This may be the most important point in the health care debate: It isn’t just that moving to a government-run system will create long waiting lines for existing care and cost taxpayers a bundle; it will change medicine in America in a fundamental way that could discourage the research and development of the next round of medical breakthroughs. That’s the point that Michael Barone makes in this article:
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.
…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.
America’s health care system certainly could be improved, but its critical that we recognize some of the best aspects of it–medical innovation being one of them–and make sure it doesn’t get sacrificed in the name of “reform.”