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Glenn Reynolds writes:
President Obama talks about the importance of prevention in a way that suggests that when people have heart attacks it's their own fault. But my wife, a longtime vegetarian and marathon runner, had a freak heart attack at the age of 37.
It wasn't from too many Big Macs. After some rough patches, she's now doing well, thanks to an obscure and expensive anti-arrhythmic drug called Tikosyn, and an implantable cardioverter/defibrillator. Not too long ago, she'd have been largely bedridden. These medical innovations made the difference between the life of a near-invalid and a life that's close to normal.
My mother had a hip replacement. Her hip didn't break - she basically wore it out with exercise. When the pain got too bad, she got it replaced, and now she's moving around like before, only painlessly. Not too long ago, she would have been chairbound.
My father had prostate cancer; his doctor suggested waiting but on biopsy it turned out to be pretty aggressive. It was treated with radioactive "seed" implants. He's now been cancer-free for several years, without the side effects of earlier treatments -- or, worse, of cancer.
My daughter had endoscopic sinus surgery this spring. She had been sickly and listless, complaining of constant migraine headaches, missing a lot of school, and generally looking more like a zombie than a teenager. Several doctors dismissed her problems, or prescribed antibiotics that didn't help much, until we found one who took the extra step.
A head CT scan done on a fancy new in-office machine showed a nasty festering infection, the surgeon cleaned it out, and now she's like a normal kid again. Before laparoscopy, her condition
would probably have remained untreated, and she would have been another "sickly" kid. Better to be well.
The normal critique of socialized medicine is to point out that people have to wait a long time for these kinds of treatments in places like Britain. And that's certainly a valid critique. I'm sure my mom and daughter would still be waiting for their treatments, while my father and wife would probably be dead.
The key point, though, is that these treatments didn't just come out out of the blue. They were developed by drug companies and device makers who thought they had a good market for things that would make people feel better.
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Very easy to say for a state government employee who is insured by the State of Tennessee, but let's give him the benefit of the doubt and treat Reynolds as if he had a private sector plan, because he'd have to be covered at all if he can list off all those procedures.
He uses a classic straw man - the logical conclusion from this argument is that advocates of universal healthcare are either against innovation or completely uninterested in it. There is also the implicit notion that these medical procedures would be unavailable to him and his family under some other plan.
Nowhere on the table is the idea that healthcare may not be provided on a fee-for-service basis outside a plan, nor is there any ban on supplemental insurance for procedures not covered by any private or public plan, nor is there any indication that these procedures will not be covered by whatever plan Reynolds is on in five years' time.
His strongest argument is that controlling costs will lead to a decrease in medical innovation. This is a serious concern. However, Reynolds fails to explain how computerizing records, working to replace ER admits for chronic problems with regular doctor visits and cutting down unnecessary tests, the main driver of cost savings, would slow development of America's Next Top Cancer Drug. Besides, you can't make money off people who can't afford those treatments in the first place.
Weak sauce. Non-ground-breaking idea. Straw-grabbing in abundance. Try again.