Vote No for Texas Proposition 15
I have to. I can’t support the measure, which Lance Armstrong says “holds the cure” to cancer. That’s disingenuous at best and probably an outright lie. I liken it to John Edwards saying that if Senator Kerry was elected President, then Christopher Reeve would be alive and walking.
I initially hesitated in support for the measure because it’s a $3 billion chunk of debt the taxpayers of Texas have to support. I won’t agree to cosign that loan. I don’t think it’s needed and Governor Goodhair, Lance Armstrong and others haven’t convinced me it’s going to work better than the research already underway.
My questions:
- Will this deliver in ten years something private and currently-funded research won’t?
- What happens if ten years comes and goes and nothing’s been cured?
- Lowering the bar a bit, what happens if ten years comes and goes and nothing groundbreaking has been discovered towards a cure?
Read Ronald Trowbridge’s column in the Houston Chronicle and see what he, a cancer widower, has to say about this massive pile of pork.
One, the average cost of getting a cancer drug through the Food and Drug Administration’s clearance process is now $1.4 billion, roughly $700 million for research and development and $700 million for clinical trials. And it now takes an average of eight years for a drug to gain approval through the FDA’s Phases 1, 2 and 3 of clinical trials. Were the full $3 billion given tomorrow to Proposition 15’s newly proposed Cancer Prevention and Research Institute, the bond issue could fund, if elected, only two drugs that would take nearly a decade for market approval. And they’d better work, without a flaw or hitch.
Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies are spending each year multiple billions of dollars on researching, testing and providing cancer drugs.
There’s more; please read it. (tip to Eric Berger)