For over three decades, CEI has advocated health care reforms that put more power in the hands of consumers to choose their health providers, treatment protocols, and scope of insurance coverage. We have advocated reform of the Food and Drug Administration’s drug and device approval process to allow for greater flexibility and patient choice. And in 2013, CEI organized the court challenges to Obamacare’s exchange subsidies that concluded with the Supreme Court’s King v. Burwell decision.
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Blog
New FDA lab tests rule could bankrupt small labs
Yesterday the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that on May 6 it will promulgate a rule under its authority to regulate medical devices.
National Review
The Return of the Cadillac Tax?
Like the phoenix, a key piece of the Affordable Care Act has risen from the ashes, resurrected, believe it or not, by the Republican Study Committee…
Blog
Free the Economy podcast: Paying for organs with Pete Jaworski
In this week’s episode we cover the future of AI and employment, why we shouldn’t trust Chinese economic statistics, and how the…
Search Posts
Op-Eds
Infant Formula Ambush by Henry I. Miller
Self-styled public-health activists often pursue issues that are surrogates for their real agenda. One example is the continuing attack on infant formula. Activists'…
Newsletter
The Competitive Enterprise Institute Daily Update
Issues in the News 1. SPAM E-MAIL Spam “zombies”—computers that are hijacked to send out a spammer’s unwanted email messages—get…
Newsletter
The Competitive Enterprise Institute Daily Update
Issues in the News 1. TECHNOLOGY A small group of U.S. House members is proposing new federal rules for disposal…
Newsletter
The Competitive Enterprise Institute Daily Update
Issues in the News 1. CIVIL LIBERTIES The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence begins debate over whether to renew…
Newsletter
The Competitive Enterprise Institute Daily Update
Issues in the News 1. ECONOMIC LIBERTY The union campaign against Wal-Mart expands in the Washington,…
Op-Eds
Infant Formula Fanatics Should Stop Milking the Issue, by Henry Miller
Self-styled public health activists often pursue issues that are surrogates for their real agenda. One example is the continuing attack on infant formula. The…
Op-Eds
If Wishes Were Horses, This Would Be the Kentucky Derby
GENEVA, Switzerland—The 58th World Health Assembly (the World Health Organization's policy-making body) under way here brings to mind the cliché about the contestants…
Op-Eds
Obesity Hysteria Survives Despite Official Debunking
Obesity hysteria recently collapsed under its own weight. But the public health establishment, media and politicians are doing their best to revive it.Researchers from…
News Release
PhRMA President Billy Tauzin To Keynote CEI Annual Dinner
Washington, D.C., May 9, 2005—In his first address to a non-healthcare industry audience since taking the top drug industry post in January, Pharmaceutical Research and…
Op-Eds
Time to End the Breast Implant Circus
Two weeks ago, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration convened an expert advisory panel to review and make recommendations on two silicone breast implants…
Op-Eds
American Dream or American Politics?
To the Editor: Roland J. Hwang has a curious approach to the issue of the auto industry's future (“Hybrids can propel Big 3…
Op-Eds
Quaky Nutritionists Cross the Line
The Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine recently celebrated its 20th birthday at a star-studded gala (and vegan dinner) attended by Alec Baldwin, Alicia…
Products
One, Two, Many Broken Windows
Full Document Available in PDF Albert Einstein is often attributed with defining…
CEI Planet
April Issue of CEI’s Monthly Planet
Full Document Available in PDF Environmentalism, RIP? Not So Fast, by Angela…
Op-Eds
What Storm-Tossed FDA Needs
President Bush's nominee to head the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Lester Mr. Crawford, faces daunting challenges. As acting commissioner for most of…
Op-Eds
A Poor Helmsman Navigates FDA’s Perfect Storm
The President's nominee to head the FDA, Lester Crawford, faces daunting challenges. As acting commissioner for most of the past four years, Crawford…
Op-Eds
Bush’s Nominee is Wrong Guy for FDA at this Critical Time
The president's nominee to head the Food and Drug Administration, Lester Crawford, faces daunting challenges. As acting commissioner for most of the past…
Op-Eds
California’s Bogus Baby Bottle Scare
The California State Assembly is about to consider legislation intended to frighten parents about the safety of baby bottles, teethers, pacifiers and other…
Op-Eds
Hysteria over Cosmetics
Europe-envy by Californians may be fine for makers of champagne and foie gras, but it's disastrous for legislators in search of sound regulatory policy.
