Torah's outlook on medicine, by today's standards, looks upside-down. Health care from Torah's perspective advocates a predominantly PREVENTIVE health care, not a NOW-FIX-IT health care.
Doctors should be paid for preventing sickness or disease. When people get sick - that's when doctors should be footing the bill!
Our society has it backwards and that's why society abounds with sickness, and that's why medical prices are skyrocketing. When you focus on treatment of sickness, then, because of high technology that's used, which continues to become more sophisticated, it always costs more. For example, the "Obamacare" solution is 97% about treating sickness. How pathetic!
Were the emphasis on preventive treatment, medical costs would plummet!
Torah is light. Torah is truth. The Torah way to practice preventive health is detailed in Maimonides (Hilchot Deah, chpt. 4). In rule 30, he goes so far as to offer his personal GUARANTEE that a person will remain healthy all his life and never require a doctor until the day he dies when one follows the Torah's way to maintain health. How can Maimonides guarantee it? Because he relies on Torah.
Were people to abide by Torah's laws, medical costs would be negligible, people would live longer, would hardly get ill, will take time to exercise, eat well, sleep well, and one's perspective would be positive and rosy.
By the way, during Moshiach's era, one of the very first phenomena to happen, when new winds will sweep evil from this earth, will be that illness will vanish from humanity. People will throw away their wheel chairs, their crutches, their medications, or whatever else ill health has burdened them with. How do we know this? In Hilchot Tshuvah, regarding the present era, the Rambam mentions health first, in his list of things Torah observance with joy can assure. On the other hand, in the last chapter of his book, in Hilchot Melachim, when he discusses what will transpire during the Messianic era, he makes no mention at all of becoming healthy, because it is a given.
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