by John F. Di Leo
On Friday, January 8, a news story announced "Abbott Laboratories and Boston Scientific Stent Gets OK for Japan Market" (see Crain's Chicago Business).
Abbott's product, the Xience V, is described as a wire mesh tube, used to keep arteries open after being cleared of plaque. It's coated with Everolimus, a drug which prevents scar tissue from reclosing the artery. Neat, huh?
Good news for Chicago's north suburban star Abbott Labs... good news for their employees and investors, and good news for the 200,000 patients per year in Japan who now have this splendid option for their coronary artery surgeries, thanks to American ingenuity and investment.
Though certainly good news, this probably isn't earth-shattering to medical professionals and people covering the science beat. It's not the first stent, and it's not the first invention to come out of Abbott or Boston Scientific.
In fact, it's not unusual at all; there's good medical news like this every day. Thanks to the opportunities nourished by modern capitalism, an ever-increasing cavalcade of medical innovations – and variations on such inventions – have been the rule for a century. Scientists, doctors, engineers, chemists, entrepreneurs, and investors have been producing medical advancements too quickly for any layman to keep track of them, particularly here in the United States.
Articles announcing this particular new export market opportunity for a US medical device appeared in Crain’s Chicago Business, Dow Jones Newswire, MedCity News, and the business section of the Chicago Tribune’s website... so, businessmen and medical professionals had the opportunity to learn the news.
This article did not appear, however, in the regular nation/world sections, or the tempo/features pages, or the opinion/editorial pages… and neither do the thousands more like it that surface all the time in our dynamic, productive, and revolutionary economy. That should be fine, normally, because the business section certainly ought to be where such a story belongs… but if you don’t read the business section, or PR Newswire, or other business websites, you won’t hear about such news; you may never know that it’s happening at all.
Why does this matter? Because our government is interfering with the business sector at a record-breaking pace – stimulating this sector and suppressing that one, encouraging this activity and discouraging all the rest – requiring the American public, as voters, to make policy decisions, which will determine whether or not these news stories will ever occur in the first place, without ever being given a clear understanding of the context, by either the Democrat majorities and administration, or their media sycophants.
The Framers gave us a Constitutional government that envisioned an ever-more complex economy, in which it would eventually become impossible for everyone to know everything necessary to control it – and that was fine, because our limited government was designed to allow the invisible hand of the market to control itself, with minimal interference by our elected officials. Every voter shouldn’t have to study all these issues in depth, because these issues should be out of government’s reach… but because of the regulatory blitzkrieg raining down upon the healthcare sector today, every voter must try.
The same day that the Chicago Tribune posted their story about Abbott’s stent approval on the business section of their website, their print edition’s only article about Abbott was a negative article concerning some old lawsuit. Which one do you think got read more?
All that most people read, see, or hear about healthcare are the incessant claims that it's too expensive, it's out-of-reach, it's unavailable. Not only is this impression mostly untrue, but the regular news pages don't give the average reader any other information to counter the impression.
The front section of the newspaper – the section that everyone reads, along with the ads and the comics – routinely slams the healthcare sector, while the slimmer and less popular business section is where all the exciting and positive news appears, if it’s printed at all.
We have all complained about bias in the news media for decades, and justly so. But this example isn’t a conscious bias; it’s just the way it is. The schools don’t teach future voters how our economy works. The press only talks about bad news, rarely about the good, and rarer still if the hero is a businessman. Could even an honorable newspaper predict all the background information that the public will need to know, to properly evaluate the cavalcade of meddlesome programs that a statist majority party would promulgate in times like these, from healthcare to everything else they’re undermining?
Back to our example. In order to market this stent, metal processing firms had to alloy and manufacture the wire mesh… pharmaceutical manufacturers had to make the coating… Abbott and Boston Scientific had to develop it, put it all together, test it, and be confident that it was every bit as great as they had hoped. Then they had to submit it for patents and approvals – not only in the USA, but in country after country, one at a time, employing attorneys and administrators, regulatory affairs representatives, and eventually, salesmen and shipping personnel.
Once a new product goes into production, it creates shipments – inbound shipments from material vendors, outbound shipments to customers both domestic and international. This creates business for freight forwarders and Customs brokers, trucking companies and airlines, railroads and steamship lines. It creates business for packaging manufacturers, ERP systems and document companies, advertising firms, and the magazines and trade journals in which ads are placed. All this wonderful activity… in addition to the manufacturer who sells the final product… and in addition to the hospital that puts it to use. New products don’t only save lives, they save economies!
Now let’s allow the leviathan state to squeeze these participants, and see what happens. Let’s raise taxes on them all, increase the already heavy regulations, some wise and many harmful; let’s force more mandates down their throats, making it ever more costly to develop, manufacture, buy, study, and try out these new products and procedures. What will happen? Fewer, ever fewer will take the risk. Fewer will try the innovations; fewer will be able to justify buying something different.
Healthcare will stagnate, and manufacturing will suffer. That means employment will suffer, and tax receipts, and home values, as well. The recession will continue to get worse.
This isn’t a prediction of the future; it’s happening now, as we watch. It’s been happening for years, as good premises are used to justify bad excesses – as the recognition that some regulation is needed (the FDA, the EPA, OSHA) is used to justify all manners of regulation. We can see it in plummeting business tax receipts and commercial real estate values, and in unemployment numbers across the country, as manufacturing flees to foreign shores, as innovations are snuffed out in their infancy by a hostile business climate.
The Democrats say they want healthcare to be affordable and accessible, but they don’t understand – or won’t admit – what their healthcare “reforms” are really designed to do, not only to healthcare, but to the economy at large.
Since Democrat supermajorities in Washington have rendered the Republican party unable to do anything to stop the progress of Obamacare, we need some Democrats in Congress to develop some independence, judgment, and vision, immediately… or as they say in hospitals, STAT.
Or soon, very soon, the reason Americans don’t know about the latest American healthcare innovation will be that there simply isn’t one to find out about.
Copyright 2010 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicago-based Customs broker and international trade compliance trainer. He does not work in the healthcare industry; he just hopes to help them stay alive in case he needs them to return the favor someday. Permission is hereby granted to forward this article freely, as long as it is uncut and the byline is included.
