T. Doom Pickens says:

Cato, you are right… the only reason costs are out of control is because the consumer is not directly exposed to them and is thus making non-economic decisions. Once you have an NHS or other single payer system what little control the consumer has on price and quality is entirely eliminated and economics abandoned. It becomes a political football just as SS and Medicare have been, and like in the EU and Canada every election cycle is about “reforming” a health delivery system that steadily gets worse instead of better, the way all other private sector products and services do.

The only reason that the socialist countries have been able to get by so far is, as you say, the fact that our still somewhat market based system has been footing the bill for research and development and other advances in technology and technique. Once America no longer leads in that role thanks to government rationing and mastermind control, anything new coming from NIH and tinkerers, entrepreneurs and inventors putting their efforts elsewhere, the systems will stagnate and collapse for all.

I already put one medical record technology company based upon some of my patents, that we dumped a few million into, into the ice box because we simply don’t know, given the growing mountain of regulations, if what we wanted to do will even be legal or profitable after compliance issues are discovered an addressed. We decided that it would cost more to find out than it would be to proceed, the unknowns are too great, so we’ll just wait a couple years and see what shakes out.

Many are taking positions on the sidelines, including many of the primary care physicians everybody is going to be depending upon for all that “wellness” care. Nobody knows what will happen other than that it will be bad. People always bitch about “big pharma”, but without it you’ll never get any “new pharma”… they are the only players who can deal with the mountain of obstacles and dump billions into research, clinical trials and regulatory approval. Once the profit motive is banned and everything is nationalized you simply don’t get the energy or the capital to sustain the advances we have enjoyed over the past fifty years.