Computers vs. Healthcare

Over at Lew Rockwell, Bill Walker writes about why computers get better, cheaper, faster, and more advanced in this country while healthcare does not:

Computers work. We complain about them, but that’s because most of the time they work so fast that we don’t even notice them in the background. And they get cheaper by the second. They get cheaper so fast that we can see the prices of memory and processor speed falling even without adjusting for inflation.

Health care, on the other hand, gets more expensive all the time, even for techniques that were invented decades ago. Computers get twice as fast every two years, but technology for carbon-based organisms improves at a snail’s pace.Why? Biology isn’t all that complex. After all, our cells only have the equivalent of about 2.8 gigabytes of (very slow) DNA memory storage. The viruses that kill us often get by with 12 kilobytes. Your cellphone has more memory than most pathogens, and cellphone design mutates more over the course of a year than the flu.

Everyone repeat after me: The main reason that healthcare isn't getting cheaper and better is because of the the government.

It's frustrating to see the politicians on the GOP side of the aisle mouthing the words about the freemarket and how it's superior to government intervention in providing healthcare but not really believing it themselves. The expansion of Medicare by the Bush administration is a $29.7 TRILLION dollar albatross that should be hung around the neck of W and a complicit Congress. That "compassionate capitalism" sure sounds like big government welfare to me.

Oh, and we want MORE government healthcare?

Anyway, read the whole article here.