Will Hillary kill you?

Posted by Marc Hodak on June 15, 2007 under Invisible trade-offs | 2 Comments to Read

Literal question. And I mean you personally.

The answer begins with a theory that not all of us have to die–ever. Please follow.

The Immortality Crossover. Right now, life expectancy is increasing by about two months per year. That means that a decade from now, if you’ve survive till then, your life expectancy may be nearly two years longer than someone who right now is ten years older than you. That increased life expectancy will be due to enhanced treatments developed between now and then. And the pace of advancement is accelerating. At some point, life expectancy will be increased by over one year for each year that goes by. Whoever is around at that crossover point will have a good shot at living indefinitely.

Are we there yet? That crossover point could, conceivably, be within the grasp of a generation that has already been born. The first immortals may be walking (or perhaps crawling) among us.

Can we keep our foot off the brakes? The pace of advancement for medical treatments will depend on exactly two things–the amount of resources devoted to such development, and the efficiency with which such resources are utilized. With regards to the first, total expenditures are rising. Everyone wants to live longer and healthier. With regards to the second, that spending is being funneled through both the private and public sectors. Both areas are contributing to advancement, but the public sector spending is more politicized and less efficient. The profit-driven, private sector is much faster and more focused on getting returns from their investment. Impact matters to them. It’s a fair bet that the more that the market is involved in allocating our health care spending, the more efficiently that (rising) spending will be used to develop new treatments. So, who would want to risk the pace of development by either slowing down the amount we spend on health care or the degree to which the market allocates that spending?

Hillary: The socialists and progressives among us have a view of how the world should work. In their world, Bill Gates could have just as well been a successful bureacrat in the Office of Computer Technology Development in the U.S. Department of Commerce. He could have helped government direct investment in software development. Our best software developers could have just as well worked for the National Institutes of Computing instead of Lotus or Adobe or Oracle. Our computers might even be better if they were required to pass muster with a government FCA instead of being allowed to be sold by any college student with Internet access. And if they could have sucked enough tax dollars out of the private economy, the government could have subsidized equal access to computer technology every step of the way.

That is why Hillary sees a broken system that the government needs to fix. It’s not broken because it is riddled with perverse incentives and administrative costs originating in government regulation. It’s broken because the market doesn’t do what Hillary wants it to do. Hillary’s prescription involves phantom cost savings that only she, and not the market, could implement. She would use those fake savings to redirect resources according to a her vision of how our health care resources should be allocated. She would expect private health care firms to subsidize care at the expense of their profits. Hillary and her fellow travelers scoff at the idea that those profits help drive technological advancement. Every single position Hillary has taken assumes that the government can do better than the market in funding and improving our health care system.

If Hillary gets her way, medical advancement will, at the very least, slow down. Hillary’s health care plan assumes everyone is going to die. By thwarting investment or distorting the incentives in developing new treatments, her plan will assure that outcome for probably several, needlessly wasted generations.