Megan McArdle’s take on preserving the American private health-care system ends with the assertion that “at this point, the US is the only country left providing a hefty incentive for inventing new treatments.”

In McArdle’s case, US = profitable sectors of medical patients, while the movements towards single-payer health care (which I unequivocally support) mean that “US” will pretty much equal all taxpayers (with most of the burden placed on the very richest, if the House bill comes to pass). If all taxpayers have to foot the bill, medical innovation should gravitate towards those diseases that affect the largest parts of the population regardless of revenue potential.

In short, erectile dysfunction can wait while the development of a cure for cancer is subsidized.

I can’t think of a major pharmaceutical company developing drugs or a hospital that performs operations knowing that healthy people are (statistic goes here, help me out people) more productive, and in the case of contagious diseases, keep others healthy and productive as well. Goodwill and utopian notions of an illness-free society aside, there is an argument to be made that there are greater economic benefits in all manner of other private industries when people are healthier.

Good health, like sound education and thoroughly developed transportation infrastructures, is a veritable force multiplier, one that makes us more consistently productive and (even quantifiably) valuable. Better smiles lead to better paychecks, flu shots mean less sick days, less sneezing on the Metro can potentially save dozens of employers lost productivity. Any kind of public health care would actually spur entrepreneurship since health care would become a part of the byzantine process of self-employment tax rather than a separate byzantine process of applying for over-marketed insurance. I could go on.

Now that I’m done assuaging the capitalists I count among my friends, I believe that privatized health care (especially in the wealthy United States) is symptomatic of a culture that neither values sustained wealth over a quarterly economic outlook nor believes that health is a public good, and I think that’s contemptible. The degree to which various systems of subsidized health care address the public good – conceptually or in reality – I’m open to debate.