Innovation

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On this page, you’ll find the Center’s analysis on how free-market policies can better balance the competing interests of medical innovation and competition. Here, you’ll find our research and commentary on such issues as patents, research and development spending, and reforms that will promote more robust competition.

July 26, 2017 Innovation

Disincentives plague the U.S. health care system, driving costs higher and the quality of care lower. Improving health outcomes requires reforms that remove these disincentives. With respect to health insurers, this means returning payers to their proper role of providing effective risk management services to patients. In contrast to other insurance markets, health insurers degrade their ability to cover medical emergencies because they cover the costs of routine expenditures that are not risks in the true sense of the word. If other...

December 19, 2016 Innovation

The deaths of two patients at the Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in early 2015 were blamed in part on a drug-resistant superbug. Two years earlier, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicted that a “nightmare” was coming in the form of the killer bacteria carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriaceae, also known as CRE. The bad dream was a grave reality for those patients who had gone to the hospital to merely undergo endoscopies and were likely infected by CRE from equipment...

July 15, 2016 Innovation

Between 2006 and 2015 the S&P 500 grew 7.25% per year on average–if you had invested $100 in the stock market in the beginning of 2006 it would be worth nearly $188 by the end of 2015. Sounds great. But, any investor during that period would surely feel less confident. After all, following the 36% decline in stock prices in 2008, a nervous investor might inaccurately conclude that the future is grim and that stock prices will never grow again. Alternatively, following the...

June 22, 2016 Briefs, Innovation

Innovations in the pharmaceutical industry have significantly improved health outcomes for patients and have made important contributions to the U.S. economy. Provisions in the 21st Century Cures bill would help address these problems by accelerating the approval process for innovative pharmaceutical drugs and as a result, extend the effective patent lives for new pharmaceutical innovations....