Why is medical progress so glacially slow?

[stauffenberg]

If you want an illustration of why the pace of medical progress is so ludicrously slow, just look at the billion-dollar cost of the stealth bomber that crashed today.  A billion dollars is the total amount that the major research organization for a cure for type 1 diabetes, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, has spent on finding a cure for that disease during the last thirty years!  Any country that divides its resources so that a single military plane costs as much as thirty years' effort to cure diabetes -- at a time when that country already has a military budget greater than the rest of the world combined, but faces enormous suffering and death from diabetes which it is helpless to address -- just doesn't have a realistic idea of the importance of curing disease.

[Bill Peckham]

There are many problems with the US healthcare system but creating innovation is not the problem. Where would medicine be if there was no US? In fact one worry I have about the healthcare reform that is often offered is that it would shut down the current innovation engine - profits - without replacing it. To understand how payment for services impacts innovation look no further than the US dialysis system. Innovation is not rewarded. The reimbursement system rewards economic efficiencies - getting the same results for a bit less money.

National healthcare stifles improved outcomes. Why is there a dialysis weekend in countries with national healthcare?

The calculus that lead to the stealth bomber is a different calculus than the one that leads to healthcare. It turns out we can afford both but  both must be designed to work. At least the stealth has a well thought out design, if not a well thought out mission. US healthcare has a good mission, but no design.