Ezra Klein: belief

Transcript context

…Christian Scientists — they still have decent life expectancy. People would have maybe higher social security. They could still buy healthcare. We’d have many more people. It’d be a much younger society, more dynamic society. Scientific advances would mean we’d cure many more diseases, forms of cancer. People would probably live longer. Why not do that? Just go crazy on innovation and number of births. One, I think that’s hugely probably a false choice. You can fund innovation, but if you don’t have provision of healthcare . . . This is the other side of your arguments about drug pricing, but your view is that you get a huge innovation signal from the fact that in a rich country, virtually everybody — and certainly all older people — have healthcare and they’re able to buy it. One, I don’t buy that you could close down Medicare and Medicaid without substantially harming innovation. I don’t buy that on a political level at all. One of the — It’s not going to happen but you could have prizes for really good drugs, right?…

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