by Nick Jacobs

The issue of how much to fund scientific and medical research continues to raise it's ugly head, and it has become painfully clear to me that the research system in this country is broken as well. Science needs desperately to study the disease mechanisms that represent underlying causation. Researchers and physicians must develop unique methodologies that can appropriately and seamlessly explore environmental causation's as well as primary genetics.

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Organizations that have embraced the concept of sharing information, working collaboratively on all levels and not rewarding individuals for keeping secret their theories and discoveries have been common everyday causalities in the fiscal environment that dominates our federal funding mechanism.

We are spending 30% of our Medicare dollars on the last thirty days of life with little or no possibility that we will cure or improve the status of the dying individuals. We are continuously, financially stroking those individual divas that try to discover their secret sauce and then have no incentive to share their findings because it may interfere with their personal grant streams or intellectual property. It's not really their fault. It is the system. Not unlike what we just observed with the melt down of our finance system. De-regulation, inappropriate reward systems and incentives all contribute to this upside down world of healthcare.

We are rewarding unendingly the finances of our oncology specialists through profit sharing and bonuses with big pharma but do not see that as a conflict in any way. We will radiate, administer chemo, and treat unnecessarily or hopelessly until death actually arrives when hospice and palliative care is the correct approach to take.

The United States has no finance policy, no science policy, and no health care policy except to continue to feed the current broken system. Someone has to stand up and be counted or the entire system will crash and burn.