And that is an abomination.

We as a society decide we need fighter pilots, so we spend millions on their education. We decide we need law enforcement of every stripe, so we pay for thier training. We do this because, the argument goes, they contribute to public safety.

I would argue that the average cop and soldier saves fewer lives in their career than an ER doc does in a week. If we're willing to field armies of men with uniforms and guns to preserve life, why are we not willing to do the same for men with stethescopes and lab coats, when Hippocrates gives us such a better bang for our buck than Leonidas does?

When you are a physician holding actual lives in your hands, I think it's insane that we make you consider mundane bookkeeping while you're doing it. Anyone willing to wade into a storm of blood, screams and excrement to try to pull a life out of it shouldn't have to spend a minute of their lives thinking about how to pay their bills. The second you're willing to saw a human head in half in Gross Anatomy, OK, you're good. You've met your end of the social contract. We should take excellent care of you.

I don't think for one second you're overpaid. I think you're overworked, getting molested by insurance companies and undervalued. I want to get you help and support.

You got my vote.

...more and more lucrative "vanity" drugs, and fewer and fewer drugs for anything else.

Funny how that works out.

Come talk to me when the parents of autism and other children's diseases aren't being forced to hold bake sales for even the most cursory of research.

Oh, I absolutely agree with you there.

Do I remember the Reagan years? You mean Alexander "I'm in Charge" Haig and James "The Environment Doesn't Matter Because of the Rapture" Watt? You mean Ronald "We're Launching the Missies in Five Minutes" Reagan, the guy who once raised taxes on the rich?

Reaganomics worked great at inflating the debt and increasing poverty. Morning in America turned out to be overcast and hazy. You can draw a straight line from that infernal speech, go through the point at Gordon Gecko's "Greed is Good" speech, and draw it right through the ruins of New Orleans and Detroit. You can look at the other side and continue the line back through Nixon and Watergate and back through Eisenhower's farewell address, where he tried to warn us about this.

The only thing sadder than the Right's attempt at revisionist history and canonizing Reagan was their attempt to whitewash Nixon.

And who do you think gets killed and stolen from? The strong? Conan the Barbarian doesn't need a strong police presence.

Again, who's in danger of starving? Oh, that's right, Oliver Twist and his little buddies.

And as Oliver Wendall Holmes observed more than once, the people who most need their rights are the people least able to assert them on their own.

So, we shouldn't be worried about caring for the weak, until we've finished caring for the weak? OK, got it.

OK, "my likes" are ice cream and romantic evenings. If you mean "the likes of me" because I'm arguing we should aid and defend the poor and sick, then I stand in such good company that I blush to be seen with them.

And "other countries?" You mean like Japan, Canada and Sweden? Please, by all means, send me to some more of those hellscapes.

But I'm afraid Team Reaper's been making a bit of a rally of late.

The advances you cite:

washing hands before surgery -- Joseph Lister, 1867
vaccinations -- Edward Jenner, 1796
antibiotics -- Alexander Fleming, 1928

Are from a while back, and I've had time to rally.

The US the highest infant mortality of any civilized nation. Fewer babies die in Croatia than the US. Tuberculosis is once again a major concern in American cities. Drug-resistant strains are becoming a real problem, and the doctors in charge are screaming panicky warnings that we may be approaching the end of the Age of Antibiotics. Life expectancies in the US are actually declining, mostly due to heart disease, diabetes and cancer from the industrialized crap we call food. We're eating beef rinsed in ammonia, product that is literally called "pink slime."

Sarah Palin and Megyn Kelly are actually convincing most Americans that healthcare is a frivolous luxury. I love those two!

Sad to say, Mortality Inc. looks like an "BUY" for the forseeable future.

"Enlightened self interest" is one of the best jokes I've ever heard.

That, and since this is Slashdot after all, the basis of Sith philosophy...

Yeah, except that not even Laffer agrees with that any more. He's been backpedaling furiously from a bad theory made 30 years ago that's been empirically, wondrously disproven over the past ten. Abondoning his little napkin sketch was the only way he could retain a shred of academic credibility.

Sure, sure, sure, just answer me this.

Why do we give federal subsidies to Harvard Medical School?

Because they threaten to train more doctors if we don't. We grant them a federal subsidy to restrict admission because the American Medical Association says that too many doctors in the field will lead to a lower standard of living for doctors.

And it's not just Harvard. Every medical school is granted subsidies to restrict enrollment.

Hmm. Seems odd, doesn't it? We can't find enough resources to meet America's medical needs in much the same way that companies can't find enough American engineers to fill all the jobs.

But let's assume those nonsense numbers are true. Let's try this. How about we divert all of the resources from the current War on Drugs and War on Terrorism and redirect those trillions of dollars to a War on Illness? Surely we can agree that a few more Harvard-educated medical doctors would do more good then a few thousand more TSA agents.

How about we find all the kids bright enough to become doctors and sponsor them through medical school? How about we devote research dollars to more than just making sure rich guys can screw their trophy wives?

How about we agree with all the drugs companies that government is wasteful and inefficient, and that we welcome their competition when we start opening drug factories they same way we open utility companies. How about when they start whining about horrendous research costs, we tell them we couldn't agree more, which is why we're going to ask them to pay back all the money we gifted to them over the past six decades.

How about we take Manhattan and Apollo project resources for the next 20 years and apply them to healthcare? Then let's see if your nonsense about "We can't afford to take care of our own" falls apart into the same pile of bull that the Laffer Curve and Supply-Side economics did.

OK, you're arguing that we need to do some form of triage because we don't have resources to go around.

I don't believe this is true. When Merck Pharmaceutical tells you it's going to cost tens of millions, you should think of that in the same way you hear cops talk about the street value of the drugs they've seized. It's a self-serving, nonsense number. The same companies that scream "It's horribly expensive to make!" scream "It's not fair to make us compete against the government!" when we threaten to make it for ourselves. Since this is Slashdot, compare the situation to when various municipalities have tried to set up their own ISP. The same telcos that scream they have to charge billions to serve a city suddenly begin screaming that it's not fair for us to find alternatives. I promise you, we'll find we can manufacture this drug for a sliver of what the drug company is claiming.

BUT, BUT, BUT RESEARCH COSTS! I hear you scream. In case you haven't been paying attention, research in this country is done with recycled tax dollars. We The People have already paid the research costs, and if Merck and GalaxoSmithKline want to argue that, then all they have to do is stop taking Federal dollars.

They won't, of course.

Secondly, you're arguing that it's immoral to take money by force from one person to pay for something for another.

You know, I kind of like this argument. I'd love to make sure not one more penny of mine went to finance Gitmo. But, OK, Death and Taxes. We set up governments, and we pay for them by taxes of some kind. You actually are free to opt out of paying these taxes if you wish. If you don't feel like paying taxes any more, all you have to do is leave, and then tell a representative of the US government that you are no longer interested in being part of the United States. It's easy. Of course, you'll find very shortly that it's cheaper to pay taxes than it is not to pay taxes, but maybe to can join all the other John Galts on that floating ocean platform they're trying to build -- you know the one that's not going to have any building codes, the one we're going to nickname "Rapture" when it finds the bottom of the ocean.

Finally, you're arguing we can't fix everything. Maybe not.
But we can fix orders of magnitude more than we currently are.