The are two paths ahead to the future of medicine. The high path sees rapid, growing, unfettered progress towards new knowledge and biotechnologies capable of curing all disease and reversing age-related damage. The low path leads to stagnation, progress spurned, opportunities squandered and suffering and death for all.

We are presently heading for the low path, thanks to ignorance, short-term greed and the rule of regulation, politicians and bureaucrats. Your prospects for future health and longevity are being squashed and wasted away; present legal and regulatory systems hand control of your well-being to people who don't care for you one way or another, and are in no way incentivized to help you.

How Government Medicine Really Works - British Edition:

Now the NHS wants to limit access to various drugs for Alzheimer's disease patients on the grounds that they are not cost-effective. Actually, there is a lot of research that suggests that delaying the cognitive decline that comes with Alzheimer's saves money because it delays much more costly care, such as admission to assisted living facilities. In any case, the NHS is engaged in pure and simple rationing.

Proponents of government health insurance will reply that private insurers might not cover the cost of such drugs and besides don't you know that there are 40, 50, or 60 million Americans without health insurance, so they wouldn't get the drugs anyway. So what? That response amounts to little more than that we should all get the same equally crappy care by government fiat. Just because extensive government meddling has screwed up private medicine in the United States surely doesn't mean that the solution to the problem is more government intervention.

Creating a commons - such as a socialized medical system in which no-one is permitted to make their own decisions about the deployment of their own resources, but rather everything is pooled at the whim of unskilled government employees - will always result in a tragedy. Here, the tragedy proceeds as rationing, waste, suffering and death - all of which are avoidable.

The US medical system is already two of three steps down this sorrowful road, and we all suffer for it already. Writ large, decades more of this will destroy any hope you and I have of a medical research and technology infrastructure rising to the level of defeating aging in our lifetimes.

Technorati tags: libertarian, medical research, politics, regulation

Posted by Reason at May 31, 2006 11:05 PM | TrackBack (1)