This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, December 2, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The United States leads the world in medical innovation, but why?

A new Cato policy analysis says that in three of the four general

categories of innovation basic science diagnostics and therapeutics the US has

contributed more than any other country and in some cases more than all other countries

combined. Paper co-author Dr Raymond Rod is a resident in psychiatry at the New York Presbyterian

Hospital, Wyle Cornell Medical Center.

We divide innovation into four categories.

The first is basic medical sciences, which are advances in our understanding of disease and

how it affects our body.

Second is diagnostics, which are anything

that helps us discover what disease the person has.

Therapeutics, which help us treat disease

and make people better better and business model innovation

which are developments in the way that care is organized and delivered to consumers.

Why is the US leading in medical innovation? There's a lot of reasons.

Part of it is that U.S. seems to be attracting high-quality innovators, both from within its population and from other

countries. There's lots of examples of doctors and scientists training other countries with them coming to the United States to do their work and to innovate here.

There's also more spending in the United States. Usually we think of the higher spending of health care in the U.S. as being a problem.

It's a fault of the U.S. system.

But it also seems to be encouraging a lot of new ideas, both in basic science and diagnostics and therapeutics.

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