Excuse me? What money? The government does not generate net positive economic benefit, and therefore has no [real] money. You might be confused and talking about "taxpayer money" — but then why bother with the gov't at all, why not just say your plan amounts to "we should increase healthcare costs so we're, you know, throwing more money at the problem".
If you look at the Federal budget it's clear that the Federal Government, beyond national defense, is simply becoming a giant healthcare and pension fund administrator, re-distributing wealth via social security, medicaid, and medicare. All other expenses are dwarfed by these. I'd expect this trend to continue until the singularity occurs and we enter our long-awaited post-capitalist utopia.
Furthermore, there's an enormous information asymmetry in healthcare, so it's hard for it to function as a market.
Because we already have "free" healthcare in the form of emergency rooms, this is ultimately a conversation about how to best allocate health spending. Emergency care is the absolute most expensive form of non end of life care, so we should focus on minimizing that send. There's a well known path for doing so, regular check ups, vaccinations, preventative care, and chronic disease management. All of which cost money now, but reduce future expenditure. And if we already pay for sick broke people in the emergency room, why not optimize the expenditure of those tax dollars by shifting it to more effective health interventions?
You yourself admit that end of life care is incredibly expensive. Why are we pushing people to live longer, when it incurs a much much greater cost to keep people alive? Why not just let them die young?
In part, this is a huge reason (the other reason is pregnancy cost) why pre-ACA healthcare prices were much much cheaper for <30 men than women - most things that seriously hurt men under 30 just completely off them, and dead boys don't incur major medical cost.
I don't know about your characterization that "Basically all research..."
Healthcare is different because consumers often don't know what anything ought to cost, rarely in a position to shop around, and will never be able to afford some big ticket items without insurance regardless.
And the economic consequences are non-obvious. For example, many conditions are much cheaper to treat if caught early; if access to a doctor has an inconvenient cost attached, overall costs go up. The ability to see a doctor for cheap – ideally free – is the most effective way to lower the risk of expensive procedures in the future.
But if I get pregnant or cancer, I have no choice - I have to get treatment or die.
I've been through chemo and radiation once, if I ever am told I need to do it again, to scrape and cling to another few months of life, I'm going to laugh in their faces, put my affairs in order, go on a hell of a vacation, and Old Yeller myself.
If it happens, it'll be interesting to see how my resolve holds up as I stare into the face of mortality.
The real behind-the-scenes debate in DC this month is about, first, the best mechanism to transfer funds (direct subsidies, state subsidies, Federal reinsurance pool for the sickest cases, etc ... each of which create distinct winners and losers whose lobbyists are currently out in force), and second, how much of an annual budget deficit the fiscal-hawk Republicans (now led by Rand Paul) are willing to tolerate.
The longer-term solutions have much more to do with diet, lifestyle management, and other behavioral health issues than with access to providers and drugs (e.g. look up how much of last year's medicaid/medicare budget was spent on type 2 diabetes treatment alone). Unfortunately it doesn't seem like we can tackle these issues at scale until after the current debate on affordable universal access to care is settled.