Michael Barone

Michael Barone is more a scholar than a pundit/commentator. It's impossible to argue with him since he has all in the info at his fingertips.

Here, he points out the benefits of US-style free enterprise in medicine. He also shows how other nations free-ride on US creativity and investment even as they call us right-wing morons.

clipped from www.realclearpolitics.com Obama Would Stifle Military and Medical Creativity We also may be at risk of squandering our high-tech advantage in medicine. As Scott Atlas of the Hoover Institution points out, the top five American hospitals conduct more clinical trials than all the hospitals in all other developed countries. America has outpointed all other countries combined in Nobel Prizes for medical and physiology since 1970. American theoretical health research financed by the National Institutes of Health and by American market-oriented pharmaceutical companies outshines the rest of the world combined. And the rest of the world tends to get the benefits at cut rates. American taxpayers finance NIH, which reports results publicly to the whole world. The Democratic health care bills threaten to undermine innovation in pharmaceuticals and medical technologies by sending those with private insurance into a government insurance plan that would be in a position to ration treatment and delay or squelch innovation. The