What key changes can innovation bring to the healthcare system?
David Cutler: Again, come back to the most productive businesses, the ones that have increasingly lower costs: those are businesses that are actually the most innovative, not the least innovative. If you look at the most productive industries in the economy, they’re industries like information technology, like retail trade, like agriculture, that use technology the most, but they direct it the right way. For people to think that healthcare reform is going to involve stifling innovation is just absolutely wrong. If we do it right, we’re going to open the possibilities for an enormous amount of innovation. Let me just give you a different example than what we have seen. Take an anti-depressant drug as just one example. It is a well-known fact that anti depressant drugs, the same drug, will work on some patients and not work on others. Just give people Paxil or give people Prozac or give them Celexa; whatever it is, some patients respond to it, other patients don’t. And it is different, s
