Why Stifle Innovation?

Andrew Sullivan isn’t convinced by Jon Cohn’s argument that government-run health care won’t have any serious effect on medical innovation. Taking issue with Cohn’s idea that "The goal is to reduce our spending moderately and carefully," Sullivan writes:

And why should we reduce spending at all if we don’t want to and the market reflects it? At some point, there really is an unbridgeable issue here. I don’t see why the government should have any real say on how much a free people wants to spend on health. I don’t think there is some “optimal” balance here, solely devisable by smart people who “promote the value of innovation” on government boards. We have a classic trade-off: between the innovation and choice of the private sector – and a “rational”, government-based system that ensures that politics and not markets decide what our healthcare should be. I don’t doubt this trade-off is coming. In a democratic society, the impulse to redistribute wealth and goods according to the wants of the majority – and a majority that’s getting older – is politically irresistible. But the quality will suffer – as will the innovation. If we haven’t learned that by now, we’re ineducable. No special board of experts has ever saved us from this; and none ever will.

Like I said, the problem isn’t so much between whether a private company is better than a government board. It’s whether a whole lot of independently acting private companies will more quickly and efficiently innovate than a single board making all the decision.