Pajamas Media » The Deadly Tax on Medical Innovation

Pajamas Media » The Deadly Tax on Medical Innovation: "Most technology aficionados are familiar with Moore’s Law, which states that computing power tends to double roughly every two years. The average American experiences this most clearly when purchasing personal computers. In 1998, Apple introduced its iMac computer with a 233 MHz processor, 32 MB RAM, and 4 GB hard drive, for a price of $1300. In 2010, Apple’s low-end iMac includes a 3.06 GHz processor, 4 GB RAM, and a 500 GB hard drive for $1200. This represents a greater than 10-fold increase in processor speed and over 100-fold increases in RAM and hard drive sizes for roughly the same nominal dollar amount (30% fewer real dollars after adjusting for inflation).

Similar but more quiet progress has also occurred with medical technology. During my medical career, MRI scanners have advanced from creating crude but workable images of brain tumors to generating high-resolution scans displaying not just their anatomic extent, but also their internal chemical composition and the extent of functional disruption caused to the rest of the brain architecture. These advances allow doctors to plan surgery and radiation treatments in an extremely precise fashion to remove the tumor while preserving as much normal brain function as possible. As Clayton Cramer has observed, modern American medicine is much closer to the Star Trek “Sickbay” than doctors could have imagined a mere 20 years ago."