MarginalRevolution
by Alex Tabarrok
We fight over health care policy because we focus on demand and redistribution. We could reach greater agreement if we focused on supply and innovation. What are the key areas where agreement is likely?
1) Cancer kills both Republicans and Democrats so more spending on medical research is likely to reach broad agreement. As I said in Launching:
Looking at the future, if medical research could reduce cancer mortality by just 10 percent, that would be worth $5 trillion to U.S. citizens (and even more taking into account the rest of the world). The net gain would be especially large if we could reduce cancer mortality with new drugs, which are typically cheap to make once discovered. A reduction in cancer mortality of this size does not seem beyond reach, and the value of such a reduction in mortality far exceeds that of spending more on medical care today. Yet because the innovation vision is not central to our thinking, we overlook potentially huge improvements in human welfare.
By greater spending on medical research, I mean not only greater spending through the NIH but also a commitment to innovation policy more …