Medical Oligopoly Stifling Innovation and Elevating Costs

People in the West often talk about a dubious collusion between big government and big business in Asian countries, yet this is not limited to Asia.

Those who understand the current state of affairs in the U.S. knows what’s been going on in the financial sector.

Another big industry which has shown a similar pattern is the medical industry including pharmaceutical and medical instruments.

What saddens me is the fact that the medical industry is the one which has to keep humanity and intellectual integrity most, helping suffering people.

The following article illuminates how the medical device industry in the U.S. has succumbed to the inner workings of an oligopoly.

From Washington Monthly:

Around this time, GPOs started to come under scrutiny. The New York Times ran an investigative series on their business practices in 2002, and Congress followed suit with a string of hearings. One of the first witnesses was California entrepreneur Joe Kiani, who had invented a machine to monitor blood-oxygen levels. Unlike other similar devices, Kiani’s worked even when patients moved around or had little blood flowing to their extremities, a crucial innovation for treating sickly, premature infants, who tend to squirm and need to be monitored constantly for oxygen saturation—too little and they suffocate, too much and they go blind. But most hospitals couldn’t buy Kiani’s product because his larger rival, Nellcor, had cut a deal with the GPOs.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1007.blake.html