Medical Research v. Medical Insurance

I found the New Republic's article on Medical Innovation to be a hard slog, but here's the important bit:

The single biggest source of medical research funding, not just in the United States but in the entire world, is the National Institutes of Health (NIH): Last year, it spent more than $28 billion on research, accounting for about one-third of the total dollars spent on medical research and development in this country (and half the money spent at universities). The majority of that money pays for the kind of basic research that might someday unlock cures for killer diseases like Alzheimer's, aids, and cancer. No other country has an institution that matches the NIH in scale. And that is probably the primary explanation for why so many of the intellectual breakthroughs in medical science happen here.

There's no reason why this has to change under universal health insurance.

In other words, it isn't our convoluted system of employment-dependent private insurance that gives Americans access to brilliant new devices and techniques. It's research funding from things like the NIH. (Or, as Krugman would have it, a triumph of Liberal policy, not the private sector).