It is, but it’s based more on providing results that will attract grant money than producing a tangible product to sell on the open market.
A two-tiered medical system? Wow, what a horror. Thank God we’d never allow something like that here in the United States.
On a serious note, I can think of one major consequence of a national health system that I haven’t heard discussed. And that’s the fact that people’s health would no longer be a private concern. Under privatized health, we can ignore the unhealthy actions of our fellow citizens because we figure that they’ll be the ones paying the price. But in a public health system, we the taxpayers would have to pay for the consequences of other people’s unhealthy choices. So there would be a major increase in the urge to tell people how they should live their lives. Even as a proponent of public heath care, I don’t favor the increase of “nannyism” that I think will be one of its results.
We all are aware that the US health care is very poor when compared to other industrialized countries. Aren’t we.?
I’m not American.
Um. Clearly you have paid zero attention to how many important medical discoveries have been coming out of Canada.
The belief that profit drives discovery is stupid. These days, business is about getting the biggest bang for buck for shareholders, which usually means cutting out anything that isn’t seen to produce profit immediately. Meaning libraries are dropped and research is cut back. OTOH, a ‘nationalized’ system benefits from government subsidizing research because profit isn’t The Most Important Thing; medical advances are.
The defense industry seems to do fine developing new technology despite the US’s “nationalized” military.
I have exactly the same concerns.
That would be something to watch out for. But the US gov’t already picks up the tab for a sizable chunk of the population, notably when they get older and all those bad lifestyle decisions catch up with them. So I doubt the incentive to “nanny” would be much worse then it is now.
I like the hockey-skate scalpel. 
I don’t know what you mean by “creating a free system,” so I’m going to deal with the question “Would a universal health care system stop innovation?”
The answer to that is clearly no. We’ve had several industries that were heavily regulated and subsidized in this country which managed to produce all sorts of innovation (telecom, power, water). Many other countries have some sort of universal health care and manage to produce innovation. Let’s also not forget that many medical innovations are subsidized by the government to begin with, so private industry is already able to slough off a portion of its R&D costs to the taxpayer.
Your question also ignores the fact that any universal health care system in the US will allow individuals to purchase private suppplemental health care (the way people purchase private health care to supplement Medicare). It has to for political reasons. Having a supplemental private system will also produce the innovation you seek.
I’m pretty sure Puerto Rico’s health care system ranks ahead of Cuba’s. I know for a fact their life expectancy is higher.
Have you ever opened a Medical Journal? You known, one of the juried ones that publish medical research.
Check the affiliations of the contributors. You’ll find that more than half of them work in the UK & other countries that do not share the USA’s approach to healthcare.
Funny, my shares in Allergan are doing just fine. They plow profits back into the lab to keep finding the next drug. They employ plenty of PhDs here in Orange County, CA to do research that won’t pay off for 10+ years.
If you nationalize health, the profit margin will get squeezed. That will reduce the amount of money going into research. We will then have to depend on NIH money to get the research done.
Let’s see how much Allergan puts into R&D for the last 3 years:
2006: 1,055,500,000
2007: 391,000,000
2008: 345,600,000
When the Feds determine reimbursements, people get squeezed. Just ask a doc what their margin is for Medicare patients, for example.
Here’s an article about the relative spending on Marketing and R&D. Most companies plow the money back into advertising. During 2000 BristolMyersSquibb’s advertising expenses almost equalled R&D - and marketing is a lot more than that. At the bottom of a link is an interesting table, comparing Marketing and R&D for several major companies, and also Microsoft. Microsoft still spent more on marketing than R&D (no comment here) but relatively less. The only exception was a new company - since if you don’t have a lot of products out there, you can’t do much marketing.
How has “nannyism” manifested itself in the UK or Canada?
I’m not certain this is correct. Your right that the gov’t will probably use its increased bargining power to pay the companies less per product, but a large group of new customers (the currently uninsured, numbering in the millions) will also appear with the ability to buy up medications and the like.
Also, I imgine that most of the effect of the “squeeze” will fall on products where the drug companies are competing with eachother to sell similar medications and will try to underprice eachother to make the sale. It’s possibe then that nationalized health will encourage companies to invest more in R&D, since the profit margins on drugs on which they hold the patents and don’t have to compete with others will be less affected.