No one can afford all the medical care they might need. Not even Bill Gates. That's because a lot of stuff still needs to be discovered, and his billions would not suffice.
He can afford more than the rest of us, in this as in other things.
Billionaires routinely die of incurable diseases. They do die later than the rest of us, since they can basically pay for several doctors to sit by their bedside full time, which no insurance policy is ever going to cover.
So that old Kansas song, Dust in the Wind, was wrong when it said: "all your money won't another minute buy".
What really drives health progress, economically, is not billionaire's bucks. The mass market provides much bigger incentives than Bill Gates can.
The bad thing is that governments keep intruding on this helpful mass market.
Which is why Andrew Sullivan's warning seems timely. He goes into some detail with lots of stats about Europe's decline in the Rx research biz. "America is the last refuge for pharmaceutical innovation. And the left wants to kill that off."
Why would we want to cut off the legs
Of a goose that lays curative eggs?
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