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September 21, 2009
WSJ: Why limit innovation in health care!
Topics: Political News and commentariesAs this WSJ article points out, despite all the well-documented problems with our health-care system, the United States is still the world's leading source of medical innovation. :
Since 1960, the U.S. age-adjusted death rate for heart disease has declined by 54% due to advancing technology and new drugs. Pacemakers have been transformed. They once required a user to wear a backpack to monitor the device's short battery life. Today, pacemaker batteries last more than seven years and are small enough to install in the rib-cage muscle wall.Read it all...Premature babies survive in America to live full lives more often than anywhere else in the world. New drugs now arriving on the market cure once-lethal leukemia. On the horizon there are vaccines to prevent other types of cancer. Modern science and technology offer even more exciting treatments in the future for diseases like AIDS, Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
Standing in opposition to this world of hope is the vision of reform advanced by President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats. That vision would destroy the economic incentives that drive health-care innovation because it starts with a fundamental conceit: that government planners can spend health-care dollars better than patients and doctors in the marketplace. This planning is the foundation for the arbitrary insistence that spending 17% of our GDP on health care is "too much."
The new bureaucracies that would be set up to reduce health-care spending by slashing payments to doctors, hospitals, surgeons, specialists, drug companies, high-tech equipment makers and others will kill the innovation that has served us so well. The essential incentives for the huge capital investment necessary to develop breakthrough treatments will be gone. And so too will high-paying jobs that these investments create.
Indeed, the plan released by Sen. Max Baucus (D., Mont.) last week would impose new taxes on medical device manufacturers of $40 billion over 10 years. That's more than industry venture capital investment.
As Ed Morrissey has pointed out, although federal and state funding plays a major role in medical research, the issue that determines whether that research occurs at all is whether patients will pay for the treatments.
[...] The market rewards success and penalizes failure on its own terms without accounting for political tastes. By allowing venture capital to make its own decisions on investment, it also gives a wide variety of opportunities for research and development by allowing the investors to focus on projects like artificial hips and pacemakers, radioactive seed implants for cancer treatment, and so on.In other words, don't be fooled by Obamacare's false promises; cost "savings" can not only end up shutting down technology and drug development, but also the lives that would have been saved had the technology and drug development not been eliminated.If government, in full cost-saving mode, decides that paying for the more expensive new therapies doesn't meet its "comparative effectiveness" criteria, then the absence of other payers in a market will mean that the technology never gets developed at all. Investors will not sink cash into such research without a market ready to adopt the end product, and government -- with its focus on saving costs and paying for an entire nation's health care -- won't have the cash to plow into experimentation any longer.
This will mean a great loss not just for the US but also for the rest of the world. Our medical research produces innovations like no other nation can, and without it, we will freeze the art of medicine in place at 2009.
Related important read: Will ObamaCare threaten medical innovation?
Posted by Abdul at September 21, 2009 7:14 PM
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- WSJ: Why limit innovation in health care! - Sep 21, 2009
