I think it's easy to miss the forest for the trees. There are billions of problems with the American system, but if you take a step back you see that, as a whole, it works pretty well -- especially in comparison to the rest of the world.

Consider science funding, for instance. Despite the neanderthals on the house committee, US funding is still comparatively extremely generous on a per-capita basis:

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone...