This may be an unpopular opinion, but new medications for difficult to treat diseases do raise the quality of life for those populations, despite being incredibly expensive. I'm certainly not saying they shouldn't be less expensive, mind you. :)
The overwhelming evidence is that 1) this is not the case and 2) that it's been improvements to access rather than intensity of medical care that have had the biggest impacts.
This is a major component of Robert J. Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth. Effectively, medical progress in the U.S. halted roughly in the 1960s and 1970s, with a very small number of exceptions.
If you go back to the bigger picture, virtually all improvements in healthcare outcomes were made prior to 1920, and those largely constituted public health, sanitation, and nutritional improvements. Laurie Garrett attributes 85% of the improvements in lifespan to public health, rather than acute medical treatments.
Improved pre-natal, natal, and childhood circumstances (medical, nutrition, nurturing, nutrition, and safety), overall safety improvements, environmental regulation, and reductions in high-risk behaviours (smoking, drinking, indiscriminate and unprotected sex, injected drugs) have all had major impacts.
Joel Mokyr notes that the truly effective medical advances are tremendously underreported in GDP statistics as the measurement basis is cost rather than benefit.
Sorry, but this turns out to be a tremendous and highly-repeated canard.
I agree with your point, but are you also implying that 'new medications for difficult to treat diseases' are a primary driver of 'ballooning healthcare costs'? I don't think healthcare costs are increasing as quickly in other developed countries while they do benefit from constant medical advances.
Which "developed" (hopefully we can develop some more) country is creating these medical advances? One might guess the US, but I don't really know. Any good studies I could read?
Well, if we are talking about recent great medical advances, i think Spain and France are leading right now with the discovery of CRISPR.
And i'm pretty happy about this, if it were discovered by an american pharmaceutical company, no other laboratory would have even heard of this before a patented product hit the market, and every research on the subject would be subject to a patent too.
