Comment Re:health insurance is like auto insurance now (Score 1) 2424
But with all due respect, ALL medical innovation in the last several decades has occurred in the US, where people and companies are free to profit from the fruits of their labor. Why would anyone put in the time, energy, and enormous sums of money involved in developing a new drug or therapy if they know going in that they're going to be forced at the point of a gun to provide that treatment to patients for less than it cost to develop them? The answer is that they wouldn't and they won't. And it isn't necessary to speculate or predict, because there are plenty of exemplars outside the US.
There was a lot made of the disparity in for example breast cancer survival rates between the US and Great Britain. It's measurably, though not hugely, higher in the US, and much of that is because the British system is just slower. People get the same therapies in both places, and in some cases it is too late, and in GB that just happens a bit more frequently. What never really came up in that debate, however, is that those therapies would not be available in either place if the US didn't have the kind of system that fostered and protected innovation.
Put another way, if this plan had been enacted 20 years ago, things like breast cancer and AIDS would still be death sentences today. And not just in the US, but everywhere that the current state of the art is employed.
And it's not like we can easily maintain the status quo either. A certain amount of innovation is necessary just to keep from sliding backwards. Just as a couple of examples, new vaccines need to be developed constantly to keep up with constantly mutating strains of viruses that are currently under control. The same goes for bacteria and antibiotics, as over time bacterial strains become resistant to existing antibiotics. The new drugs in these classes that come out every few years aren't improving health, they're necessary just to stay where we are.
This probably won't stand, because too much of it is unconstitutional. You're welcome to your own system of government in Belgium or anywhere else, but in the US we have decided as a people that the federal government's power is limited, and among other things they can't make you buy health insurance, they can't dictate to insurance companies what and who they must cover, and they certainly can't make insurance absorb a loss incurred by someone who hasn't bought the insurance. That last one is not governed only by the constitution, but also the dictionary, as it conflicts with the definition of what insurance is.