Dean Kamen Destroys Obama's Ignorant Healthcare Alarmism

This is a long excerpt of an interview that Popular Mechanics has up with Dean Kamen (H/T Glenn). I strongly recommend that you just click over and RTWT but this is important enough that I'm putting up the conclusion excerpt without hiding it behind a "Read More" jump so you have no excuses.

If you're a free market advocate, you know what Dean's saying in your bones but you maybe haven't heard anyone pull it together into this kind of a concise and devastating argument with market sizes, impacts and comparisons.

And, BTW, Kamen is far from a right wing ideologue. Along with his long list of medical inventions, he's also the inventor of the Segue scooter, which is almost a liberal religious shibboleth! He doesn't flesh this out in Hayekian free market terms because that's not his educational background but you can see there's no fundamental contradiction with his argument and free markets at all. In fact, he's one of the world's pre-eminent medical entrepreneurs. (And ironically, he's one of the founders of the First Lego League robotics competition for elementary and junior high students which I am involved in and find to be heavily staffed with liberal global warming alarmist parents, etc.)

Anyway, here it is:

Kamen: We spent on all pharmaceuticals in the United States last year $260 billion. That means all those vaccinations to prevent diseases, all those pills to treat diseases, all those pills to cure them so we don't have to treat them anymore. We spent in all branches of all our pharmaceutical suppliers, $260 billion.

That's certainly way up from what it was in the early days of the world, but we also spent way more money on computers and other things that didn't exist back then, either, and we don't claim we have a computer crisis. We spent more money on our iPhones last year than we did ten years ago cause there were no iPhones. But let me compare $260 billion to other things. How much did we spend in the United States last year on tobacco? $88 billion. That's a significant piece of 260. It's the reason we spent some of that 260. How much did we spend last year on alcohol? The government doesn't subsidize that, you don't have a right to it, it's discretionary spending and if you were really in trouble you would probably spend a little less on alcohol. We spent $90 billion.

Last year what did we spend in the United States on soft drinks? $121 billion. Nearly half of what we spend on all of our pharmaceuticals, on soft drinks. I'm not against soft drinks—I think you ought to buy all the soft drinks you want.

Last year what did we spend supporting professional sports? $409 billion.

Now if somebody in this country wants to explain to me that we ought to be spending about twice as much supporting sports as on all of our pharmaceuticals, then stop spending. You don't like that drug? You don't want to cure this disease? Don't buy it. But don't make villains out of people so that we can turn what is a real social responsibility issue into a political debate.

PM: Yet health-care costs do keep rising. Is there a point at which we simply can't afford the most advanced treatments?

Kamen: Diabetes alone, if you include all of the long-term, insidious consequences of a lifetime of diabetes, is responsible for about 30 percent of the federal reimbursement for healthcare. Taking care of the diabetic every day is a small piece of it. But what if tomorrow we could wipe out diabetes, suddenly everybody takes a pill and it cures the people that have it, and it inoculates the other people so they'll never have it? Forgetting what a great life that would give people and their families, you take care of 30 percent of what now we project as this insurmountable problem of healthcare, which they project is going to kill us.

Well, it would kill us if we look at the 30-year actuarial data based on our 19th century confidence in technology. But I'm sure in 1920 if you asked actuaries to say what percentage of our GDP are we going to spend taking care of people with polio, they'd say: "They get polio, it goes to their lungs, they sit in iron lung machines, they could live a whole lifetime with three people watching over them. We can't support them all."

But what did it cost to deal with everybody with polio? Oh, $2 apiece. We gave them the Salk vaccine. But in the 1920s Salk wasn't around yet.

PM: In other words, R&D spending now may save money later?

Kamen: If you project forward these horrific costs of treating everybody and you want to assume we are not going to respond to that by making the therapies better, simpler and cheaper and in some cases completely wiping out the [diseases], well you know what? We might actually get to that situation—if we stop investing in technology, if we stop believing that the future ought to be better than the past.

If we want to sit here and keep assuming we should be fighting, and that we should be striving to spend less of our intellectual power and our money on great achievements to come in healthcare—that we should be fighting to make it a smaller piece of our economy—I want to know what you want to make a bigger piece of our economy. What do you want to see the future look like?

I think this debate shows a fundamental lack of vision, a lack of confidence, a lack of understanding of what's possible. And it's being fueled and fed by vested interests of people that have something to gain by making the general public, frankly, afraid of all sorts of things.

Note his perhaps unconscious reference to the liberal healthcare alarmism in similar terms to free market advocate's notice of how the AGW advocates use alarmism. Beautiful. Just beautiful.

Get this in the hands of everyone you know who's falling for the collectivist healthcare lunacy. Now.