Here Comes the Death Panels or Is This an Advance in Freedom?

Johnson & Johnson has appointed a nationally known bioethicist to create a panel that will make decisions about patients’ requests for lifesaving medicine, reports NYT.

NYT explains the why:

It comes as a small but growing number of patients with terminal illnesses have sought the right to obtain drugs still in the testing phase that show promise for treating their diseases.

Some of the requests have become highly publicized cases on social media, where family members and advocates have lobbied the companies on patients’ behalf — often to no avail because drug makers fear that doing so would interfere with clinical trials, or, in the case of the Ebola outbreak, that they have too little available. The issue, which involves fundamental questions of fairness and equal access to care, has become so intense that more than a dozen states have taken up legislation to speed the process...
Johnson & Johnson said the bioethicist, Arthur L. Caplan of New York University, who has written extensively about the issue of experimental drug availability — known as “compassionate use” — would oversee an independent panel of doctors, ethicists and patient advocates that will review requests for access to a limited array of experimental medicines and decide how Johnson & Johnson should respond.Of course, this only comes about because government regulations in the first place prevent free markets to develop in these drugs, and prevent the terminally ill from getting medication that may be their only hope. Why do we need any kind of ethicist to stick his nose in a patients decisions? If a patient wants to use a drug and is willing to pay for it, a free market would allow such. There would never be a need fo a "bioethicist" and panels of doctors and "patient advocates" in the middle.

So is this an end run move by Johnson & Johnson around oppressive government regulations and aa positive step in the direction of freedom for the ill or will this result in Americans becoming acclimated to "bioethicists" making life and death decisions on treatments, that will expand overtime to include "cost-benefit" analysis by bioethicists and panels across a large spectrum of medical and medicine treatments.

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