This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, December 30, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The United States leads the world in medical innovation, including the kinds of innovation

we might take for granted in other fields like new business

models.

Physician Raymond Rod believes that health care reform may threaten the pace of medical innovation

in the U.S. He's co-author of the new Cato paper Bending the Productivity

Curve. At the Cato Institute November 20th, Broad talked about what makes the US so productive

and what might threaten that innovation.

Comparisons in health care systems across countries are very popular and

influential in health policy debates.

Those four up there are the most influential and there are others.

There are several problems with these studies which I'm not going to get into here but you can

ask me about during the question and answer period if you're interested, but one of the problems

is that none of them include any measure of the contribution of various countries to medical innovation.

Now why is it important to include innovation?

Well as Sir Cannon just said, innovation is what makes us healthier. It's what brought us to the health

care system that we have today. And in many ways, I would argue that innovation is more

important than the two issues that are considered most important in health care today, rising costs and

lack of health insurance because really a treatment has to first be developed

before its costs can be addressed and its use can be extended to everybody.

Now a common question that's asked is why wouldn't innovation show up in other measures?

...