>one of the meta challenges with socialized medicine is that there is virtually no innovation due to price controls (please no anecdotes). Thanks for parenthet

>one of the meta challenges with socialized medicine is that there is virtually no innovation due to price controls (please no anecdotes). Thanks for parenthetically instructing us not to share anecdotes at the end of a statement which isn't even that. https://www.statista.com/statistics/266141/pharmaceutical-spending-per-capita-in-selected-countries/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/266141/pharmaceutical-sp... That's per capital spending on pharmaceuticals. Two things to note from that: 1) The highest by far is in the US, that's absolutely true. 2) Substantial amounts are still spent in other wealthy countries. American healthcare payers - insurance companies and their agents - also impose controls on what they will pay for drugs and for which conditions. They don't seem to be as effective in enforcing them since they haven't got the kind of monopsoninistic power as either single payer systems like Canada or constrained multi-payer insurance markets like the Netherlands. That Americans overpaying for drugs helps to subsidise R&D that everyone benefits from seems like it make intuitive sense. I'd question whether the evidence supports a complete halt to innovation if the US adopted pharmaceutical price controls unless the price control they adopted was to restrict prices to cost of production - something that no government single payer health service does. In the NHS, these decisions are made by the NICE which determines how many quality adjusted life years are gained from the use of a drug and then checks to see if they clear a threshold CBA value. It's worth noting that £100k+ cancer drugs that actually work are still frequently approved under this system. Recently, NICE approved Soliris at £330k/yr for treating aHUS. That's $450k/yr, treatment required for life. I suspect that many American insurance companies wouldn't fund that. Moreover there are goods and services such as fighter jets where there is a single US government buyer and innovation still happens. Conceptually it doesn't appear that this needs to be a barrier to innovation spending.