The End of Medicine, Andy Kessler
9/3/07
Kessler, of Wall Street Meat and Running Money, puts technology to the side for a bit and takes a long look at how medicine might scale. And by scale, he implies, getting cheaper and therefore selling more. It is a fascinating question; think about the money that is spent on health care in the US alone: 1.8 trillion dollars, 15% of American GDP. That is a whole chunk of our economy. That is $5,400 for every American, the highest in the world. The book sights the Swiss paying $3,300, and $2,700 in Canada. The paradoxes are plentiful, however.
The book is a journey though these paradoxes and ultimately results in showing that one day, preventative scanning/detection will revolutionize medicine and end the way we currently think about medicine. The problems are many. False positives in testing result in more tests and treatments, a whole lot of heart ache, that are all unnecessary. False negatives are recipes for litigation. And if you are the one paying the bill, and it is likely that you aren’t, because you have insurance, and it is determined you do have a condition that means we have to fix you, and that costs money. To run the best tests medicine has to offer right now on the entire population is shown to be cost prohibitive, at least for now. And that is what will change.
So be on the lookout for imaging solutions, or other types of preventative detection that will scale, it is coming and it isn’t driven by passion for money, it is driven by the passion of survivors and memories of those who didn’t.
