A colon cameral pill just got approved by the FDA, Huffington Post Reports.
The FDA on Monday cleared the company's PillCam Colon for patients who have experienced an incomplete colonoscopy. Given estimates 750,000 U.S. patients are not able to complete the procedure each year, due to anatomy issues, previous surgery or various colon diseases.
I wonder how many of them died because they couldn’t get an incomplete colonoscopy. And then there’s the consumer surplus of replacing a $4,000 colonoscopy with a $500 camera.
These are the costs of not having this neat little devise, and we ought to multiply it by 12 for the average number of years that it takes the FDA to approve a drug in order to assess the true costs of having the FDA approve it.
Most people don’t think about this kind of problem – approval times kill people and reduce the quality of their lives. Upon taking it into account, they ought to assess the value of the FDA accordingly, that is, as much less valuable than it was previously thought to be. My impression of how people actually react to it is by exaggerating the benefits of the FDA all the more in order to preserve the previous assessment of the total net value of having it.
