Without pinning things down quite a bit more into specific proposals, I'm not willing to do much of anything. I'm just saying that sometimes increased risk for decreased money and increased time can be a good trade-off, and any given proposal should be evaluated on its merits.

Sure. If the proposal is "government is tyranny, abolish the FDA!", there aren't any merits, the proposal is fundamentally unserious and comes from a place of deliberate ignorance. That's the kind of idiocy I was objecting to.

Any realistic proposal (as in, we have an idea of how much extra risk we're incurring) is going to have a lot of technical details and probably require a huge amount of research to justify it -- it's human lives that we're talking about here. The potential $ savings are big but that doesn't matter if you're dead. Like I said way upthread, there is plenty of room for improvement, but "libertarian pixie dust will make everything better automatically" is the same thought process that led to collective farming and killing 10s of millions in Russia and China.

Savings doesn't matter if you're dead, but the other side can't be ignored either. If those billions permits more competition and leads to new drugs, that too can save lives.

We need to do what we think is most likely to lead to the best outcome. There's a point beyond which that's no longer "more research", at which point researching more isn't taking it seriously. I have no particularly strong feelings about just where we are in that space - I'm busy saving the world along other lines.