One of the central promises of Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign was to “Make America Healthy Again.”
With limited details on how exactly he plans to achieve this and uncertainty surrounding the confirmation of his selected agency heads to lead the initiative, all eyes will be on Washington to see how the new administration delivers on the MAHA agenda.
Improving America’s health is no small task – it will require addressing everything from a broken food system to the nation’s chronic illness epidemic. However, one issue that has flown under the radar will need to be addressed if the MAHA agenda is to succeed – the growing burden of litigation weighing on America’s health care system.
Although the issue has not received significant attention in the mainstream media, the rise in mass tort litigation over the past few years has become a substantial factor in the health innovation ecosystem. When a company is targeted with a lawsuit, it consumes a significant amount of money, attention, and time, diverting resources away from the core business mission. In the case of biopharmaceutical companies, this means less funding flows into critical research and development efforts, ultimately delaying the development of novel treatments and therapies.
Delaying innovation is not just an academic matter – it has a host of unwanted real-world consequences. Many diseases and conditions currently have no treatments available, and even among those that do, the options are often inadequate or insufficient to offer patients the relief they deserve.
This is just reality. The only way to change it is for medical innovation, primarily driven by the private sector, to continue. While the biopharmaceutical industry has delivered many incredible treatments in recent years, the growing burden of litigation threatens to prevent this progress from continuing.
Some may think that issues like mass tort litigation are too abstract to be relevant for improving America’s health. But nothing could be further from the truth. Patients are at the very end of the complex medical innovation ecosystem. Everything from research to testing to securing regulatory approval happens upstream of the patient’s experience.
When it comes to improving America’s health, out of sight cannot mean out of mind. If the foundational research that drives innovation slows down or halts altogether, patients will eventually experience delays in accessing new products – if they ever get them at all.
Treatments that arrive five years later or novel medicines that never arrive at all are serious barriers to care. The harm may be harder to see compared to other problems plaguing the health care system, but it is no less real.
Indeed, the threat of costly litigation acts as a wet blanket across the entire innovation ecosystem. In addition to diverting resources from valuable research and development, companies adapt to the hostile business environment by becoming more risk-averse in choosing which innovations they pursue. After all, if a company that delivers a novel treatment can be forced into bankruptcy by a lawsuit, they are more likely to invest in churning out more of the products that are already proven and safe.
While building on past success is fine, the way to make America healthier is to develop groundbreaking treatments. Protecting this innovation and the lifesaving treatments it delivers to patients must become a top health care priority for our nation’s leaders.
