Another area in which government activity way beyond Constitutional functions doesn't achieve its ostensible aims

James Madison wouldn't be surprised.

Prior to the Progressive movement of the early 20th century, the federal government was generally understood to exist to maintain a military, a court system, a highway system a diplomatic function and a treasury. And that was about it.

Somewhere along the line over the past century, we embraced the notion that it should be involved in searching for medical breakthroughs.

As is the case with so much of this kind of stuff, because government lacks the incentive of competition, we see diminishing returns.

If you have any doubt that federally funded biomedical research is not giving you a good return on your forced tax dollar investment, a new study will set you straight.

The study, conducted by microbiologist Arturo Casadevall and M.D./Ph.D. student Anthony Bowen, shows that while the “industry” is growing, the deliverables are not.  To quote the Washington Post, “As the nation’s investment in the science that underlies new therapies has increased over the past half century, the output that we actually care about most — advances in health — appears to be slipping.”

$lipping.“The goal of the roughly $30 billion spent by the National Institutes of Health each year isn’t merely to provide jobs for scientists and create reams of erudite scientific papers, but to help people live longer and better,” but the analysis published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ”raises far more questions than it answers and may in fact reveal how little we know about how to measure the bang for our buck when it comes to funding the insights and innovations that improve health.”
I’ve written about the issue numerous times before, whether it was to chide big-government conservatives like Newt Gingrich or Republican congressmen, or to point out how federal animal research labs are conducting ridiculous experiments and accidentally killing their animal subjects. This is a big fiscal deal because the budget for the National Institutes of Health is astronomical at $30 billion a year.“I remember wondering if the pace of innovation from 1950 to 1980, when we only knew a certain amount [about biology], had been faster than the pace of innovation between 1980 and 2010,” said Arturo Casadevall, chair of the department of molecular microbiology and immunology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Thinking of all the things that were found between 1950 and 1980: blood pressure medicines, antibiotics, heart transplants… and that had been learned with only a very limited amount of knowledge compared to what we know now. And I kept thinking, could things be slowing?”
Some of the findings in the study show that “funding increased four-fold since 1965, but the number of drugs only doubled.”

The director of the NIH, Francine Collins, said “NIH agrees that it is critical to assess whether progress in biomedical research is achieving its ultimately desired outcome –  better health for the nation and the world. That is, however, a challenging task, and previous published economic analyses of the return on investment for NIH-supported research have led to radically different conclusions.” 

Sounds a lot like the way things go when the gummint gets involved in energy, agriculture and the arts, among other  realms.

And you busted your tail end to provide the money.