Spend MORE on Health Care!

I love a good contrarian viewpoint. Craig Karpel's column in last Sunday's WSJ made me sit up and take notice. It's entitled "We Don't Spend Enough on Health Care." The basic premise is that we're looking at the "high" percentage of GDP represented by health care spending in the wrong way. As Karpel points out, "No one thinks the 20% of our GDP that's attributable to manufacturing is weighing down the economy, because it's intuitively clear that one person's expenditure on widgets is another person's income. But the same is true of the health-care industry."

What follows is a fantastic argument that the large spend on health care in the United States is good. It is the logical extension of fullfilling human needs after food, clothing, and shelter -- key drivers of the industrial revolution, as well as the last century.

"The U.S. health-care economy should be viewed not as a burden but as an engine of growth. Medical and orthopedic equipment exports increased by 65.1% from 2004 through 2008. Pharmaceutical exports were up 74.6%. The unprecedented advances expected to come out of American stem cell, nanotechnology and human genome research—which other countries' constricted health sectors cannot support—will send these already impressive figures skyward."

Well worth the read.