Law Commons^™

Health Care Costs And The Arc Of Innovation, Neel U. Sukhatme, Maxwell Gregg Bloche

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Health care costs continue their inexorable rise, threatening America’s long-term fiscal stability, competitiveness, and standard of living. Over the past half-century, efforts to rein in spending have uniformly failed. In this Article, we explain why, breaking with standard accounts of regulatory and market dysfunction. We point instead to the nexus of economics, mutual empathy, and social expectations that drives medical innovation and locks in low-value technologies. We show how law reflects and reinforces this nexus and how and why health-policy-makers avert their gaze.

Next, we propose to circumvent these barriers instead of surmounting them. Rather than targeting today’s excessive spending, …