I could fill pages with how I think the military has dumped money into the wrong areas over the past decades, and not enough into the right ones.

The problem has been that decisions are made as much out of political considerations as they are out of real needs. A shiny new weapons system that brings billions of dollars and jobs to a congressional district looks a lot better on a Congressman's resume than, say, a pay raise for soldiers that is distributed invisibly over everyone's district. Systems with powerful political backers are almost unkillable.

This is true for almost every major government project. I could fill even more pages with examples from the space program. There's a NASA-industrial complex, too.

As an aside: People get starry-eyed over having the government take over our medical system. Does anyone think that suddenly the giant medical corporations are going to evaporate? That decisions won't be made out of politics, and that lobbying will just go away?

It's okay to worry about profit being too high of a motivator in health care, but it won't improve anything to centralize the greed for money and power into one giant organization.