In the News – FDA Fails to Follow-Up

Snippet from the article:

The Food and Drug Administration has allowed drugs for cancer and other diseases to stay on the market even when follow-up studies showed they didn’t extend patients’ lives, say congressional investigators.

A report due out Monday from the Government Accountability Office also shows that the FDA has never pulled a drug off the market due to a lack of required follow-up about its actual benefits — even when such information is more than a decade overdue.

When pressed about that policy, agency officials said they have no plans to get more aggressive.

Read the full story at USA Today.

The policing arm of the federal government seems to fail because of lack of funding for that activity. The results are shown in the above linked article. It seems that the Hurricane Katrina debacle is the same government style they use in managing its agencies. For those of you who saw 60 Minutes this weekend (watch the video), you can marvel on how the US government is failing in the management of Medicare expenditures and now we are trying to take that expertise into the development of national healthcare policy.