American Health Care and the Fortress Mentality

“For decades America’s health care debate has pitted Left against Right, federal against state, public against private. All sides, however, have shared a similar, inhibiting mindset—an excessive aversion to risk and deference to medical insiders—instead of stressing the ideal goal of better health care for more people at lower cost on a continuous basis.

A new study published by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University shows how this “Fortress”-like mentality has limited innovation in health care, constraining medical advances and raising costs. Shifting to a “Frontier” approach—one that tolerates risk and opens the field to other participants and disciplines—would bring to health care the kinds of creativity seen in many other fields, such as information technology.

The study illustrates these ideas in part through a set of unconventional characters, including a Hollywood actress who figured out how to stop Nazis from jamming American torpedo controls, a small-town doctor who pioneered stem-cell therapy, an injured carpenter and a puppet-maker who saw $40,000 prosthetic hands and produced a workable alternative that costs less than $50, a dying rodeo enthusiast who successfully battled the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and—on the other side of the coin—a well-meaning educator who helped destroy African-American medical education.” - Fortress and Frontier in American Health Care, Robert Grabayes, George Mason University

Link to the summary:

http://mercatus.org/sites/default/files/Graboyes-Fortress-Frontier-summary_0.pdf


Link to the entire paper:

http://mercatus.org/sites/default/files/Graboyes-Fortress-Frontier_0.pdf