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Healthcare “reform” and suppression of innovation

By: Bham (Diary)  |  November 23rd, 2009 at 07:09 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

To begin, the only reason I’m alive to write this diary is because I benefitted from high-tech medical innovation. In my case, it was computer-controlled 3D conformal, external x-ray therapy for recurrent prostate cancer. (BTW I’m happy to report nominal PSA values at five years and counting.)

So continued medical innovation and I have an intense personal relationship. For that reason, one key reason that both the House and Senate versions of health care “reform” deeply disappoint me is that they will badly damage medical innovation by removing most of the profit motive to fund risky research.

There are two basic reasons for this, both driven by political budgeting: price controls and limitation of market access. Market access will be collateral damage from “relative cost-effectiveness” judgments rendered by committees of political apparatchiks empowered by both House and Senate bills.

If you think that choking off medical innovation will only mean that currently untreated medical conditions will remain untreated, you aren’t seeing the whole picture. (As if ignoring the long list of currently-unsatisfactorily-treated medical conditions weren’t bad enough.)

Especially in the area of infectious disease, to fail to innovate is to go backwards.
As documented here, competent international medical experts are calling urgently for “ten new antibiotics by 2020″ to combat the steady accumulation of resistant strains. They cite this as one of the top priorities in medicine.

Virus mutation is no less of a problem than bacterial — arguably it’s a bigger issue.

I lament the time that will elapse, if anything like these ill-conceived health “reform” packages are enacted, before the full extent of the damage done by suppression of innovation is widely apparent. And there’s the conundrum of how to prove a negative: how to know if some individual sick or dying of a medical condition could otherwise have been cured?

But if an individual suffers an infection that we used to be able to cure, but can no longer, that may be a different matter.

The current debacle of H1N1 vaccine shortfalls nicely illustrates what happens when we stop innovating. The old incubation-in-eggs technology used to produce influenza vaccines should long since have been replaced by genetically-engineered fermentation processes that have been reliable for almost 25 years, since Eli Lilly first commercialized human insulin.

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  • wayneepalmer

    Simply put, the plan is from the original book “The Population Bomb” by Ron Ehrlich…

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb

    This book is about as important as Rules for Radicals and Das Capital to the “Progressive” movement.

    It is the Bible of what is behind much of the motivation for them.

    All of their plans to “take care of us” are not so much about making life better for everyone as they are about keeping us from harming their good lives (kind like the mafia version of “I’ll take care of them..” wink, wink, nudge, nudge).

    Cass Sunstein, Ted Turner, Al Gore, George Soros, and the rest of the cabal are focused on the threat to the beautiful earth (and their beautiful lifestyles) posed by too many smelly peasants using up the planet.

    Everything, from Global Climate Change, Universal Health Care, government takeover of the economy, and the sexualization of education are about not only limiting our freedom to make our own choices but about reducing the population of the masses.

    There is a number out there (less then 500 million) that they believe is the sustainable population of humans in a modern society. The vast majority of these they want to place in what is basically a form of “benign” slavery to support the society and the comfortable lifestyles of the leaders.

    All of these programs being promulgated under Obama-Pelosi-Reid are about putting into place the framework to create this Utopian world and suppress the inevitable backlash.

    Force the die-off of the old.

    Control reproduction by things like mandating abortions for a host of “genetic qualifications”, using a host of mechanical methods to prevent pregnancies (contraceptives in the food supply, mandating birth-control implants, segregating the sexes, controlling sexual partnerships – encouraging homosexuality, sterilization).

    Reduce the lifestyles of the masses by “green” and “carbon reduction” regulations that force the peasants into small apartments and force them to use almost every cent and every labor to be able to survive with no extra’s for luxuries (travel off of limited rail lines or out of the cities, comfortable enough lifestyles to have the energy for procreation or politics (too cold, too hot, too little caloric intake, worked too hard, non-working hours spent waiting in lines or in indoctrination), education beyond what is needed for work, etc.

    …THEY BELIEVE THAT BY CREATING THE WORLD OF 1984 THEY CAN SAVE THE EARTH…

    … FOR THEM – THE GODS OF MANKIND.

    It is their religion. It is 1880′s Eugenics revisited.

    • freedomforall

      ImpeachBarackObama.com MMM MMM MMM !