America has been on the dark path where lives are equated to money for a long time now. It will take something quite dramatic to shock the system to the point where people are willing to re-think it from the ground up. Maybe this is that shock. If not now, then probably never.

Except that quality-adjusted life expectancy changes due to side effects of drugs are valued much more higher than people dying due to being too broke to get any non-ER-care for acute, but not yet emergency-posing illnesses. Even within the drug certification process there is an issue with relatively niche drugs wasting a lot on overly-extensive studies, if you calculate how many people would get how much benefit from getting/affording these niche drugs. IIRC there is about an order of magnitude higher weight on side-effect deaths compared to lack-of-medicine deaths for niche drugs.

to be fair, you can adopt europe/wuhan-style total lockdown but you could also adopt developed-asia-style mass tracing.

The latter seems to have been way more effective in containing the epidemic and less impactful on the economy.

So, there was third option which saves both people and economy, but it's probably politically unfeasible.

It's too early to evaluate the tracing approach. The problem is what happens when other people come in from the outside. This is now a major problem in Beijing; not internal transmission but cases brought by arrivals.