Report Card for Donald Trump

[Warren Dew]

(12-29-2016, 06:50 AM)Mikebert Wrote:

(12-28-2016, 10:36 PM)Warren Dew Wrote: The primary reason health care is a growth industry is because of the preferential status given it by tax law, in a way that encourages inefficient use of resources by tying health care costs to employers rather than to the individuals that benefit.

No.  At your age I am surprised you don't know this.  Health care has gone up for two reasons.  Increases in price and volume.  I will address the later in this post.  Physicians can do more today than in the past.  Since there is more to do, more is done (i.e.  volume rises).  

Back in the 1970's there was little that could be done when someone had a heart attack. They either lived or died. Afterward you could they could try to improve their diet and exercise, but there was nothing medical science to do and so if you had bad genes you'd be a goner in short order.

Today we have an array of well-tolerated medications that can address many of the factors leading to heart attack so if you have bad genes you aren't necessarily a goner. If you get a heart attack, a cardiac catheterization can often stop it in its tracks.  This happened to my wife in 2010, I watched on the video how they just stopped the heart attack in its tracks not 40 minutes after the onset of serious symptoms.  She got out with zero damage, lost weight, and pulled herself out of nascent diabetes, and now is likely to have decades more to live.  The medications she takes control her hereditary blood chemistry issues, just as the ones I take control my hereditary high BP.  None of this existed forty years ago so the drugs we take and the treatments she got (that are part of this increased volume) were not things available to her father (who died of a heart attack at 55).  Had we been living in the 1970's she would have died from that 2010 heart attack--at 55, just like her father.

Same thing is true for cancer. When I was a kid, cancer was a death sentence.  You got cancer, you died, unless you got lucky.  Now lots of people get cancer and get cured of it (my wife is one).  Others don't but manage to live on for a decade or more with the cancer before it finally gets them. In this sense, if you develop cancer at 69, and die of a stroke at 75, you can say you survived cancer.  We all are going to die of something.  The opportunity to die 6  years later of something other than cancer is surely worth something, right?  How much is that worth to you?

Certainly there have been technological improvements in a lot of areas, health care included.  But here's the thing:  it was calculated in the 1970s that even complete elimination of cancer would only increase life expectancy by 3 years, and that's consistent with what has happened.  I'd argue that's a lot less of an improvement in health care than the improvements in information technology or even automobile technology.

So why is health care a growth industry when information technology and automobiles are not?  As I said, it's because tax law makes health care inefficient, such that improvements in treatment cost much more than they would in any normal industry.

Edit:  As for me, I'm taking an over the counter supplement that reduces cancer incidence by 77% at a cost of about $15/year.  That's the kind of efficiency that we would see if it weren't for the economic distortions imposed on the health care system by our tax regulations.  Unfortunately, because of the tax regulations, no one can make money preventing cancer, so solutions like that are reserved for the favored few that spend hours investigating things like that for ourselves.