Innovation, we hardly knew ye

John Graham of Pacific Research Institute points out in a blog post that innovation in the medical field is likely to suffer in the hands of the government:

It’s hard not to get excited about entrepreneurs who are founding companies and developing technologies – like a headband that people with sleep apnea wear in bed, which captures certain vital signs that can be downloaded to a doctor’s office for diagnosis.
But it’s also disheartening to learn that their success depends on the government, specifically the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, approving the service for reimbursement.
Do you think that we’d have microwave ovens, automatic transmissions, DVD players, or mountain bikes today if the people who invented them, or the people who wanted to use them, had to wait for a government agency to decide how much to pay for them and who deserved to use them?
Government now controls about half of all the dollars spent on Americans’ health care. It’s amazing that we have any innovation and entrepreneurship at all.