Sequester and NIH Grants

[nyerdoc]

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For those of you in academia---

It is next to impossible for an emergency physician to get an R01 grant and with the sequester the NIH is now down another 2.5 billion. If you are deriving grant money where are you getting it from and how difficult do you find it to get grant money as a young academic physician?


http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/09/sequestration-would-cut-us-scien.html

 

[EMquest3]

For those of you in academia---

It is next to impossible for an emergency physician to get an R01 grant and with the sequester the NIH is now down another 2.5 billion. If you are deriving grant money where are you getting it from and how difficult do you find it to get grant money as a young academic physician?


http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2012/09/sequestration-would-cut-us-scien.html

The NIH just opened up an entire department devoted to funding emergency medicine research. *The sequester alone will not negate the extra funding coming from that office.

 

[xaelia]

There's no extra funding associated with the NIH Office of Emergency Care Research – it's simply a coordinating office that helps connect EM folks seeking funding with grants in other research institutes.

Better than nothing.

But, yes, I expect NIH funding will be harder to come by now. Serves 'em right, those deadbeat, freeloading, good-for-nothing academics.

 

[GeneralVeers]

With 40% of the budget already deficit spending, I don't think we can afford any money for the NIH. Furthermore, I'm not certain the (Federal) government should have any role to play in medical research. States, private education institutions, and private companies should foot the bill if they so choose.

 

[Arcan57]

With 40% of the budget already deficit spending, I don't think we can afford any money for the NIH. Furthermore, I'm not certain the (Federal) government should have any role to play in medical research. States, private education institutions, and private companies should foot the bill if they so choose.

Could not disagree more. Relying too much on private companies has lead to the creation of too many drugs that serve only to make a profit, not improve health over what exists currently. States and private educational sources don't have the resources to fund the necessary amount of research. This is a case where centralizing works.

 

[xaelia]

Sadly, industry-funded studies aren't being conducted with the integrity and transparency required to turn over the future of healthcare to them. If there are known flaws in a new drug, it's just a race to profit as much as possible until it gets pulled off the market, and only a small relative payout in legal costs on the back end. This has been repeatedly demonstrated.

I can't see how abdicating the funding prerogative to the states is appropriate – advances in healthcare aren't "local problems" requiring "local solutions". If you're going to have any government funding of research, it's far more efficient to have a single, federal bureaucracy, rather than multiple state-level ones.

Private institutions? I guess we could just all beg Bill and Melinda Gates for money. But then we'd be researching nothing but malaria treatments.....

 

[GeneralVeers]

Could not disagree more. Relying too much on private companies has lead to the creation of too many drugs that serve only to make a profit, not improve health over what exists currently. States and private educational sources don't have the resources to fund the necessary amount of research. This is a case where centralizing works.

I am consistent about my limited government principles. The Feds are there to protect the safety of the U.S., manage a stable currency, and make sure the States play nice with each other. Not much else is in their purview. I'd be hypocritical railing against their extra-constitutional involvement in healthcare delivery, yet support their involvement in healthcare research.

 

[Arcan57]

I am consistent about my limited government principles. The Feds are there to protect the safety of the U.S., manage a stable currency, and make sure the States play nice with each other. Not much else is in their purview. I'd be hypocritical railing against their extra-constitutional involvement in healthcare delivery, yet support their involvement in healthcare research.

Which I think demonstrates a limitation in your philosophy. Limited government is not an end goal, in and of itself. Limited government is a way to approach the problem of how groups of people should interact, with the goal of producing some desired benefit for the people involved (in your case it appears to be maximizing personal freedom and economic opportunity). A limited central government that performs your 3 main functions is definitely more successful at providing your goals for the largest possible segment of the populace then communist or dictatorial regimes. But limiting central government isn't a virtue in itself, it's the freedom and hope that come from the system that is the virtue. It would be hard to argue that nationalized health research destroys freedom and hope without resorting to some absurd slippery-slope argument. The truth is that no single philosophical viewpoint is sufficient to encompass the ideal system of government.

 

[GeneralVeers]

Which I think demonstrates a limitation in your philosophy. Limited government is not an end goal, in and of itself. Limited government is a way to approach the problem of how groups of people should interact, with the goal of producing some desired benefit for the people involved (in your case it appears to be maximizing personal freedom and economic opportunity). A limited central government that performs your 3 main functions is definitely more successful at providing your goals for the largest possible segment of the populace then communist or dictatorial regimes. But limiting central government isn't a virtue in itself, it's the freedom and hope that come from the system that is the virtue. It would be hard to argue that nationalized health research destroys freedom and hope without resorting to some absurd slippery-slope argument. The truth is that no single philosophical viewpoint is sufficient to encompass the ideal system of government.

It's simple. Amend the Constitution to give the government an enumerated power to provide healthcare research funding.