Op-Eds
Kraft Nod to Gene-Splicing Provides Food for Thought
Full document available in pdf format.<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /> Biotechnology applied to agriculture and…
Op-Eds
California’s Extreme Makeover
If <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />California truly is the bellwether for the rest of the country, get ready for more…
Op-Eds
Vaccine Disease Protections Outweigh Side Effects
It’s quite unusual for me to write follow-up columns, but I had such an overwhelming response to my recent column…
Op-Eds
Give Nestlé a Break
Generally, the European left has no love for big American financial firms. But some Swiss shareholder activists have embraced the U.S.’s largest proxy-advisory service in…
Washington Post
Painkiller Decision suggest shift in FDA’s risk-benefit equation
Op-Eds
Nation Descends into Mercury Madness
Mercury is all over the news these days, which is appropriate for an element named after the messenger of the gods. At some Maryland high…
Citation
Americans told fish tales about mercury hazards in fish consumption
Products
The Drug Reimportation Controversy
As policy battles go, the drug reimportation debate is an unusual one. On its face, the federal ban on reimporting pharmaceuticals appears to violate the…
CEI Planet
February/ March Issue of CEI’s Monthly Planet
Full Document Available in PDF Featured in the February/March Issue of the…
News Release
UN: The Sky Is Falling
Contact: <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /> Richard Morrison, 202.331.2273 Washington,…
Op-Eds
Bureaucrats upending NIH
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) faces a revolt by its employees over new, draconian conflict-of-interest rules. They ban all consulting (paid or unpaid) for…
Op-Eds
Misnamed Activists Are Thorns In Rose Of Agbiotech Foods
In a spin-dominated world where activists claim—often on the flimsiest of data—that this, that or the other thing causes cancer or threatens the…
News Release
Career Scientist Nominated as EPA Head
Contact for Interviews: <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /> Richard Morrison, 202.331.2273 …
Op-Eds
Dying for Regulatory Reform
Full article available in pdf format Congress has a long and ignoble history of exaggerated legislative responses to perceived health…
Op-Eds
Science Goes Tabloid: In scientific journals, if it bleeds, it leads
In the United Kingdom, most of the respected broadsheet newspapers have cut costs and increased circulation by adding a tabloid edition. Some argue that…
Op-Eds
Travesties of Regulation: Harmful U.N. policies.
Former Federal Reserve Board chairman Paul Volcker, who heads the inquiry into corruption in the United Nations' defunct oil-for-food program, has just issued…
News Release
Bush Budget Missteps On Energy, Environment, Regulatory Reform
<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /> Contact for Interviews: Christine Hall, 202.331.2258, or Richard Morrison, 202.331.2273…
News Release
CEI Scholars Respond to Bush Budget
<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /> OVERVIEW Analysis from CEI Vice President for Policy Clyde…
News Release
CEI Applauds Court Ruling Against Gov’t Tobacco Suit
Contact for Interviews: <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /> Richard Morrison, 202.331.2273 …
News Release
Fast Food Obesity Lawsuit Threatens Consumers, Rule of Law
Contact for Interviews: Richard Morrison, 202.331.2273 Washington, D.C., January 26, 2004—Yesterday’s reinstatement of the obesity liability lawsuit against McDonald’s resurrects…
Op-Eds
Six Tsunamis
<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /> Imagine that every year the world suffered from six or more tsunamis producing…
Products
Freeing the Biotech Revolution
Full Document Available in PDF The second of two excerpts from The Frankenfood…
CEI Planet
CEI Planet: November 2004
Full Document Available in PDF In this issue: “Freeing the Biotech Revolution” by Henry…
Op-Eds
Stopping a Flu Pandemic
During the winter of 1918-19, only months after the end of World War I, much of the world was ravaged again, this time…
Op-Eds
Pew’s Parallel Universe
<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /> The “new biotechnology,” or gene-splicing, applied to agriculture and food production is here to…
Study
“Mad Cow”: Is the Media Milking an Overblown Threat?
