Can the U.S. Repair Its Health Care While Keeping Its Innovation Edge?
The United States health care system has many problems, but it also promotes more innovation than its counterparts in other nations. That’s why discussions of remaking American health care often raise concerns about threats to innovation.

The United States health care system has many problems, but it also promotes more innovation than its counterparts in other nations. That’s why discussions of remaking American health care often raise concerns about threats to innovation.

But this fear is frequently misapplied and misunderstood.

First, let’s acknowledge that the United States is home to an outsize share of global innovation within the health care sector and more broadly. It has more clinical trials than any other country. It has the most Nobel laureates in physiology or medicine. It has won more patents. At least one publication ranks it No. 1 in overall scientific innovation.

Strong promotion of innovation in health care is one reason the United States got as far as it did in our recent bracket tournament on the best health system in the world. Though the United States lost to France, 3-2, in the semifinals, it picked up its two votes in part because of its influence on innovation, which can save lives in the United States and throughout the world.

Now we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking Americans are inherently more innovative than people in other countries. In fact, many American innovators are immigrants who may or may not be citizens. Many technological and procedural breakthroughs in medicine have occurred in other countries.