Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt; the status quo must be maintained, our holy profit margins must be unstained. I hate to say it, but Obama is right on about the idea

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt; the status quo must be maintained, our holy profit margins must be unstained. I hate to say it, but Obama is right on about the idea that the current system needs competition to shake the parasites loose. There are a lot of middlemen and a lot of misaligned incentives in our current system that must be squeezed out. Since the nation seems to be in a Keynesian mood at this point, here is my modest proposal for how to organize medical research for the next twenty years as a public/private partnership on a par with the moon race or the interstate freeway system. The basic structure is a patent pool with a set of protocols for licensing advances from research shops and licensing assemblies for manufacturing. Define a small set of ideal medical technology goals; a universal medical imager, a universal portable pathology lab, a universal pharmacopia, and a universal medical expert system to tie it all together. Allow anyone to present model assemblies of technology that approach one of the defined goals. Have a fast track approval process for testing assemblies and licensing them for release to manufacturing. Every year, or every three months, pick the top 5 designs in each category and release them to manufacturing with a minimum guaranteed order for any manufacturer taking the product to market within a short time frame. Iterate, until we have a functionally complete autodoc that is as capable as the entire Mayo Clinic is today, and yet so affordable that middle class people can choose to have them in their homes. Done properly it would be a self-funding effort after the first few years, and it would take health maintenance and medical surveillance out of the hands of the health insurance mafia.