>>>Billions of dollars spent worldwide on health-care planning, and it's "through a glass darkly"? Seriously?
>
>Absolutely. Example: what does it cost to treat cancer. Bearing in mind that you *want* new treatments to appear that knock your planning back to square 1.

Millions of people have died from cancer. I'd like to think the cost of treating it (successfully or not) is reasonably well known. Yes, there are huge variations from case to case but over large populations you get statistically meaningful answers. If you're trying to tell me cancer treatment hasn't been analyzed in exactly this fashion, then that's disgraceful.

Again using cancer as an example, yes, it would be ideal to come up with new approaches that make major gains. But history has shown that's not the case. Progress has been incremental despite there always being major breakthroughs "just around the corner". Incremental improvement and attendant costs can be statistically analyzed and extrapolated. If you say not, why not?