I wonder how much progress could be made if the DC crowd had decided to give the bailout moneies to the cancer and diabetes research efforts?

While wondering how much progress could have been made if the DC crowd had given the bailout moneies to cancer and diabetes research is a seemingly good question it is really part of the problem. You make it sound as if we had a couple of spare trillion dollars just laying around to be squandered.

And you won't need health care!

While printing trillions of dollars of un-backed currency will be an inflation disaster in a few years, if you're going to do it anyway (god help us), funding promising medical research would be much more useful than artificially propping up dis-functional and insolvent companies thereby preventing natural selection from taking its course.

Perhaps the administration is acting out of a sense of guilt because many of the recent bank failures are likely a result of congressional pressure to make foolish business decisions. Part of a futile effort to engineer a socialist utopia, which flies in the face of all true free-market principles, and sabotages the very system that made this the most economically successful nation the world has ever seen in just 200 years (a blink of an eye, historically).

Nevertheless, spending some money on private medical R&D thereby lowering the cost of development makes a ton more sense than throwing it into the Socialist Healthcare pit to be burned.