Full Document Available in PDF The recent confirmation of…
Study
The Environmental Source
NOTE: A new edition of The Environmental Source has been published. The new version of this essential reference book on environmental policy is available in…
News Release
Understanding the Perils of Drug Reimportation
Washington, D.C., December 21, 2004—Today, as the Department of Health and Human Services is poised to release its pending report on drug reimportation, the Competitive…
Op-Eds
The Danger of Too Much Caution
Congress has a long and ignoble history of exaggerated legislative responses to perceived health crises. They seem to be at it again.<?xml:namespace prefix…
News Release
Disrupting Unscientific Chemical Speculation
Contact for Interviews: <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /> Richard Morrison, 202.331.2273 …
Op-Eds
How lawsuits can kill
This year's flu-vaccine shortfall is just one of many dangerous shortages of essential vaccines—and it need not have happened. <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns…
Newsletter
Cooler Heads
Politics COP-10 Opens in Buenos Aires with Attacks on US Intransigence As the tenth Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention…
Washington Post
Killing Salmon
Op-Eds
The Supermarket’s Unnatural Selections
Agricultural practices have been “unnatural” for 10,000 years. With the exception of wild berries and wild mushrooms, virtually all the grains, fruits and…
Op-Eds
Abusive Behavior
Recent months have seen some regrettable lapses by prestigious scientific journals. Some highly questionable claims have been made, but have been published anyway.
News Release
Time to End “Mad Cow” Madness
Washington, D.C., December 1, 2004—The Competitive Enterprise Institute joins President Bush in calling for an end to the unnecessary and harmful ban on importation of…
Op-Eds
The Curse of Too Much Caution
The FDA is the nation's most ubiquitous regulatory agency. It oversees products that account for 25 cents of every consumer dollar, with a…
Op-Eds
Making the Desert Bloom
There is big news from the <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Middle East that is unusual in several ways: It's positive,…
Products
Food Fights: When Puffery Crosses the Line
As technological and institutional innovations have made it possible to replace the problems of starvation with those of obesity, we’ve begun to take for granted…
Products
The Origins of “Biotechnology”
Full Document Available in PDF Excerpted from Chapter 1 of The Frankenfood…
Washington Post
After Criticism, FDA Will Strengthen Drug Safety Checks
Washington Post
After Criticism, FDA Will Strengthen Drug Safety Checks
New York Times
FDA’s Drug Safety System Will Get Outside Review
Op-Eds
Demonize – Then Pulverize
Ten years ago last May, a new type of lawsuit was filed against the tobacco industry. That industry was no stranger to lawsuits; since the…
Op-Eds
Health, Wealth and Happiness
How do we know when we’re happy? Strange as it may seem, this philosophical question could come back to haunt you one April 15. Psychologists…
Op-Eds
Medicine Could Reach For Stars, FDA Willing
When Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft in 1975, they shot for the stars and succeeded. More recently, Allen shot for the stars again.
Op-Eds
More Crop for the Drop
Your morning espresso at Starbucks will soon be more expensive. Unless, that is, they find a way to make it without water or coffee, both…
Op-Eds
The Toxic Politics of Biotech
How far does grass pollen travel? Ask someone who has hay fever, and the response is likely to be “much too far.” But…
Op-Eds
A Green Push to Keep Projects Safe for Vermin
The next time you see rats roaming around public housing units in New York City, think of Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. He and a handful…
CEI Planet
CEI Planet: September 2004
Full Document Available in PDF Tech Regulation Done Right, by Braden Cox…
Citation
Downsize Her
Products
Confronting the Malaria Threat
Full Document Available in PDF Ninety years ago, a Congressional Committee held a hearing…
Products
Ketchup: More than a Vegetable?
The organic food industry got an unexpected boost from the Democratic National Convention this past July. The surprise came from how the candidate’s wife, Teresa…
Op-Eds
Mr. Rifkin’s Pipe Dream
Professional worrier Jeremy Rifkin's pronouncements always remind me of the characterization by one-time Speaker of the House of Representatives Thomas B. Reed of…
Op-Eds
Back to School for Pests
As students return to school this fall, parents will again worry about new illnesses as kids come in contact with more cold and…
Op-Eds
The Internet as Medical Adviser?
