Another Potential Casualty of ObamaCare -- Nobel Prizes

Three Americans were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine today for their work in discovering the mechanism of how chromosomes protect themselves from degrading when cells divide.

Aaron Gee at American Thinker (be sure to read the comments!) makes some very interesting observations regarding how President Obama's proposed 'health care' reforms will jeopardize the winning of future Nobel Prizes by Americans. His basic point is that we are winning the preponderance of the Nobels for medicine because so much medical research is done here. And so much medical research is done here precisely because the profit margins of the private marketplace for new medical innovations provide both the motivations and the capital with which this research can be done.

I loved his statement of the fact that "The top 10 U.S. hospitals that conduct clinical trials carry out more trials than all the hospitals in the rest of the world - combined." That gives you an idea of just how far ahead of the rest of the world we are in this regard -- the rest of the world here meaning, for all practical purposes, Europe. (Once you exclude Japan, Israel, and probably Australia, the remainder of the non-European world contributes little to this field.)

So why is Europe so far behind? Gee says it's because "No other country has a working structure that has as much potential for medical research as the US." But the main reason for this is European price controls on the products (drugs, devices, and the like) of that research. It is these price controls that make the European 'health care' systems appear to be so much less expensive than ours. However, one can now see that there is a very substantial hidden cost (to Europe) for being so penny-wise and pound-foolish. (And if you think about it, that expression, referring to pennies and [British] pounds [sterling], coming as it does from England, is just so doubly ironic.)

Gee concludes saying, "The other symptom of a broken marketplace you should expect is fewer US Nobel Laureates in the field of Medicine." But it's what that portends that is more ominous. Not just fewer accolades from Stockholm. Obama's desire for the US to have a more European-style medical care system will mean we'll also have a more European-style medical research system.

By taking away the profit system that funds the research machine of the United States, the advancement of medical innovation will slow to a virtual standstill. No new medicines, no new technologies, no new surgeries will be forthcoming. The continuous increase in life expectancy we have come to expect will come to a grinding halt and may start moving backwards as the waiting lines and rationing this plan must result in leads to delays in and even prevention of life saving care.

How do I know that this is part of the actual goal of the reform plan? Because one of its main developers, Obama 'health care' advisor Tom Daschle, said so much in his book, Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis. As explained in the book, one of the goals is to slow the development and use of new medications and technologies because they are driving up costs.

Mr. Daschle and Mr. Obama have absolutely no conception of what price they are going to make all of us pay for their "cost-savings".

But Aaron Gee does. And now so do you.