Went alright, though the bards won't be singing of my performance in the generations to come. The Swedish guy is really into us becoming Estonia,, folks at Cato really don't like relative measures of poverty, and according to some of the folks in the audience, I talk too fast. My grandmother, it should be said, has long agreed with this critique.
Towards the close of the event, someone in the audience argued that moving towards a national system would hugely retard medical innovation. I never understand the evidence for this claim. A huge amount of the tech advances come from public institutions and grants even now. The Veteran Administration's development and integration of the medical information software VISTA is one of the great delivery advances in recent decades. Medical development only increased as Medicare has expanded, in large part because bringing more seniors into the pool increased the potential profits to be made. Indeed, you could create a national system and plow the savings directly into NIH grants, hugely accelerating innovation. There's just no evidence on the other side of this innovation question -- and there's quite a bit that the current system encourages a lot of wasted R&D, like into molecularly dissimilar but functionally identical copycats of patented blockbuster drugs.
