Doug Schoen, Serious Medicine Strategist.

Doug Schoen is best known as the pollster-strategist for a wide variety of center-left candidates, including Ed Koch, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Michael Bloomberg. 

But now Schoen has written an important piece for FoxNews.com, that should be of interest to all Americans.

As he writes:

America’s economic leadership is ours to lose. A new report by the Institute for Management Development shows the United States has fallen to third place in global competitiveness, behind Hong Kong and Singapore. The U.S. must move forward with a committed and aggressive medical innovation agenda that will help get our economy back on track, facilitate the work of innovators, and produce new products that will address some of the world’s most pressing medical challenges.

And he offers some specific policy recommendations:

Leaders in the public and private sectors need to join together to form unique and coordinated partnerships to eliminate gaps in funding, so that medical advancements can be developed efficiently, and so that the U.S. can remain competitive.

Congress should make the federal research and development tax credit permanent and raise it so that it is globally competitive, thus incentivizing investments that will ensure that we will be at the forefront of medical innovation. According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, expanding the research and development tax credit from 14% to 20% would create 162,000 new jobs.

Congress should also create tax and economic incentives to boost manufacturing and export-related job growth resulting from medical innovation. Such measures to strengthen investments in research, development and manufacturing will foster job growth and enhance America’s competitiveness.

The U.S. must also enhance regulatory sciences efforts at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). From 2005 – 2008, the FDA only approved about 19 truly new medicines, compared to an average of 31.13 from 1990 to 1999.

We need our federal leaders to strengthen and fund the development of a Regulatory Sciences Roadmap, which would build upon and advance current efforts to bring the best science to the review and approval of biomedical advances.

All of these suggestions can be debated and perhaps tweaked, but the debate should occur from a common understanding that Serious Medicine is a win-win-win.  A win for health, a win for economic activity in the medical sector, and a win for the overall economy.