Smothering Medical Innovation

[Geee]

Pajamas Media:

Two propositions dominate current debate over health care: that the nation spends too much on it, and that these expenditures will bankrupt our governments if current trajectories extend out into the not-so-far future. Indeed, these are the basic premises used in the attempt to sell ObamaCare.

The first of these is nonsense. How much we should spend on health care is a question of how much value we get for our money, and that depends on millions of individual calculations, not on some abstract budget. If one restates the proposition to say that the system is inefficient and we should be getting more value for the money spent, then the point becomes valid. The shift in perspective is important, though, because it dictates that we focus on improving efficiency rather than meat-axe budget cutting.

The second proposition is true, but trivial. As the saying goes, if something cannot go on forever it will stop, and commitments that can’t be met won’t be met, so health costs will not destroy the nation. The correct approach is to recognize the point made in PJM last week by Beth Haynes – once health care expenditures are turned into a commons, over-use becomes inevitable, soon followed by arbitrary rationing.

A logical response to both these concerns exists, and only the whinging culture of the liberal state could take one of the greatest opportunities ever presented to humanity – the astonishing progress in medicine and biology – and convert it into a cause for complaint and despair while at the same time taking one of the best-known issues in institution building — the over-use of a commons — and see it as an intractable problem beyond society’s capacity to address.