the elephant in the room for healthcare is and always has been that the majority of healthcare is bullshit. or, in more technical terms, has no effect on health outcomes.
Even assuming what you say is true, that "minority" of non-bullshit healthcare is very important.
Chemotherapy is a crude and harmful way to eliminate cancer, but I know several people alive today because of it.
Without insulin injections, mortality of type one, childhood-onset diabetes would be dramatically higher.
Viagra.
Vaccines for numerous diseases are still incredibly effective and one of the most successful innovations of the 20th century.
And innovations continue. Fifteen years ago, a patient diagnosed with Macular Degeneration would be told eventual blindness was certain and the possibility of ever finding a cure was very low. Google macular degeneration stem cells to see how that has changed.
Yes, there's a lot of healthcare focused on controlling risk factors like high cholesterol and we don't really know how much that's helping, but I'm not sure I'd marginalize everything else by calling it an "elephant in the room."
Life expectancy is going up due to a variety of factors: better trauma care, better vaccination regimes, better sanitation, better nutrition, some better treatments (some amazingly so).
Nevertheless, a large fraction of medical screens and procedures does not improve average life expectancy when people actually try to measure their impact. Intensive end-of-life care does not improve life expectancy when similarly measured.
not just life expectancy in toto which you would rightly expect to have a huge number of variables that interact in unknown ways. many medical procedures have proven to be directly detrimental to health in double blind studies yet remain standard procedure.
Chemotherapy is a crude and harmful way to eliminate cancer, but I know several people alive today because of it.
Without insulin injections, mortality of type one, childhood-onset diabetes would be dramatically higher.
Viagra.
Vaccines for numerous diseases are still incredibly effective and one of the most successful innovations of the 20th century.
And innovations continue. Fifteen years ago, a patient diagnosed with Macular Degeneration would be told eventual blindness was certain and the possibility of ever finding a cure was very low. Google macular degeneration stem cells to see how that has changed.
Yes, there's a lot of healthcare focused on controlling risk factors like high cholesterol and we don't really know how much that's helping, but I'm not sure I'd marginalize everything else by calling it an "elephant in the room."