Instapundit linked up this abject lesson in what happens when price controls are placed on medical care:

Unfortunately for Europe, Germany’s decline [as a leader in pharmaceutical innovation] is just part of a Europe-wide problem. Media on both sides of the Atlantic have reported the piecemeal relocation of Europe’s biopharmaceutical industry to America. Upon moving its global research headquarters to the U.S., Switzerland’s Novartis created a cutting-edge biomedical research campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2002. Likewise, after transplanting its international headquarters to New Jersey in 2002, Dutch drug giant Organon launched a new biotechnology research facility in Cambridge in mid-2005. Organon officials call the region “the perfect breeding ground for medical biotechnology.” The Anglo-Swedish AstraZeneca is investing hundreds of millions of dollars in new labs in the U.S., and almost 30 per cent of its employees are now based in the Americas. The UK’s GlaxoSmithKline has manufacturing and research facilities across the U.S., and almost one-quarter of its workforce is now based here.

Listen up folks. The only reason medical innovation is happening anywhere is because the US government does not fully subsidize or control medical care. We are, in effect, carrying the rest of the world, and paying higher prices ourselves because of it.

Does that mean our system is the right one? Oh hell no, our system has got loads of problems. But anyone who thinks giving control to the government is how to fix things either has an ax to grind or isn't paying attention.