Combined with the semi-evil precautionary principle in Europe, it is very important to keep this research alive.
So I'm very wary of changes in the current system that aren't centered around decreased regulation.
Increased spending on medicine usually corresponds to measures that wouldn't be taken in more nationalized systems. Late stage treatment of diseases and proceeding with risky births are two examples.
It's this kind of spending at the edges that matters a lot for where money and research time is spent.
My big fear with a change that isn't deregulation is to remove this incentive. The accounting is obviously difficult. How much value to you assign to a technology that increases life expectancy for a certain kind of disease? If you're comparing %GDP, surely an increased survival rate has a positive affect on GDP. How can you possibly account for that?
Numbers like the %GDP spent on medicine and life expectancy takes the aggregate information in a dynamic system of 300M nodes and reduces it down to two numbers that don't mean much for any given individual. For me personally, I'd like to see more research into predicting ailments, individual funding of research to fight ailments that are likely, and much more out of pocket spending on day to day treatment. Unfortunately, the national dialogue consists of many people who have no trouble paying for medical care debating how much of other people's money they should spend on the mythical set of the uninsured.