Medical care and health care aren't actually the same thing. And the problem is that actually improving health for humans tends to be relatively cheap and culturally based. It is pretty much not a big money space. It involves things like inventing soap and getting people to wash their hands. And this is a thing most people do not want to hear.
Better drugs and better surgeries are all ooh, shiny! but they really are not optimal. The optimal approach is boring and hard to even see. People who fail to get sick are incredibly hard to measure. Heroic interventions after the fact are far easier to measure and make for more interesting press. They also can be charged big bucks.
Good summary. Especially the healthy people being hard to measure. Never heard anyone put it that way before. Now that I think of it, it's usually easier to tie data points to specific illnesses than to a lack of them. I have a feeling I'll be wondering about this in the future.
Quick guess is that healthy relies on emergent behavior of locally interacting cells. Lots and lots and lots of complex behavior with few observable inputs and outputs into the body. The inputs might not have a direct correlation to healthiness. We'd have to have a model of all those processes before we'd see evidence of healthiness in the data points.
Better drugs and better surgeries are all ooh, shiny! but they really are not optimal. The optimal approach is boring and hard to even see. People who fail to get sick are incredibly hard to measure. Heroic interventions after the fact are far easier to measure and make for more interesting press. They also can be charged big bucks.
The whole thing kind of sucks, frankly.