About the Center for Medical Progress

The Center for Medical Progress is dedicated to articulating the importance of medical progress and the connection between free-market institutions and making medical progress both possible and widely available throughout the world. We encourage the development of market-based policy alternatives to sustain medical progress and promote medical innovation. The Center for Medical Progress also publishes www.MedicalProgressToday.com, a web magazine devoted to chronicling the connections among private sector investment, biomedical innovation, market friendly public policies, and medical progress.

The Center for Medical Progress produces a variety of publications and hosts regular forums on issues of concern to medical progress and health care policy. For more information, please contact CMP director Paul Howard at communications@manhattan-institute.org.

ISSUE AREAS:

Medicare/Medicaid Entitlement Reform

Medicare and Medicaid are the nation's two largest entitlement programs. They are also facing multi-trillion dollar deficits in coming decades as expenditures dwarf tax revenues. While some have advocated that the U.S. adopt a Canadian-style "single-payer" health care system to reign in costs, the Manhattan Institute recognizes that price controls and rationing will only exacerbate the health care challenges facing our nation, not solve them. Reforming these programs means opening Medicare and Medicaid to private insurance markets and putting consumers, not bureaucrats, in control of their own health care spending through health savings accounts and targeted vouchers. Empowered consumers make rational, cost-effective choices without dampening the market incentives driving health care innovation. Read more on this topic >>

Consumer Driven Health Care

Third-party payment plans allow some consumers to use services without ever paying the full cost of health care utilization, while others pay for benefits they don't need. The result is a system where health care costs spiral out of control and consumer choice is limited to "one-size-fits-all" medicine. The CMP wants to change this system by making it a true market: putting consumers in charge of their own routine health care spending; reserving insurance for truly catastrophic injuries; and creating a national market for health insurance that encourages customized insurance plans and pricing competition. Read more on this topic >>

FDA Reform and Medical Innovation

The discovery of rare side effects from drugs like Vioxx and Celebrex has politicians and the media clamoring for larger, longer, and more expensive clinical trials by the Food and Drug Administration. But there is no evidence that reliance on additional "one-size-fits-all" clinical trials will make prescription drugs safer. Moreover, it will cost more lives due to slowed access to new medicines. The CMP's prescription for reform is more science, not more regulation. Science-driven FDA reform can help improve drug safety, streamline drug development and accelerate the adoption of personalized medicine. To achieve these goals, the Manhattan Institute has formed Project FDA, composed of leading experts that will develop a platform for FDA reform that will help the agency meet health care challenges in the 21st century using cutting-edge science and market-friendly policies. Read more on this topic >>

Drug Importation/Price Controls

The U.S. is the world's leader in biopharmaceutical innovation, mainly because the U.S. does not impose price controls on prescription drugs. However, the rise of the internet has given individual U.S. consumers access to drugs in price controlled countries, leading to a growing demand that policymakers legalize importation on a national level. This policy would undermine medical innovation, while sending pharmaceutical investment and innovation now conducted in the U.S. to our rapidly developing competitors in China and India. The CMP is devoted to cataloguing the benefits of market driven medical innovation, both in economic and human terms, and in shifting the debate on drug importation to a question of free trade. After all, since the entire world benefits from the premium U.S. consumers pay for drug research and development, U.S. trade negotiators should encourage rich nations to help bear the full costs of drug development. Read more on this topic >>

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