“Spending too much on medicine” isn’t like spending too much on clothes or nice houses. If the consumer goods you buy are crummy and don’t improve your life yo

“Spending too much on medicine” isn’t like spending too much on clothes or nice houses. If the consumer goods you buy are crummy and don’t improve your life you can do without them, but we’re essentially unable to decide we can do without health. Demand for cures for our diseases is different than demand for other things, and that shows up both in the sorry economic structure of our (U.S.) health system, and here. If we had more medical treatments that worked, and a lab-to-hospital pipeline with a better track record, I suspect better scientific standards would follow naturally. But for now, raising the standards of evidence would essentially block off the invention of new treatments altogether, which simply isn’t an option even on a psychological level.