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Health Care's Role In America's Vanishing Innovation Edge

From the Atlantic: Evidence from analyst Mary Meeker that so-called "productive spending" - infrastructure, R&D and education - has been displaced by "less-productive spending" - health care and entitlements. 

Says the article, "Like an aging couple shifting its spending away from the kids' clothes and tuition toward pills and doctor visits, the U.S. government has transformed itself from a defense-technology-infrastructure investor to a national insurance conglomerate for its aging population."


The result is slower growth and declining competitiveness.  Meeker's prescription: Taming the Monster, i.e. more spending on innovation, less on health care.

More from Forbes on "How ObamaCare is Putting Medical Innovation In the Hospital."
"If hospitals are at the heart of ObamaCare, as they appear to be, that’s a huge problem. Hospitals today are some of the last places medical innovation takes place. The reasons have to do with their structure and how they are constituted."

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