I think this is why the skyrocketing costs of healthcare in the US are so upsetting to me. Its sucking away the hope by putting so many of these technological miracles out of reach.
The high Healthcare costs in the US are caused mostly by high physician salaries though, and that's probably highly correlated with why they are able to make all these breakthroughs
Last I checked, physician pay represents a fairly small (single digit) fraction of healthcare expenditure. If I recall right, administrative overhead and insurance is significantly more of a contributor to pricing.
Do you have a source for that? Physician salaries do not account for all that large of a portion of healthcare spending. A $300,000/year doc performs a lot of procedures annually, and the amortized amount isn't huge compared to other costs.