If Democrats ignore health-care polls, midterms will be costly

I don't think that necessarily follows. Innovation isn't something you put in a budget, so it isn't something that gets cut from a budget to fund other things (including waste).

In fact, I'd argue that smaller budgets may lead to greater innovation - if you need to do more with less, you'll try harder to find new solutions than if you have unlimited funds. Therefore, government waste drives innovation

barfo

 

Uhm... I'm not sure I see the point of that comparison. The purpose of the military budget isn't to "service" the servicepeople. The soldiers in your example would correspond to the health care bureaucrats in a government run health care plan, and I don't think there would be quite 250 million of those.

Nor do I see how those numbers imply much of anything about innovation.

barfo

 

That is a fair point - I agree government R&D could be impacted by wasteful spending. Although I suspect that waste, or lack thereof, isn't actually a big factor in setting the R&D budgets - political priorities appear to me to be a vastly bigger influence.

barfo

 

That after paying for 2.5M people, there's a lot of money left to pay for innovation (and $800 hammers and $5,000 toilet seats).

 

Right, so you are agreeing with me that government run health care would not stifle innovation?

barfo

 

Not at all.

They're going to spend 150% of the money they think they are on anything but innovation.

There's not going to be $100B to invent the next jet fighter (equivalent) for health care.

 

He's a pollster. I'm sure he told those losers they were losers.

 

Luckily, health care innovations don't cost $100B, nor are they funded by health insurance companies. So if government "takes over" health care insurance, I'm not sure I see the impact on innovation.

barfo

 

They do cost $100B.

Healthcare investment outpaces IT investment for the first time




(That's for just one year of venture capital, doesn't include R&D)

 

It's also not $100B, it's $7.7B, and it's healthcare VC money, total, for the year. Now you are suggesting that VC money will dry up if the government spends more money than it planned to on the uninsured???

barfo

 

Agreed. They'll fail to capitalize though, just like they always do.

barfo

 

I don't disagree with that generally. However, it isn't an on-off switch.

If I raise the reward for building a better mousetrap from $1 trillion to $1.001 trillion, it won't matter because everyone will already be working on the better mousetrap as hard as they can. Likewise if I lower the incentive by a tenth of a percent it does not follow that everyone will quit working on mousetraps and go flip burgers instead.

barfo

 

They elected him because he's not GW Bush, and that is all there is to it.

 

Some people claimed that old what's-his-name wasn't GW Bush either, but he and his creepy sidekick weren't elected even so. Pretty sure Hillary wasn't GW Bush, too.

McCain. McCain was his name.

barfo