Dean Kamen On The Health Care Debate
It’s not often that I can say, “Dean Kamen agrees with me,” but the inventor of the Segway said some remarkably similar things about the health care debate in an interview with Popular Mechanics that we said in a post we wrote a few months ago.
(Maybe he’s a reader!)
Our post was called The $10 Biopsy And Fighting The Last Health Care War. The point was, essentially, that all this debate about health care insurance and all this money flowing to that cause–whether through a government or private sector solution–is a misplaced investment.
The debate fails to include the massive effect that exponentially-increasing technology will have on the lowering cost of health care. It also denies the possibility for research to significantly cut health care expenses.
Some of the things Kamen says:
According to Kamen the health care system has achieved near-miraculous cures and treatments.
“Our health care system has seen some of the greatest achievements of the human intellect since we started recording history: We’re developing incredible devices and implantables to improve the quantity and quality of people’s lives.”
Cost savings through cures is the key to lowering health care costs, Kamen adds.
“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?”
Finally, Kamen says that the debate around health care has polarized into two intransigent positions that limits creative solutions.
“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.”
Related posts:
- The $10 Biopsy And Fighting The Last Health Care War?
- Secret #7: The Government will not be able to take Care of you
- Challenging Conventional Wisdom with What Ifs
- What Shape The Recovery Will Be. And Why You Shouldn’t Care
- Why Mr. Market Is Depressed
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