Rising Health Care Cost; Baby Boomers

[sunspot]

A major problem that faces the nation is the rising cost of health care. The rising costs actually have three aspects. The first two are connected to economics and the law of supply and demand. On the supply side are the economic needs of all the middle men. The middle men are helping to drive innovation but they are also responsible for excessive redundancy and marketing hype, during the process of supplying new and improved drugs and technology.

 

On the demand side are the people using the health care system. Medical insurance is like another tax on living. To help make economic sense of this disguised tax, one needs to seek value for their money. The result is overuse of the medical establishment. Those who can lobby for excessive care using expensive overkill technologies, are sort of like investors who seek a high rate of return on their investment. This is encouraged by the supply side middlemen who are able to increase the market share of their product or service.

 

For example, if one exercises and eats right this is not covered by insurance (no middle men benefit). But if one has a unhealthy lifestyle and seeks medicines and expensive treatments to tip the scale back toward health this is covered (the middle men benefit). One may have an hang-nail. If one waited for a couple of weeks, using only aspirin as a local anistetic, it will grow out without much pain. But one can also go to the doctor to get special care. Why pay twice when one can get economic value back from their hidden health tax.

 

Shifting a free market based health care system toward a solicalize system is not the answer, because although it would cut out the middle men and could reduce redundancy, it would also remove the ecomonic incentive needed for innovation. In a social system, the inventor often gets a dollar and then then loses control over the direction of the innovation to polititians who squander the economic benefits due to their lack of collective vision (personally motivated). Maybe a compromise is in order, which discourgages all the redundancy and over treatment, while providing some economic advantage to those who live healthy at their own expense.

 

The third area of high costs is R&D. The biologist and biochemists have characterized the details of the cell very well. But humans are multicellular and there are no good models which allows its simulation with any level accuracy. The result is that too much medical research has to rely on the ancient science approach of trial and error. It has been modernize with statistics and better machines, but is not much different that what the alchemists did.

 

For example, drug research way require randomly testing hundreds of plants to see what sort of works. The chemicals in those that show promise, are isolated and then tested on hundreds of animals to see the positive and side affects, with modifications made. The best of best are then tested on hundred of humans with the hope that the side effects are marginal enough to get past the govenment into the market. The middle men then push this new drug, with free market hype and spiffs, hoping to create subjective demand.

 

The cost of empirical science is very high, resulting in these new drugs being very expensive. Those with economic push are able to increase the benefit/liability ratio on their high insurance premiums by getting the insurance to cover the high cost of R&D. The healthy, less neurotic and less economic minded foot the burden of the rising costs.

 

There is a way to speed up R&D and lower costs. The living state differs from inorganic chemistry in that inorganic chemistry is based exclusively on the action of the electron. While the living state is based heavily on the action of the hydrogen proton. The electron approach to the living state, works, but is way too cumbersome for multicellullar modelling, causing the medical sciences to remain stuck at expensive empiricism. A hydrogen proton approach toward the living state simplfies everything by an order of magnitude and allows the possibility of highly accurate computer simulation instead of animal sacrifice. The R&D cost cutting, will allow us to lower the costs of medical treatments, while speeding up the turn-over rate of innovation.