Should We Charge Patients for Medical Research?; New York Times, 7/31/15

Ezekiel J. Emanuel, New York Times; Should We Charge Patients for Medical Research? :

"A FEW months ago, we got a call from a former oncology professor of ours. He had developed an experimental precision diagnostic test that he thought would be able to determine which chemotherapies would be most effective against a patient’s cancer. He wanted to conduct a research trial to evaluate the effectiveness of the new test. But there was one big problem: The research had no funding.

He wanted our view on whether it would be legal and ethical if he charged the patients about $30,000 each to pay for the research.

This idea is not as outlandish as it sounds. In the 1980s some for-profit companies and institutes charged patients for participating in research. Mostly they went bust. Recently, others have proposed that the rich buy places in clinical trials. And now scientists have begun thinking this may be a way to fund promising research ideas...

Despite some apparently good arguments, we disagree with this approach. While there is no law or rule that would prohibit pay-to-play research, and some research may be funded this way, as we wrote in the current issue of Science Translational Medicine, we think charging would be a mistake."