Cheap Health Care Not Always Good

All the rage right now is an overhaul of the health care system to make it cheaper for everyone involved. And while that would be good for some people, I have my doubts as to whether or not it'll be good for the US as a whole.
Case in point...there is an article in a recent Popular Science regarding some very popular drugs losing their patent rights this year. Lipitor being the most prominent. Lipitor made $12.4 billion in sales in '08. $12.4 billion!! On the surface, that seems exorbitant and a symbol of what's wrong. I mean, if we could reduce that by even 10%, we'd save over $1 billion in health care cost. And that is true. However, that means Pfizer has 10% less to invest in R&D to create the next generation of drugs. And that's exactly what's happening. Drug submittals to the FDA are down over 10% and likely going to continue to drop. Eli Lilly is slashing $1 billion from it's budget and cutting 5,000 jobs. If drug companies don't have the money to put into R&D, they can't create the next generation of drugs to treat emerging health issues. Depression, obesity, cancer treatments, etc. Drugs are insanely expensive to get to market. R&D costs to come up with them, years of work to prepare trials, years or decades of patient trials, FDA approval submissions, then if you're lucky, marketing and production costs. Factor in all the drugs that don't make it, and it's alot of money to market a drug that may never really sell.
Another big issue in slashing health care costs is the supply-and-demand problem with MDs. This is an issue that I've been forced to learn first-hand. I don't want to get into raw numbers, but when Hayley graduated from med school her student loan debt was more than our mortgage. Shocking, especially considering she had no undergrad debt. And as a resident, she's making only 5% more than what I made as a test engineer straight out of college back in January 2001. Meaning that without a substantial pay raise as a practicing MD, she'd still be paying off her student loans when she was in her 50s. If she was single, as many residents are, it'd be impossible to take on a mortgage of her own. And while home-ownership is a privaledge and not a right, a scant few will willingly decide to spend 12 years of schooling, the last 8 of which involve non-stop 80 hour or more work/study weeks, to spend their lives renting apartments. This will create a huge drop in the number of people that choose that career path; even less that go on to pursue specialties like surgery, cardiology, reproductive fields, etc. The likely immediate effect of this is what Massachusetts saw after they imposed mandatory health care. It become very hard to find a PCP (primary care physician) and even harder to get an appt. To make matters worse, with our current system only the best med students make it into residency programs and only the best residents make it out to secure jobs. But if you have less going in and the same number coming out, students that normally wouldn't survive make it all the way to being practicing physicians. So after waiting extra weeks/months to get an appt with your PCP, now you're getting sub-standard care from them. Sounds appealing, doesn't it?
I'm not saying all of this will necessarily come to pass. But it's something that needs to be considered before we all jump on the 'make health care cheaper' band-wagon. If people want the expensive exploratory tests they've come to expect, they have to pay for it. X-Rays, MRIs, CT scans, mammograms, EKGs, blood work, these aren't cheap. Surgeries aren't cheap. You can either have great doctors and great testing, or you can have cheap health care. You can't have it both ways. If anyone has a way to accomplish both, I'd love to hear it.