Just an observation.  When people in the UK start talking about the National Health Service as “The New Church of England,” as Timothy Garton Ash is quoted here as suggesting, they may be saying more than they realize.

First of all, in coming decades, healthcare will continue to occupy a larger and larger share of our financial resources (as societies, regardless of whether healthcare is publicly funded or privately funded—either way, the funding comes from members of society).  In 2018, the last year we have good data, healthcare expenditures in the US was at 17.7 percentage of GDP and growing.  (This is not unique to the US—all countries’ expenditures on healthcare are growing, and fast.)

What this tells us is that healthcare is an increasingly important part of government as a whole.  A friend who studies politics put it to me this way: after World War Two, the US needed lots of national security experts, and nuclear weapons scientists, and the like.  Those needs haven’t gone away, of course, but they’re less pressing now.  Now and in decades to come, the center of gravity of governmental service will increasingly come to center around providing healthcare, in the broadest possible sense of the term, to a nation’s population.  Government Will change from being a military industrial complex to a medical-biotechnological complex, or even more bluntly, from a military camp to a retirement home.  This is not just about needs; this is about what the populace will expect.

Why is this?  I think there are two reasons.  On the one hand, the fact of demographics mean that as the population ages, medical care becomes more important.  The population will continue to age, probably (we can hope) stabilizing somewhere in the 40s.  (As I think I’ve said before elsewhere, the fact that humanity is moving from a fundamentally young population to one that is fundamentally middle-aged is a very interesting development—a development not seen since the dawn of agriculture, ten to twelve thousand years ago.)

The second reason is the rise of biotech as a global industry.  This field strikes me as one of the fastest-growing, and perhaps most important, fields of research and development in the twenty-first century.  What physics did in the twentieth century (think of computers and robots), this field may do in the twenty-first.  There’s so much to say here that I don’t know where to start, so I’ll only say this: the kind of innovations and technologies developed will be primarily (though not exclusively) in the healthcare areas, I think.  

So we’re moving into an era that is going to be fundamentally different from the previous century’s experience.  It will have implications for culture and politics.  It should also have significant implications for religion.  Should be interesting.