First-rate health care: I'm getting it, as should more Americans

Every day this week I shaved, brushed my teeth, showered, dressed myself, made my own breakfast. Big steps for a recovering invalid.

I have multiple myeloma, a bone-marrow cancer. Just after I started chemo, I fell down the stairs and tore my left anterior cruciate ligament, complicating treatment for both.

For the last six weeks, I've essentially been confined to my bed, with another week or so to go. If you sent me an email, and I haven't responded, this is why.

I hate being an invalid even more than I thought I would. But I have so much to be grateful for.

From the parking lot attendants and transporters to the nurses, physician assistants and doctors at UPMC Passavant hospital, I've received caring and superb treatment.

Oncologist Brian McLaughlin has the best communication skills of any doctor I've ever encountered. Nurses say Dr. William Abraham of Tri-Rivers Surgical Associates, who repaired my knee, should sign his work. He's that good.

I'm very grateful to my employer, and to the union at the Post-Gazette, for providing a health plan that's made it possible to obtain the excellent care I've been getting. I'm grateful also to management for letting me work from home while I'm laid up.

I owe so much to my wife. Caring for an invalid with cancer puts enormous strain on the caregiver. I couldn't get along without Pam's management of the meds I must take each day and night, and I am grateful to her for feeding and bathing me when I couldn't do these things for myself.

Since my injury, Mollie, our Maltese, hasn't wanted to leave my side.

I've been amazed so many are praying for me. Your prayers are working. The first two rounds of chemotherapy have reduced sharply the symptoms of my cancer.

I was in Stage 3 — the highest — when I was diagnosed. If I weren't getting the care I'm getting, my life expectancy probably would be measured in months.

All that said, I don't think there is a "right" to health care, because no one has a right to put his or her hands into someone else's pockets. But we should do everything we reasonably can to put quality care within reach of as many people as possible.

The president said Obamacare would reduce unsubsidized, employer-based health-insurance premiums by $2,500 a year, and since 2008 the growth in premiums has slowed, but the average family premium still has risen $4,865, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. Deductibles and co-pays have been going up, too.

One of the cancer pills I take costs $1,000 a pop. The average cost of developing a new drug is now north of $1 billion, according to a report by Avik Roy of the Manhattan Institute. Total drug development time — about three years in 1960 — is around 15 years today.

The chief reason why it costs so much and takes so long to get a new drug to market is overregulation by the Food and Drug Administration. About 85 percent of the cost of developing a new drug is the cost of complying with FDA regulations. When in 1962 the FDA began testing drugs for efficacy as well as safety, development time and costs doubled virtually overnight and have been rising ever since.

The huge increase in cost isn't the worst consequence of FDA overregulation. Americans often are the last to benefit from new, life-saving medicines developed by American pharmaceutical companies.

The first steps to giving more Americans access to quality care are to repeal Obamacare and to make the FDA's opinions about drug efficacy (not safety) advisory only.

A third step is to provide a refundable tax credit for the purchase of health insurance. This would be enormously expensive. But we could offset the cost by slashing the $432 billion we spend on a Medicaid program riddled with waste, inefficiency and fraud.

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JWR contributor Jack Kelly, a former Marine and Green Beret, was a deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration.