The kind of design thinking championed by Steve Jobs--human-centered, iterative, and practical--can fix more than just our gadgets.

Controls would take away the industry's incentive to develop new lifesaving medications and therapies.

Patients who take a close look at medical science in search of treatments are often appalled by what they discover. On the one hand, there's academic research, a self-contained and self-absorbed universe of its own where data may be internally consistent (on a good day) and robustly reproducible, yet often has little relevance to real-world clinical conditions.

A fresh crop of caution inside the FDA may keep the agency out of the news, but it won't keep cancer patients from dying.

Extensive reimportation would likely have destroyed the incentives that U.S. firms have to develop new drugs.

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.

Ineffective drugs take lives, waste money and make precious cures useless. Drugs have been recycled after their expiry date; they have been contaminated with fatal toxins; they have been made too weak or with no active ingredient at all.

Political dysfunction. Partisanship at record levels. Attack politics run amok. And public approval of Congress scraping the single digits (Sen. John McCain is fond of saying it's down to blood rlatives and paid staff).