That is the theme of my latest Free Press piece, here is one excerpt from it:

Government-run systems often (not always) do a perfectly fine job setting a broken arm or administering a long-standing, well-known medication. They do much less well when it comes to developing, financing, and delivering a new immunological approach to fighting cancer, personalized to your individual genome at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. In our rapidly arriving biomedical future, innovation capacity will matter above all else. And though they may not see it today, the people with the most life ahead of them will reap nearly all of the benefits of a dynamic system, or suffer the consequences of a paralytic one.

Thirty years ago, it was often debated whether the Canadian or British healthcare systems were better than what we have in the U.S. After all, they offered a kind of guaranteed access to health services. The details could differ, but often the healthcare had no upfront price or only a low user fee. In America, in contrast, healthcare was more expensive, there were many millions of uninsured people, and dealing with sometimes rapacious insurers and hospitals could involve significant emotional trauma.

But over time the British and Canadian systems look worse and worse. The queues and rationing have increased, as giving healthcare away for free makes it hard to satisfy demands in a timely manner. In Canada, for instance, the median wait time has risen from 9.3 weeks in the early 1990s to 28.6 weeks today. In the British National Health Service, only 65.3 percent of patients start treatment within 18 weeks.

Worse yet, both of those systems are undercapitalized. In Britain, healthcare is badly understaffed and underfunded. Yet the country already has high taxes, high debt, and slow economic growth, so it is not clear where the new money will come from to recapitalize the system.

And this sentence:

This entire dynamic will be intensified as the pace of medical innovation picks up.

Your life may depend on it.