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The Luddite: He invented the Internet?
National Review, August 14, 2000 by Robert Goldberg
It doesn't take an inventor of the Internet to figure out that Gore's war on medical progress would wound our nation for generations to come. It would lead to a huge loss in what Harvard University's David Cutler and Elizabeth Richardson call "health capital-the dollar value of health a person will have over the course of their remaining life." For a newborn in 1990, Cutler and Richardson estimate health capital at about $3 million, while for the elderly, health capital is nearly $1 million. Health capital has increased greatly over time-by roughly $40,000 to $50,000 per decade. Gore believes that drug companies earn profits by price gouging, not by investing in valuable new drugs; but Cutler has found that just 30 percent of the increase in America's health capital in the past 40 years would have been enough to justify that period's investment in medical progress.
Moreover, it is clear that gains in life expectancy, birth weight, and the reversal of starvation in the developing world are largely due to advances made through medical progress. Columbia University professor Frank Lichtenberg has found that, over the past decade, a one-time pharmaceutical R&D expenditure of about $15 billion subsequently saves 1.6 million life-years per year. Lichtenberg also found that for every dollar spent on new drugs, America saves nearly four dollars on physicians and hospitalizations.
Al Gore's plan will do little to ease the plight of the 20 million people worldwide who are afflicted with Alzheimer's, or the 24 million in Africa with AIDS, or the millions more with cancer. His small, federally regulated and funded biotech business would kill incentives for investment and drain wealth into Medicare entitlements. The result would be a death knell for medical progress, retarding and reversing the recent gains in health and life expectancy. America would pay a huge, and unnecessary, price for a new middle-class entitlement, and for Gore's life-denying vision of biotechnology.
COPYRIGHT 2000 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group
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