Telling stories: "Extraordinary Measures" and health care reform

In my review of the new CBS Films docudrama Extraordinary Measures for The Weekly Standard, I mention that the film (perhaps inadvertently) makes a powerful case for one of the hardest-to-illustrate but most-compelling arguments against health care reform, namely that it will lead to a reduction in pharmaceutical innovation and cause the deaths of countless millions yet to be born:

It is easy for supporters of health care reform to make an argument based on emotion – “Health care reform will open access to insurance and save lives; if you weren’t so busy callously ignoring the indigent sick you could see that” – but more difficult for opponents to demonstrate in a quick and easy fashion just why we need the dread evils of private venture capital and the profit motive.

Indeed, it’s an argument that we’ve seen a number of times in the blogosphere over the last year or so. Conor Friedersdorf once argued* that conservatives were at a distinct disadvantage when it came to discussing health care reform because their strongest argument against it was that drug innovation would be stifled and it’s hard to demonstrated clearly and concisely just what that means. Furthermore, it’s hard to quantify future human suffering from a lack of drugs that don’t yet exist to cure diseases we don’t yet know about. Liberals, meanwhile, have it pretty easy: They can point to a litany of stories that tug on the heart strings and make an emotional, impassioned plea for helping the weakest amongst us. Here’s Freddie DeBoer taking Megan McArdle to task for not caring enough about children like Deamonte Driver, a boy who died from complications arising from an untreated cavity:

Would she continue to oppose health care for all when her audience is not faceless commenters applauding her, but rather the human face of someone who has paid far too high a price for existing in our corrupt, brutal, insane system? This is where the rubber meets the road, ladies and gentlemen, this is where the courage of one’s convictions becomes not a matter of convincing your ideological fellow travelers but of looking at the actual reality of human pain.

And look, Freddie’s argument is powerful and moving. It’s hard not to read about Deamonte and feel pangs of horror at just what happened to him.** Conservatives have never really had a counterargument, something concrete they could point to and say “See, this is what we’re talking about when we say that you’re killing people when you stifle drug innovation through price controls and more centralized government action.”

All that changes with the movie Extraordinary Measures however, which is an implicit defense of the profit motive as it relates to drug innovation, even if it does so through gritted teeth, grimacing all the way. As I write:

Indeed, it’s unclear whether screenwriter Robert Nelson Jacobs or director Tom Vaughan realize [what they are arguing] either — anytime mention of profit is made it’s usually through clenched teeth by John. He doesn’t care about profit, after all; he just wants a drug that will save the lives of his babies. Without concern for profit, however, that drug wouldn’t come: Dr. Stonehill would still be toiling away at a backwater public university with a little government money and John’s children would have died.

I mean, hey, I don’t think this glorified movie of the week is going to radically swing the debate in health care reform or anything. But it’s an interesting cultural document, one that highlights the truth of Robert McKee’s words in Story:

Writers deal with ideas, but not in the open, rational manner of philosophers. Instead, they conceal their ideas inside the seductive emotions of art. Yet felt ideas, as Plato pointed out, are ideas nonetheless. Every effective story sends a charged idea out to us, in effect compelling the idea into us, so that we must believe.

*For the life of me I cannot find the post. I thought it was at The American Scene, but then I realized that it was probably at the old Culture11 blog, the Confabulum, and therefore has, in all likelihood, disappeared into the ether of the Internet.

**I don’t want to get into the weeds of just why I found Freddie’s argument lacking, but I addressed the issue here.