mgcolin

Personalized Medicine: The Next Big Thing

An important question with personalized medicine is whether this innovation will be cost effective and who will pay.

In fact "who will pay?" will be the key question for all health care spending in the future, and there is no doubt the current US system is fatally flawed - The proof of this is that the US spends a far higher proportion of GDP on Health care than any other country on the planet and we have mediocre outcomes at best (quality of life and lifespan). Far too much money in the US is wasted on health care that doesn't really improve life, big $$ ICU stays for terminal elderly for example. At the opposite end of the spectrum, too many people have no coverage at all so they don't treat chronic problems or wait too long and wind up in really bad shape in emergency rooms - the most expensive place health care can be delivered.

I believe the solution to this mess will be market based - culturally I don't think single payer will ever work in the US. But the status-quo is just not the right answer anymore - Health care costs are putting US businesses at too big a disadvantage in the global economy.

Yes - capping the drain to the US economy from health care to some will look like a sacrifice to some. But we cannot afford $100K ICU bills for 90 year olds anymore. We cannot afford branded drugs hawked by $100K per year sales reps whose MBAs from good schools have prepared them for the challenging job of carrying pizza into doctors offices every day. We cannot afford $50,000 courses of exotic chemo to eke out an extra 2 months of life in pain. We cannot afford 80% gross profit margins for me-too medical devices. And we cannot afford more multi-million windfall payouts to 'victims' of non gross negligence malpractice cases.

Yes the new system will look more like Europe than the current system (God forbid) but at least we will get some of the current wasted GDP back and deployed into something more productive.