7/ But the kinds of leading-edge innovation delivered by the US "advanced" system tells you where the frontier is: in biochemistry labs and extremely advanced treatment facilities (for people with weird and rare kinds of cancer for example). This was not always the case.
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18/ Equally, resist the temptation to write off advances made by other countries simply because they aren't accompanied by the innovation theater of the US: patents, big fortunes, miraculous-seeming outcomes for a few.
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19/ Non-private innovations LOOK different: large-scale assembly line cataract operations at "eye camps" in India for example. Or of course, immunization/vaccination.
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20/ The US used to lead on those fronts too about a century ago (eg. Rockefeller foundation work on eliminating hookwork in the US south), but now mostly that's left to "poor" countries.
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21/ tldr of the thread: Don't buy into naive arguments that the US healthcare system is "best in the world" and if your experience of it sucks, it's only because because "other countries free-ride" and you didn't buy enough Big Pharma shares.
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22/ Addendum to point 12: In some cases a net negative societal health condition may be "negatively privatizable" where some other sector (sugar, tobacco) has a stronger incentive to keep the condition alive than the healthcare sector does to cure it for profit.
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Great thread. Irrelevant to your point but at least within pharmaceutical the “free loading” narrative doesn’t hold up to an examination of the facts in terms of $$ spent on pure R&D or origin of discoveries
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Yeah Pharma is just hard to attribute to national economies anyway, whether it is US, UK, German or Swiss HQ companies. In-patient care is probably a much stronger correlate of the structure of national system tradeoffs.
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A supporting observation from inside the industry: It’s a system optimized for “heroics” — and that determines which professionals, processes, diseases, & tech are valued more within the system.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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