National Healthcare

A comment I posted in response to Half Sigma's suggestion "Republicans should support socialized medicine:"

$140K [for doctor's salaries, set by the government]? You are out of your mind. Medicine will hemorrhage its best and brightest. That means no innovation. No new procedures. No progress in medical science.

That is the real, never-mentioned problem with all of these government take-over plans. Socialized medicine in the USA would be a death blow to medicine, because the USA the only major market left on earth where investing in medical research has the potential to pay off. No profit motive means no new devices, no new drugs, no new procedures, no new technology. Spare me your vision of the noble NIH-funded scientist sweating away in his lab to save humanity. His goal is to produce journal papers. Spare me your point about European drug companies doing well. Where do you think they make their money?

If we had adopted socialized medicine decades ago, where would medicine be today? Decades behind.

and another on a followup post:

Obviously, other countries have lower medical costs because their governments strictly control prices. The only major relatively free market left, the USA, ends up footing the bill for medical research by way of high prices. In effect, countries with socialized care are not paying their fair share, they are passing the costs on to us.

What if the USA adopts socialized medicine like other countries? Then all would be on equal footing. But, as I pointed out in my previous comment, it would be a disaster for the advancement of medicine.

We can debate the pluses and minuses of health care policies, but to ignore the effect of said policies on the advancement of medical science is foolish and likely dangerous.

Half Sigma is an interesting blogger, and I read him often. I sometimes wonder though if he makes incendiary statements just to get a rise out of people. He dedicates a lot of posts to the question of race and intelligence. Some will surely find it offensive. I am not much offended by it, but I don't agree with the level of importance with which he seems to rate the topic.