Yesterday, President Obama signed the 21st Century Cures Act, which not only improved healthcare conditions for most Americans, but also will ramp up R&D (research and development), scientific, engineering, IT (information technology) and manufacturing jobs and technical healthcare breakthroughs. This will create have the side benefit of creating many high wage jobs as well.
Jobs and Technology Benefits Of The Cures Act
The Cures Act is one of the most sweeping efforts to provide additional programs and funding for health conditions and innovation in America, including cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, opioid addiction, medical devices, access to new drugs, and mental health. The Cures Act includes the major provisions of the Senate mental health compromise bill, Mental Health Reform Act of 2016, as well as a few additional provisions from the House’s over-reaching Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act of 2016 bill.
Additionally, as I shared in a previous article, it will not only speed up discovery of medical cures, but also help streamline our nations R&D, engineering, scientific and technology innovations and in the process create a lot more high paying jobs.
It will do so by speeding up the FDA’s approval process for new drugs and medical devices. Furthermore, many new antibiotics will see shorter trials periods and a wider range of drugs will get additional approvals for new uses based on relatively low amounts of evidence, such as data summaries and data from company registries.
Why This Technology Innovation Is Needed?
The National Center for Advancing Transactional Sciences says that out of the more than 10,000 known illnesses, less than 1,000 of these disorders currently have effective cures! Additionally, none of the 20 most-prescribed drugs in the U.S. came to market in the past decade. This has led to a scientific, engineering, and technology innovation slump that has caused American standards of living to stagnate since 2000.
Healthcare: A Catalyst For Technology!
One of the fields that continued to add jobs and push technology during the recent recession is healthcare. Unfortunately, a recent study shows that scientific, technical and research and development (R&D) innovation has declined in the past 6 years!
This is further confirmed by a new study by Charles Jones of Stanford University and three co-authors, which shows a declining payoff to medical research. It found that in the decade before 1985, years of life saved through breast cancer treatment rose steadily each year, along with the volume of research. But since 1985, improvements in mortality slowed. They calculate that each new published trial added 16 years of life per 100,000 people in 1985, and that fell to less than one year by 2006. They found the same pattern across agriculture and semiconductors: steadily declining productivity per researcher.
As a result, The 21st Century Cures Act may provide just the catalyst to reinvigorate medical scientific, engineering and technical breakthroughs. This in turn will lead to more companies recruiting key talent for technology endeavors, which will lead to much higher wages for our citizens.
