American Enterprise Institute (AEI) president Arthur C. Brooks has announced that AEI scholar Leon R. Kass, M.D., is the recipient of AEI’s 2012 Irving Kristol Award. Dr. Kass will receive the award and deliver the Irving Kristol Lecture at AEI’s annual dinner on Wednesday, May 2, 2012, at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.

Many new medical technologies reduce direct health costs, but when they reduce costs in the short run, they often increase costs over the long run.

The crisis in financing is having a chilling effect on biomedical innovation. As discussed in my last column, the main problem in our industry is that the sheer cost of drug development has become almost prohibitively expensive, effectively pricing almost everyone but the largest companies out of the market.

Theallocation of public funds should take account of both research productivity and the public health need to relieve the social and economic burden of disease.

AEI contributorsfrom the federal government, foundation sector, and the nation's top scientists seek to define the major issues in ensuring continued U.S. leadership in biomedical research.

Successfully translating scientific discoveries requires a sense of urgency, which some disease foundations seem to have, and many big pharmas appear to need. Patients waiting expectantly for medical research to produce important new cures are finding bad news almost everywhere they turn.

For the last decade, as the biopharmaceutical industry has struggled — largely unsuccessfully — to live up to its anticipated potential, a litany of experts, analysts, participants, and commentators have offered up their diagnosis and treatment for pharma’s productivity problem.

The basic question they’re all trying to solve: how can...

The United Kingdom's publicly financed National Health Service has granted near-veto power over drug reimbursement decisions to the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, an independent organization known as NICE. As a result, British health authorities are expected to adopt or deny new medical technology based on NICE's assessment...