UK: Is the failure [sic] of health regulation damaging our well-being?

Recent guidance, lowering the threshold for the prescription of statins to patients with a 10-20% risk of developing cardiovascular disease in a 10-year period, has generated much controversy, with many experts questioning the sense of mass-medicating healthy people. . . .

Last April, independent scientists of the Cochrane Collaboration concluded that Britain wasted more than £500m on the influenza drug Tamiflu. After gaining access to withheld clinical trials data, the body found Tamiflu was no better than paracetamol in relieving flu symptoms and had potentially serious side effects including kidney problems and psychiatric disturbance. Nice was criticised for failing to call for the full data to be released by the pharmaceutical company manufacturing the drug before giving its hasty approval. . . .

Could ideology be behind Nice’s perceived perpetuation of an increasingly over-medicalised patient population? Insiders recently expressed concerns to the investigations editor of the BMJ, Deborah Cohen, that there was ministerial encouragement on Nice committees to be more favourable to the drug and device industries. 71 coalition MPs have been linked to health firms set to profit from opening up more of the market within the NHS. Failure to regulate the banks was responsible for the biggest crash in half a century and failure to regulate the drug and device industries is causing unfathomable damage to our health at great cost.

The author refers to all of this as “the failure of health regulation.” But one could just as easily say that this is regulation doing exactly what it is supposed to do, benefiting politicians, major companies, and even regulators themselves.