jreeves
Senior Member
- Feb 12, 2008
- 6,588
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RealClearPolitics - Obama Would Stifle Military and Medical Creativity
We also may be at risk of squandering our high-tech advantage in medicine. As Scott Atlas of the Hoover Institution points out, the top five American hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in all other developed countries. America has outpointed all other countries combined in Nobel Prizes for medical and physiology since 1970.
American theoretical health research financed by the National Institutes of Health and by American market-oriented pharmaceutical companies outshines the rest of the world combined. And the rest of the world tends to get the benefits at cut rates. American taxpayers finance NIH, which reports results publicly to the whole world.
Pharmaceutical companies that produce benefits for patients and consumers get the profits that support their research disproportionately from Americans, because other countries refuse to spend much more than the cost of producing pills, which is trivial next to the huge cost of research and regulatory approval. Getting these free riders to pay more is, again, Sisyphus's work.
The Democratic health care bills threaten to undermine innovation in pharmaceuticals and medical technologies by sending those with private insurance into a government insurance plan that would be in a position to ration treatment and delay or squelch innovation. The danger is that we will freeze medicine in place and no longer be the nation that produces innovations that do so much for us and the rest of the world.
We are quick to grow irritated with the imperfections of our health care system and with the inefficiencies inevitable (because there is just one buyer) in military procurement. But our grouchiness should not keep up from losing sight of the wondrous American ingenuity and creativity of the American military and American medicine.
It is ironic that an administration that promised hope and change is instead pursuing policies that could stifle American creativity. It is encouraging that, on health care, so many Americans are recoiling from that prospect and, as polls show, starting to appreciate the wonders of American achievement.
Just think, if American medical researchers no longer deliver cutting edge pharm. and medical treatments? Just to think, for instance, people were paralyzed by polio, died from heart attacks not knowing that their cholesterol was the cause, suffered from countless genetic disorders, died from kidney disease because kidney transplants weren't available, all of these have either been greatly learned upon or eradicated by American medical research and innovation. This only a minute sampling.....
We also may be at risk of squandering our high-tech advantage in medicine. As Scott Atlas of the Hoover Institution points out, the top five American hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in all other developed countries. America has outpointed all other countries combined in Nobel Prizes for medical and physiology since 1970.
American theoretical health research financed by the National Institutes of Health and by American market-oriented pharmaceutical companies outshines the rest of the world combined. And the rest of the world tends to get the benefits at cut rates. American taxpayers finance NIH, which reports results publicly to the whole world.
Pharmaceutical companies that produce benefits for patients and consumers get the profits that support their research disproportionately from Americans, because other countries refuse to spend much more than the cost of producing pills, which is trivial next to the huge cost of research and regulatory approval. Getting these free riders to pay more is, again, Sisyphus's work.
The Democratic health care bills threaten to undermine innovation in pharmaceuticals and medical technologies by sending those with private insurance into a government insurance plan that would be in a position to ration treatment and delay or squelch innovation. The danger is that we will freeze medicine in place and no longer be the nation that produces innovations that do so much for us and the rest of the world.
We are quick to grow irritated with the imperfections of our health care system and with the inefficiencies inevitable (because there is just one buyer) in military procurement. But our grouchiness should not keep up from losing sight of the wondrous American ingenuity and creativity of the American military and American medicine.
It is ironic that an administration that promised hope and change is instead pursuing policies that could stifle American creativity. It is encouraging that, on health care, so many Americans are recoiling from that prospect and, as polls show, starting to appreciate the wonders of American achievement.
Just think, if American medical researchers no longer deliver cutting edge pharm. and medical treatments? Just to think, for instance, people were paralyzed by polio, died from heart attacks not knowing that their cholesterol was the cause, suffered from countless genetic disorders, died from kidney disease because kidney transplants weren't available, all of these have either been greatly learned upon or eradicated by American medical research and innovation. This only a minute sampling.....
