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The Arsenal of Medicine

America and its Golden Eggs

By: Dan McLaughlin (Diary)  |  November 20th, 2009 at 06:25 PM  | 

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If you’re wondering where health care dollars go in this country, the invaluable Phil Klein reminds us:

Raymond Raad, a resident in psychiatry at New York Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center and co-author of a new Cato study, presented evidence showing that the United States leads the world in the development of drugs, medical devices, and other advanced treatments. For instance, between 1969 and 2008, 57 of the 97 Nobel Prizes in medicine and physiology — or nearly 60 percent — were awarded to people who did their research in the U.S., and nine of the top 10 medical innovations between 1975 and 2000 were developed here. But … once these products are developed in the U.S., they become widely available and improve health care outcomes around the world.

Read the whole thing, and remember: that’s the system the Democrats are trying to tear down and replace with one more like the European countries that depend almost as heavily on American medical and pharmaceutical innovations as they do on American military protection. In both cases, the arguments for the superiority of a European model that is unsustainable on its own depend on somebody else assuming the role of America. And nobody’s volunteering for the job.

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  • aesthete

    Healthcare knowledge is a public good, and as with most things (military, foreign policy), Europe is content to have the US spend its money on such efforts while being petulantly ungrateful all the while.

  • samdallas

    NIH sends tons of OUR money to researchers for the world’s benefit. SOCIALISM. Of course we make the most discoveries that cancer patients outside the US don’t pay for. Lame.

  • student

    Over the last two hundred years since the first modern biological (smallpox vaccine, 1798) and the first modern pharmaceutical (morphine, 1806), the small molecule, biological, vaccines, device and diagnostics industries have been the primary engine converting scientific advances into therapies that have increased the average lifespan of human beings from the low 20s to circa the 80s – a gift of half a century of life to the average person. The industry has largely migrated to the US because of free market pricing. Pharmaceuticals take up the same proportion of US medical costs (9%) than of European (11% Italy, 10% France, 10% Germany), The US system pays more when medicines are new but has a rapacious generics industry that wipes out any “tail” of earnings after patent expiration. The rest of world system pays less for new medicines but has less generic decline. Overall both pay the same price but the US system encourages innovation and improvement while the EU and rest of world system encourages stagnation and life cycle management. This is why the innovation occurs in the US (with the exception of Novartis and Roche situated in uber low-tax Switzerland). Destroy the pricing for innovator medicines and you condemn all of us to stagnation in therapeutics development, shorter and sicker lives. You also make it impossible to control the 90% of healthcare costs that are tied up with bricks and sticks, hospitals and clinical, doctors and nurses – critical to delivering therapeutics but not the thing that gets you well (only two things actually get you well – nature and therapies). The short sightedness of the hatred of the therapeutics industry is breath-taking. All the more strange that the Senators from NJ, PA, MASS, NY, and CA where the industry centers are killing a main industry of their own states. Perhaps all the people who hate the therapeutics industry should just stop using their products and save themselves the money.