While the future of health care is heatedly debated in this presidential election year, something less obvious, but possibly much more important, is occurring behind…
News Release
Déjà vu Tobacco Lawsuit Seeks $280 Billion Tax
Contact: Christine Hall, 202.331.2258<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /> Washington, DC, September 20, 2004—As the U.S. Department of Justice…
Op-Eds
Taking the Scare Out of Biotech Crops
In the late 1990s, political scientist Gregory Conko had been studying food and pharmaceutical regulation as a fellow of the Competitive Enterprise Institute,…
Op-Eds
Soso Whaley Interviewed in Brazil
Soso Whaley interview in O Estado de Sao Paulo, August 20, 2004 Soso Whaley followed the same…
Study
Ratification without Representation?
Full Document Available in PDF In 2001, the Bush Administration signed the United Nations Environment…
Op-Eds
Ratification Without Representation: Making a Joke out of the Constitution
“Why don't we just give them ours?” Jay Leno asked last summer as the Bush administration was helping <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns =…
News Release
“Frankenfood Myth” Debunks Biotech Scare
Contact for Interviews: <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /> Jody Clarke, 202.331.2252 <?xml:namespace prefix = st1…
Op-Eds
Nauseating Cases of Product Liability
Morning sickness –the nausea and vomiting that afflict more than half of pregnant women –can be debilitating. There once was…
Op-Eds
The Truth About Marcia Angell
I never knew my maternal grandparents. During the nineteen-teens, my maternal grandmother died of a wound infection following a routine gall-bladder operation. A…
Op-Eds
Fear Factor
Environmental activists seeking to halt the worldwide spread of the advanced technologies they fear see <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />China…
Op-Eds
Obesity: a Sign We’re Doing Things Right
Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson recently designated obesity a disease, with all the negative implications that entails. Our society, crippled, it seems,…
Op-Eds
Bookshelf: Fighting Disease Is Only Half the Battle
As a fresh-faced medical intern, a colleague of mine once greeted a new patient with a breezy, “So what’s your problem?” “Oh, just a touch…
News Release
The Frankenfood Myth: How Protest and Politics Threaten the Biotech Revolution
Announcing a timely and incisive<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns =…
Op-Eds
California Wine vs. Two-Legged Pests
<?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />California is under attack by parasites, of both the six-legged and two-legged variety. The former are…
Op-Eds
Visions of “Ecodemics”
In Six modern plagues, veterinarian and journalist Mark Jerome Walters, like many modern-day greens, deems humankind the source of many of the world’s problems. He…
News Release
CEI Welcomes Report on Biotech Food Safety
<?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” /> Contact for Interviews: <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /> Richard Morrison,…
Op-Eds
DEBUNK THE JUNK – July 25, 2004
<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /> “What we did in making nutrition labeling mandatory did not help obesity.
News Release
Scientists and Scholars Denounce Position of the Catholic Institute for International Relations on GM Crops
<?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />Milan, Italy: July 17, 2004 — An international group of scientists and scholars released a statement…
Op-Eds
They’re Coming for Your Shrimp
H.L. Mencken famously defined Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy." Yesterday’s puritans worried about their neighbors enjoying alcohol or gambling…
News Release
Debunk the Junk: June 1, 2004
Debunk the Junk: <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />June 1, 2004<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /> …
Op-Eds
EU Is out of Step over Regulation of Modified Products
Sir, The premise of Steven Druker’s rant that the US criticises Europe’s application of the precautionary principle yet uses it itself (“America’s hypocrisy over modified…
News Release
Chemical Risk Expert Testifies Before Government Reform Committee
Contact for Interviews: <?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office” /> Richard Morrison, 202.331.2273 …
Op-Eds
We eat only what we choose to
To answer John Gapper’s question (Who would be in Neville Isdell’s shoes?”) in his article “How to get fat on a healthy diet”…
New York Times
We Eat Only What We Choose To (Letter to the Editor)
To answer John Gapper’s question (“Who would be in Neville Isdell’s shoes?”) in his article “How to get fat on a healthy diet” (May 11),…
News Release
Nobel Peace Laureate to Discuss Tools for Battling Hunger
Contact: Richard Morrison, 202.331.2273 Washington, D.C. – On Tuesday, May 18th, Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Norman Borlaug will address a Newsmaker Breakfast sponsored…
News Release
Crews Rejoins CEI as Vice President for Policy
Contact for Interviews: Richard Morrison, 202-331-2273 Washington, D.C., May 11, 2004—The Competitive Enterprise Institute is pleased to announce the return of Clyde Wayne Crews Jr.
