If you’re wondering where health care dollars go in this country, the invaluable Phil Klein reminds us:
Raymond Raad, a resident in psychiatry at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center and co-author of a new Cato study, presented evidence showing that the United States leads the world in the development of drugs, medical devices, and other advanced treatments. For instance, between 1969 and 2008, 57 of the 97 Nobel Prizes in medicine and physiology — or nearly 60 percent — were awarded to people who did their research in the U.S., and nine of the top 10 medical innovations between 1975 and 2000 were developed here. But … once these products are developed in the U.S., they become widely available and improve health care outcomes around the world.
Read the whole thing, and remember: that’s the system the Democrats are trying to tear down and replace with one more like the European countries that depend almost as heavily on American medical and pharmaceutical innovations as they do on American military protection. In both cases, the arguments for the superiority of a European model that is unsustainable on its own depend on somebody else assuming the role of America. And nobody’s volunteering for the job.
Failure, Failure, its broken, its a disaster, blah, blah,blah
As the Cato article indicated, a much higher percentage of basic science research is funded in the US by the government, i.e. a redistribution of tax dollars. The article singled out the NIH. The amount is certainly higher when we include defense research that results in civilian applications, e.g. microwaves and the internet.
Any idea how much government money (socialist spending, if you will) funded those Nobel winners?
The counterargument, which has some merit, is that you can’t take advantage of the innovation if you can’t afford the health insurance in the first place, which is the whole basis of the health care reform effort.
That being said, we shouldn’t be choosing reform that stifles all of that innovation for all the reasons Crank mentioned.