Biden’s FTC chair Lina Kahn never met a merger she didn’t hate or a business she didn’t want to regulate, but perhaps her single most destructive move was overruling her agency’s own administrative law judge to block the merger of Grail and Illumina.
Congressman Darrell Issa of California explains the fallout from this moronic intervention:
What if we could detect almost all cancers in the earliest stages when less-invasive treatments mean lifesaving cures? Mortality rates — and health care costs — would plummet because most cancers could be cured or controlled using existing therapies.
The good news is this innovation exists today in the form of multi-cancer early detection (MCED) from one blood test. The bad news is we don’t have an Eisenhower administration determined to deliver a medical game-changer to as many Americans as possible.
Instead, we have a Biden administration — in the form of the Federal Trade Commission and Chair Lina Khan that Biden named to head it — creating an impenetrable barrier to access to millions of cancer patients.
California-based Grail is a pioneer in the MCED space and wants to merge with another California company, Illumina, which makes the machines used by Grail to scan our blood for signs of cancer. Illumina says it wants to bring Grail’s potential breakthrough test beyond the concierge doctors and self-insured health plans and to the entire country.
But this isn’t good enough for Khan, an avowed critic of corporate mergers. She deems this anti-competitive and offers the excuse that Grail has no present competitors… It may be the single worst regulatory mistake this country has ever made because early detection could do for cancer what Salk did for polio.
