American Innovation - For Export Only
by Mark Steyn • Jul 3, 2014 at 4:27 pm

The Toronto Star has one of those heartwarming miracle-operation hospital stories that newspapers run from time to time, whose meaning for American readers is something else entirely.

A 33-year-old Oklahoma man called Jon David Sacker (right) urgently needed a double-lung transplant after his body rejected the ones he'd received two years ago. So he went to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, but was too weak to undergo the operation.

The only possibility of saving him was something called the Hemolung Respiratory Assist System, which would stabilize his condition and buy time for the body to re-strengthen and for new lungs to be found.

There was no Hemolung RAS at UPMC, so they dialed around and found one at Novus Medical in Oakville, which is on Lake Ontario just south of Toronto. Murray Beaton of Novus agreed to loan the Hemolung to UPMC, and, given the urgency, offered to shorten the distance by driving down the Queen Elizabeth Way to meet the Pittsburgh guys in the wee small hours at a crossroads at Fort Erie, just across the Niagara River from Buffalo.

Now, if you're a patriotic American on the eve of Independence Day you're surely wondering: why the hell do we need to borrow state-of-the-art medical equipment from some cockamamie town in Canada no one's ever heard of?

But wait, it gets better: The Hemolung RAS was actually invented in Pittsburgh by a UPMC doctor and developed and sold by a Pittsburgh company founded by UPMC doctors. So why are there no Hemolungs in Pittsburgh? The Toronto Star explains:

Zitat

---

Hemolungs should have been an easy option. They are made in Pittsburgh by ALung Technologies. The hitch was that there were no devices available in the United States, since they were not approved for use there.

All of the Hemolungs made by ALung had been shipped either to Europe or Canada, where they have been government approved.

---

Ah. So an American invention is already being used to save lives in Canada and Switzerland and Belgium and Denmark and Germany ...but has not been approved for use in America.

That presented certain challenges with Homeland Security:

....................................

"That machine is a lifesaver," says the patient. Yes, it's American innovation saving lives everywhere else around the developed world - except America.

We have had a vigorous back and forth in Mark's Mailbox in recent weeks about declining innovation. In this case, American innovation is just fine, but the American regulatory regime is killing it......................

Much of American life seems to be seizing up, its lungs in as bad shape as Mr Sacker's, and with no Respiratory Assist System in sight. Powerline is currently examining both the administrative state and many so-called libertarians' indifference to rule by an unaccountable, permanent, hyper-regulatory bureaucracy. At the sharp end of this micro-tyranny, as I say above, "people die - non-stop". Under FDA rules, Mr Sacker is supposed to be dead. He is alive because Messrs DeComo, Bermudez, Crespo and others decided to assert their - what's the word? - independence.

More:
http://www.steynonline.com/6458/american...for-export-only