Prevention is cheap, repair is costly. Yet we have a medical establishment that is shackled - by regulation, by its own choice, by other factors - to developing after-the-fact emergency damage repair strategies for age-related disease rather than means of prevention. It is an approach doomed to failure in every way but generating profit - and it won't even be much good at that if socialism and collectivism in the US medical system continue their steady advance. Randall Parker has some thoughts on the matter:

Think of it this way: If potholes in the roads were causing damages to vehicles that far exceeded the cost of fixing the potholes then the political cry would go out to fix the potholes. Well, the cost of diseases and aging - both for expensive treatments and for the costs of disability - run into the trillions of dollars per year. So why do the US National Institutes of Health get less than $30 billion dollars per year while US federal, state, and local governments spend somewhere in the neighborhood of $700 to $800 billion per year for medical care and nursing care? Why does the private sector spend even more while the government also spends money to provide income to old folks who are too aged to work?

While we can not allocate money to repair and rejuvenate bodies as quickly as potholes can get repaired we can allocate money to achieve repairability of human bodies within the lifetimes of most of us.

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In 2003 health care spending made up 15.3% of the US economy and is projected to rise to 18.4% by 2013 with further increases beyond 2013. Currently US federal biomedical research spending (almost $29 billion out of an almost $11 trillion economy) amounts to less than a third of a percent of GDP. Why spend over 30 dollars delivering care with today's lousy treatments for every dollar spent on research to develop newer, better, and more cost effective treatments? Imagine we spent $30 dollars on car repairs for potholes for every dollar we spent fixing potholes. Our current policies are about that dumb. Effective treatments will be cheaper treatments. Also, effective treatments will boost productivity and economic output by boosting the level of function of the labor force and by allowing people to work more years. Biomedical research will pay back many times over.

I'm not a fan of any sort of government or centrally controlled wealth redistribution, for research or otherwise, but the above suggestion is an iota less terrible than continually funding a failed coping strategy.

This all seems to me like more of the cricket and ant, writ large, tens of millions of people spending vast sums of money in failed attempts to save themselves - often other people's money, through the wonders of coercive wealth transfer - because they failed to invest in medical research for a better future. Because they failed to decentralize the medical establishment, failed to abolish the regulations that increase costs and force most funding and research down less productive paths. Every dollar that is diverted away from healthy life extension research today will lead to many, many dollars in medical costs in the years ahead.

Posted by Reason