America’s Biotech Future and Lives Are on the Line

Originally published on Substack. 

​America is drifting into one of the most important battles of the 21st century without acting like it: the fight for global biotech leadership. And the stakes aren’t academic—they’re personal for families like mine.

Prescription drugs save lives. I didn’t learn that from a textbook or a hearing room. I learned it as a kid watching my parents’ marriage struggle under the weight of a condition modern medicine couldn’t control—and later, as a passenger in a mangled car that should have ended my life.

Today, I want to explain why the future of healthcare, U.S. competitiveness, and patient freedom all hinge on one fundamental truth: innovation thrives when government steps back and people are empowered.

How Limited Medicines Helped Break Up My Family
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My parents married and divorced twice over five years in the 1980s. The first divorce happened in 1986, when I was five. Here’s a picture of us when I was about 14 years old, when my dad visited for the holidays.

A major reason for the divorce was my dad’s epilepsy, which my mom couldn’t deal with, given her own battles. He developed epilepsy over time after having a traumatic head injury from a car wreck as a passenger in 1972 when he was 18. The grand mal (and petit mal) seizures were violent, unpredictable, and impossible to manage fully. And in the mid-1980s, the epilepsy drugs available today didn’t exist. Treatments were limited, unreliable, and expensive. That instability seeped into everything—our finances, our home life, and eventually, my family structure.
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Even after my parents remarried a couple of years after their first divorce to help with finances, his condition and the overall situation kept weighing us down, and my parents divorced again. My dad fought severe seizures for decades until SUDEP took him too soon at 56 years old in 2011. That experience taught me early that the cost of poor medicine isn’t measured in dollars—it’s measured in broken families and lost years.

The Wreck That Should Have Been the End

Fast-forward to 2002 (30 years after my dad’s wreck), when I was 20 years old. I was riding shotgun in a friend’s new Acura RSX going 120 mph, racing another car, when we crashed into another vehicle, rolled at least 6 times, and skidded upside down for 40 yards. Here’s what the car looked like at the impound lot.

I shouldn’t be here. But the grace of God, along with emergency medicine, trauma care, a life-flight helicopter, and modern pharmaceuticals that God gave humans the intellect and resources to develop, kept me alive. Here’s what I looked like after the wreck.

That moment is welded into memory. It’s why I can’t treat drug policy debates as political theater. Not when I’ve seen what access—or lack of access—means for real families.
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Innovation Is Slow, Expensive, and Fragile

Now let’s talk economics, because too many in D.C. substitute talking points for actual understanding.

Discovering and bringing a single drug to market takes:

• 10–15 years,
• often $2.5+ billion, and
• a 90% failure rate.

That’s not waste. That’s the cost of life-saving innovation.

If Washington restricts returns, imposes price controls, or injects uncertainty into reimbursements, investment falls. And when investment falls, breakthroughs disappear. Families like mine wait for cures that never come.
That’s not ideology. That’s basic economics, the kind some populists seem allergic to learning. Research shows that a forced 50% cut in drug prices could reduce new drug development by 30%—a devastating blow to future patients.

China Is Not Catching Up—China Is Planning to Win

While Washington debates how aggressively it can regulate American innovators, China is executing a full-scale industrial strategy under its “Made in China 2030” biotech framework:

• Giant state-backed biomanufacturing hubs
• National research parks tied to Party goals
• Aggressive recruitment of American and European scientists
• AI-driven drug-discovery platforms fed by massive datasets
• Total-state effort to dominate global supply chains

China isn’t catching up. China is positioning itself to control the next century of medical innovation while we argue about political gimmicks like MFN drug pricing, “TrumpRX,” or tariffs that pretend to solve problems Washington created.

That is not how markets work.

That is not how science works.

That is not how you compete with China.

Lower Prices Require Abundance—not Bureaucracy

If we want lower drug prices, the answer is simple:

• Increase supply.
• Increase competition.
• Increase innovation.

Prices fall naturally when abundance rises—not when politicians cap prices and shrink the pipeline of new cures.

• Price caps don’t lower costs—they eliminate future treatments.
• Tariffs don’t strengthen supply chains—they drive production abroad.
• Central planning doesn’t accelerate cures—it suffocates them.

That brings us to the model that works.

Empower Patients: The Pathway to Win Against China

This is exactly why I helped develop the Empower Patients (get your copy today!) blueprint with Dr. Deane Waldman, and why its core reforms aren’t optional—they’re essential.

1. Put healthcare dollars in the hands of patients through no-limit HSAs

• Fund them with the tax exclusion currently given to employers.
• Patients own the dollars.
• Patients see real prices.
• Patients drive the market.

This is how you create competition and transparency—not by empowering insurers or bureaucracies.

2. Block-grant Medicaid to the states

• Washington can’t manage 50 different populations from one office.
• States innovate; Washington regulates.
• Only one of those approaches works.

3. Streamline the FDA

• Every year of regulatory delay raises costs, slows cures, and weakens our global position.
• Modernized trials, reciprocal approvals, and faster pathways save billions—and lives.

4. Build America’s biotech supply side

• Stable R&D rules.
• Predictable regulation.
• Competitive taxes.
• Less government spending and fewer distortions.

Make the U.S. the best place to research, develop, and manufacture cures—period.

Why This Matters

My family broke apart partly, if not mostly, because the medicines my dad needed didn’t exist yet. I survived because the medication I needed did. That contrast is the entire point. The families waiting on tomorrow’s treatments don’t need Washington’s slogans. They need breakthroughs. They need affordability driven by abundance, not political shortcuts.
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And they need a government willing to stop sabotaging the very innovators who make these cures possible.
If we fix incentives, unleash competition, and trust free people to innovate, America—not China—will lead the future of medicine. And millions of families will live longer, healthier, and freer lives because of it. That is how we let people prosper.