The most important health care issue there is

Despite the best efforts of researchers to date, all of us are doomed. Unless something else gets us first, we can all look forward to a slow, lingering, painful death in less than 100 years.

Our only hope of survival is further technological advance in the medical and pharmaceutical fields. Every single day that the necessary advances are delayed, 100,000 people die of “natural causes”.

Now advances tend to build on each other, and they especially build on previous advances that have proven themselves in the laboratory and in the marketplace. Thus, inserting a bureaucratic delay of one year in each step of the process can lead to a delay of dozens of years in the final development and deployment of anti-aging treatments, with each one of those years costing more than 3.6 million deaths. Given the length of time that the FDA has been in existence, I’ve got a feeling that every death by “natural causes” over at least the last ten years (~36 million) were already completely unnecessary and could have been avoided if only the FDA and other controls on the medical industry hadn’t been established.

Reducing the payoff for introducing useful treatments will, of course, cause more delays and more deaths. Pharmaceutical price controls, single-payer health plans, and other interventions are therefore extremely dangerous to all of us in the long run, and the the mere threat of their introduction may have already sealed the doom of those in their so-called “golden years” by discouraging current investment that would otherwise pay off over the next 15-20 years. Our health care policy is badly in need of reform – free-market principles need to be introduced, not taken away, and controls need to be lifted, not added to, in order to give us our best chance at survival. We need everyone involved in the pharamceutical and health care industry to know that they can get filthy stinking rich and freely gouge the public for huge sums of money if they come up with even a partial solution to this scourge that has plagued every single generation since the Dawn of Man, without any danger that clueless leftists will take their earnings or their freedom to pursue further discoveries and further profits in peace in the health care industry away from them.

And that, as far as I can tell, is by far the most critical “health care issue” there is. I don’t see how anything else even comes close.