Much is spent every year on drugs (and research for drugs) that deliver medicine directly to certain parts of the alimentary tract. For instance - some drugs for the relatively common Crohn's disease and Ulcerative Colitis (both which can affect the small and large bowel), travel through the digestive system in order to deliver their payloads to the diseased areas topically. It seems to me that such a device could not only be used as a diagnostic tool, but could also be used to deliver meds directly in such cases. Just a thought.

But democracies plan years into the future all the time. We're debating Medicare changes because of a supposed issue 15 years down the road. Now, we might change our plans, but hey, what good is democracy if you can't change your mind?

You might mean that we aren't planning hundreds of years into the future. That's true. But we don't need to plan hundreds of years into the future. If we wanted to build a cathedral, we could do it in a year.

In fact, there really isn't anything we can plan hundreds of years for. We can't really make economic plans for more than a decade or two in advance, even for entitlement programs that don't kick in until a certain age--and we know how people we'll have reaching that age in each year! These days, there are very few places where planning so far in advance is an advantage.