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The problem is that insurance companies and governments stand between health care and consumers. So the incentives aren't as strong as other markets. Purely market-based health care, like eye lasic or breast implants, have seen remarkable improvements in safety and lower costs.

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Insurance companies and governments still have an interest in getting effective healthcare at a low price. There's plenty of incentive there.

LASIK is younger than I am, and new technologies tend to develop faster. Looking at the Wikipedia article on breast implants, the pace of development there doesn't seem remarkable: it says the latest generation date from the mid 1990s, and that seems to be mostly an incremental safety improvement. There have been more significant advances in non-consumer healthcare in that time, e.g. Radioimmunotherapy.

And again, cars: widespread consumer technology, lots of money in the industry, but mostly incremental improvements. Though Google's self-driving cars are interesting.

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