Comment by wouldbecouldbe

In theory many laws are based on good ideas, but in practice they dont or only partially accomplish what they set out to do. Few examples:

- Bureaucracy around clinical trials The old Clinical Trials Directive (2001/20/EC) was meant to harmonise standards, but in practice it led to lots of extra admin and different interpretations in each country, which made multi-country trials slow and expensive. EUR-Lex You can see the effect in the numbers: Europe’s share of commercial clinical trials fell from ~22% in 2013 to about 12% in 2023, even while global trial numbers increased by ~38%.

- Medical Device Regulation (MDR & IVDR) bottleneck Meant for safety, but has meant delays and uncertainty for new devices and even risks of shortages of older ones, which clearly affects innovation. * https://www.meddeviceonline.com/doc/we-re-heading-toward-a-b...

- Data protection (GDPR) and health/science data Complexity and fragmentation of implementation can definitely slow things down, especially for big pan-European projects or AI/“big data” medicine. In theory it's good, but researcher or not being helped on how they can compete worldwide while being GDPR compliant, meaning EU will get behind & certain research is done elsewhere

Many more examples in other fields then medicine. And there are clearly a lot of good laws, but our idea of running a country is just adding lots of new rules every year is just faulty.