July 16, 2010. This week, Obama signed into law a financial reform bill which, among other things, stops one of the most egregious practices the developed around home loans in the last decade. Mainly, loan officers received kickbacks for steering customers into higher interest loans, and for higher dollar amount loans.
A loan officer might take someone with $100,000 of equity in their home who needed $5,000 for an emergency. They would encourage them to as much equity out of their home as possible, and then steer them into a 7% or 8% interest loan, instead of the 6% loan they had. The loan officer would get a kickback, sometimes in the tens of thousands of dollars for large loans, for their service.
Many people wonder why a research group doesn't just infect some animals with Blastocystis, find out what to use to treat it, and then distribute the information. After all, Blastocystis from 'IBS' patients makes animals sick, and by scientific criteria that has been established for 150 years, curing the disease is the next logical step.
One of the big problem is that no US research group wants to start with a "dinky" study to isolate an organism, infect an animal, and find a cure. Yes, that type of project is immensely valuable, and has been the standard for infectious disease research for some time. But it would be difficult to justify a grant for more than a few hundred thousand for such a project. And it wouldn't take long enough for graduate students to pursue a PhD thesis.
Yes, that's right. Studying Blastocystis isn't expensive enough. You see, when US researchers get money from the NIH, a percentage goes to the University they work for (sometimes 50% or more). The process is called an "overhead rate" or "expense capture." Over the years, Universities have caught on to this, and they now hire professors who are able to produce large NIH grant proposals. A professor who asks for $300,000 for a 1-year project would only earn the University $150K. But a 5-year, $10 million project. Now that's some cash.
This may explain why, when I talk to US researchers, they don't talk about identifying a specific infection in patients. They want to genetically sequence the patient's entire "biome", which means studying every organism in the patient's body. Now, that's going to take some cash, and years.
In both cases, there is a substantial economic pressure, in the form of the "kickback" that goes to the loan officer, or to the University. The result is that most medical research today is being driven by greed, plane and simple. Of course, the bogus grant has no more value to the patient than the inflated homeowner's loan, and this is how Washington is sickening the country.
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