CIAO DATE: 01/2010
November 2009
The health care issues commonly considered most important today — controlling costs and covering the uninsured — arguably should be regarded as secondary to innovation, inasmuch as a medical treatment must first be invented before its costs can be reduced and its use extended to everyone. To date, however, none of the most influential international comparisons have examined the contributions of various countries to the many advances that have improved the productivity of medicine over time. We hope this paper can help fill that void. In three of the four general categories of innovation examined in this paper — basic science, diagnostics, and therapeutics — the United States has contributed more than any other country, and in some cases, more than all other countries combined. In the last category, business models, we lack the data to say whether the United States has been more or less innovative than other nations; innovation in this area appears weak across nations.
Resource link: Bending the Productivity Curve: Why America Leads the World in Medical Innovation [PDF] - 871K