anon talking points, as a middle aged woman completely disconnected from anywhere that should exist, I knew we had problems.
I’ve sort of accepted it’s going to burn down. The problem is that it doesn’t seem there’s anyone capable of rebuilding it.
The US is the most pure-capitalist nation on the planet, and medical services are as bad a fit as it gets for a market economy:
* interactions with the market are ideally as few as possible
* there is massive information asymmetry
* people can't "shop around" during medical emergencies
* the externalities are orders of magnitude more potent than the forces directly acting on a transaction
* most importantly, individuals in many cases *literally cannot exit the marketplace* (unless you consider death a viable consumer choice).
That second property creates a market incentive to squeeze every consumer dry. What can they do about it, really?
But it's insanely unethical, and extremely against the common good (externalities abound).
Those forces push the middlemen, the insurance providers, to do horrible shit. And since they are the middlemen with all of the power, and interact with literally every market actor, the culture of pure evil seeps into everything. Clinicians either becomes numb to the fact that insurance companies will literally just not pay things they agreed to pay, or live a life of endless frustration.
This is just "how it is", and so everyone, including regulators, shift their overton window to be able to function in a decrepit, toxic system.
soangry•2h ago
I really hope another class action lawsuit is brought against Sun.
actionfromafar•2h ago
cogman10•2h ago
throwawaymaths•1h ago
cogman10•53m ago
The competence comes in because they put availability above safety. That's an incompetent trade-off.
billylb42•1h ago
To me, it’s indicative of a rotting regulatory institution that lost its way. FDA is about safety, not low cost drugs. I don’t know how that mandate became mission critical for them but it happened before the current administration.
cogman10•45m ago
These agencies are rotting primarily because they've been reworked to be business friendly over the last 40 years
derbOac•13m ago
To me this sort of thing is fraud, and I feel like the FDA needs more resources and oversight to fight it. But with other things I think the FDA needs to back off completely, where it's overstepped its useful mission. I personally would like to see the FDA stop telling people what they can purchase or receive from whom, but spend more time guaranteeing that whatever is on the label is what it says it is and nothing else.
leereeves•2h ago
sct202•2h ago
wl•21m ago
LoganDark•2h ago
pyuser583•1h ago
jnsie•2h ago
xpe•2h ago
thfuran•1h ago
Their certification requires it, at least to some extent.
xpe•1h ago
Second, seems like roughly 1 week a year of continuing education is meager. Think of how much learning a software developer does during a year! Very different contexts, very different incentives.
[1]: https://www.chronicle.com/article/lessons-from-a-professors-...
thfuran•1h ago
xpe•52m ago
My first point is that software developers (generally, more often than not) have the time and incentive to learn on an ongoing basis.
Second point: if continuing education has to be mandated, it is likely a symptom of a system that lacks proper incentives.
On the positive side, as more patients educate themselves and press doctors for statistical understanding and synthesis across studies, “Dr. Expert’s” stale knowledge will no longer fly.
thfuran•43m ago
But I certainly won't dispute that doctors in most systems in the US are overworked starting at least in residency.
JumpCrisscross•12m ago
I’m a pilot and work in finance. They both have continuing-education requirements. The ones in the former are practical and helpful. The ones in the latter are mostly performative. (In some cases, arguably counterproductive.) The existence of continuing-education mandates per se tells you almost nothing about the system as a whole.
potato3732842•45m ago
thfuran•42m ago
derbOac•29m ago
I do think it's a good example of why pharmacists should maybe have more power in the drug prescription process, and also wonder why insurance companies or pharmacies don't ban drugs from certain places and/or sue them themselves more often.
timr•2h ago
I don't know if the completely purified drug officially has an odor, but usually you get some free amines that come along for the ride. More likely, some got outside of the gelatin capsule during shipping.
[1] https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/amines-and-landsca...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisdexamfetamine#/media/File:L...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadaverine
VeninVidiaVicii•43m ago