The trials are paid for by the company making the drug. With FDA and (sometimes) NIH oversight of course. But the FDA is terribly under funded. And the NIH is already a tool for the pharm industry.
And if a company's drug gets into trouble, a few calls to a few of our elected officials takes care of the little fact right quick.
We only hear about it when people die. Remember Vioxx?
http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/11/nation/la-na-fda-bud...
When a business fails, its budget is cut as customers leave it in droves for other businesses. But when the FDA fails, the idea is to throw more money at it, to increase the budget of a failure.
The problem is that the FDA is a monopoly. When it fails, which happens routinely, people should be able to look to alternate reviewers -- like the European or Japanese regulatory bodies. That doesn't happen right now.
Yes, things could be improved, but taking apart the FDA isn't, IMO, a solution.
How much does it need to do its job? Has the amount of work stayed constant between 2006-2011? Was it properly funded in 2006?
We could start to pay a company to tell us which drugs were safe, but they would only have one customer who would tell everybody else.
[ScienceBasedMedicine.org](http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/the-free-speec...)
I'll accept the FDA wasting money, and in exchange I don't have to listen to them. The fact that homeopathy can be branded medicine virtually eliminates any point in having the FDA with regard to drug efficacy / safety.
The market does nothing except exploit. Now nothing wrong with that.. but the idea of a free and open market in America hasn't been true since.. well.. 1980?