In a must-read article, Scott Atlas looks at one of my biggest fears about ObamaCare and the regulatory state generally, when it comes to healthcare:

Of the many unintended consequences of the Affordable Care Act, perhaps the least noticed is its threat to innovation. Although most discussions center on the law’s more immediate effects on hiring, insurance rates and access to doctors and care, attention should also be paid to its impact on U.S. research and development and health-care technology.

Millennials may be too young to appreciate it, but the last twenty years have been a time of medical marvels.  Things that were a death sentence when I was young are now curable, or at least their fatality can be delayed.  We’d gotten to the point, I think, of taking for granted that all cures were just a matter of time.  “I hope I don’t get [disease X]” was becoming “I hope I don’t get [disease X] before they’ve found a cure.”

We who inhabit the modern era don’t seem to understand that such progress is not inevitable.  It takes risk and investment, and maybe a little bit of apparent unfairness.  (After all, if you can’t see the vision of the inventor and the investor, it looks like an awful waste of resources to do what they’re doing, and once they’ve succeeded, it can look so obvious that it hardly seems fair to reward them so lavishly.)

That’s not an argument for an anything-goes society, but it seemed like we had found a decent balance between ensuring that somebody was keeping a check on the system and allowing the system to operate.  Now, it seems like the weight has shifted, and the whole thing is wobbling.