Free Market Effect on Food Safety

Name: Adrienne

Posting #2

Topic: Health

Title: Leverage the Free Market Writer: Tom Coburn

Publication Name: USA Today Date of Publication: 11/23/2010

Length: 373 Words

Main Ideas:

Currently in the Senate there is a FDA Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010 that the Senate is going to be voting on. The Government Accountability Office calls the act "high risk due to it's greater vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement." The bill has 250 more pages of laws and regulations to be added. The bill would make changes that they installed after the salmonella outbreak last summer but did nothing to make it better. Opposers to the bill say that it's high cost will drive food prices up and run small businesses out of business. Proponents of the bill argue that food safety has not been modernized in the past 100 years and that it needs to be up to date. Senator Tom Coburn introduced a new bill as a replacement that wants to improve outdated technologies as well as have private inspections on businesses by the FDA without raising the price of food. He wants to let the free market to do all the work to fix the modern problems we have with food safety.

Conclusion:

There are currently two options facing the country. One is the democratic bill the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010 that is about to be voted on in the Senate. This bill is supposed to ensure food safety for the health of the country's citizens and ensure that many regulations are put on businesses. The proponents of this bill want to modernize the food safety regulations that have not been modernized in 100 years. People oppose this bill because they say it just wastes all our money and shuts out small businesses. The other republican bill is for letting the free market be with no government interference saying that when the regulations were enacted during the salmonella outbreak, they did nothing to stop it. They propose small private investigations of businesses to asses what needs to be done.

Opinion:

I would agree more with the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010 because it makes sense to me that the food safety regulations would have to be updated since the past 100 years. Also, private investigations seem like they would take up more money than just adding regulations to the market. And lastly, since the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act of 2010 is a democratic bill, I do not think it would allow small businesses to be hurt by this act because democrats in general are proponents of allowing small businesses to flourish.