insurance for their employees, interfered with the traditional physician-patient relationship. The incentive for healthcare providers and patients to keep costs as low as possible was lost. He says that now providers always charge the maximal fees for services, since the government or insurance company can be counted on to pay the bills. Paul additionally argues that government contributes to rising healthcare costs through yet other ways, such as through government regulations, one example being restrictions imposed by the Food and Drug Administration on the manufacture and sale of medications and dietary supplements, and through licensing of physicians and other healthcare practitioners, which Paul says interferes with market-based competition for healthcare services. He also criticizes the legal system's approach to the handling of medical malpractice claims, which he says needlessly inflates the cost of healthcare further still. Medical research funding Paul has long opposed government funding of medical research. Although he considers himself "pro-research," he believes that "all research in a free society should be done privately." In the mid-1980s, when no effective medication was yet available for AIDS treatment, Paul spoke publicly against all federal funding for AIDS research. He also wrote, in his book Freedom Under Siege, published in 1987, "Victims of the disease AIDS argue ... for crash research programs (to be paid for by people who don't have AIDS), demanding a cure ... The individual suffering from AIDS certainly is a victim – frequently a victim of his own lifestyle – but this same individual victimizes innocent citizens by forcing them to pay for his care. Crash research programs are hardly something, I believe, the Founding Fathers intended when they talked about equal rights." More recently, Paul has called federal funding for medical research unconstitutional and has complained that "neither party in Washington can fathom that millions and millions of Americans simply don't want their tax dollars spent on government research of any kind ..." He argues that the availability of federal research funds distorts "the natural market for scientific research" by inducing scientists to eschew pursuit of radical lines of potentially promising research that might not appeal to politicians and bureaucrats who hold influence over the allocation of grant monies. "Federal funding of medical research guarantees the politicization of decisions about what types of research for what diseases will be funded. Scarce tax resources are allocated according to who has the most effective lobby, rather than