Research : huge investment required. Very few patients (ie. voters) are clamoring for it. Very easy to cut as part of public policy. Treatment : not a huge cos

Research : huge investment required. Very few patients (ie. voters) are clamoring for it. Very easy to cut as part of public policy. Treatment : not a huge cost (esp. not per-patient), but has to be bourne a billion times over. Extremely expensive in total (far, far more than research, but ...). Even tiny cuts will result in massive protests (see Europe every few weeks since 2009 or so). Various interests with large amount of people want to see this cost going up : docters, medical personnel, patients. Getting public money to do healthcare will result in next to no research, and ever more, ever less effective treatment. This is not to say there won't be advancements, just really, really slow ones. Because nobody really sees the potential (or sees it as bad to some extent, e.g. medical personnel) nobody will even miss the research. Also, people kind of like that only universities do the research, but never, ever bring drugs to patients, and only very rarely do they bring treatments to patients. Getting private money to healthcare runs afoul of one of the basic axioms of the free market : choice and competition. In medicine there is, in quite a few cases, no choice (as illustrated above. Hep C infected ? You have 2 choices : $100k or $100k, or death of course). It doesn't seem, economically speaking, that you can do both.