U.S.: Medical Innovator; Europe: Free Rider

mjperry. ^

[newbie2008]

Most all the world pays a marginal cost for drugs, medical devices, and procedures that does not come close to repaying the development effort that went into those products. Further, most of the world has regimented medical systems that have very strong immune systems against any sort of innovation. As a result, almost all medical innovation occurs and is paid for in the United States, with the rest of the world acting as a free rider. Sure, some Swiss or Japanese firms still develop a few drugs, but most of those efforts are still justified by profits in the US market.

~Coyote Blog

The U.S. is still driving quite a bit of product innovation. Our messy, organic, wasteful, unfair, irrational system allows experimentation, and Europe cherry picks the best results. If we stopped doing this, their system would stop looking so good.

~Megan Mcardle

[arthurus]

Any form of single-payer or otherwise socialized healthcare in the US will end research and innovation and ultimately end the effectiveness of antibiotics. ALL medical and pharmacological research and innovation survives on the American market. When that market is gone so is research. No research means that as antibiotics lose effectiveness due to continued mutation of pathogens they will not be replaced by newer effective ones. Within a couple of decades death rates will have begun a rapid climb to levels characteristic of 1900. You get sick, you die.

The politicians who crave government control of Medicine are too shortsighted to understand that, as to antibiotics, the future holds the same for them as for the serfs. Soros and the Kennedys can live off the already developed machinery and techniques that will be hoarded for the use of the political and financial elite but they will still die from diseases that we regard now as inconsequential or that most of us don't even remember the names for.