I have been using Julia extensively for about a year as a data analysis tool / R and Matlab replacement. I can say it is very good, especially well suited for exploring and processing large amounts of data. Often when you're trying to understand a set of data, you don't know what kinds of filters and transformations you're going to want to try. If those transformations end up not being easily vectorizable, then they will be dog slow to run in R or Matlab, and probably inconvenient and more difficult to create in C. For these situations, Julia is perfect.
There's actually a pretty fascinating branch of game theory devoted to these kinds of problems.
Differential game theory poses these situations as optimal control problems, with evaders and pursuers each having a separate control and opposite objective functions.
Yeah that's the scary thing. The actual cost is much higher. How much of this is inefficiency/"overcharging" is up for debate but it's pretty clear that since the bulk of the cost of healthcare for most people is paid by someone else, there's no incentive to economize.
Plus modern medicine is AMAZING, but the surrounding economy isn't strong enough to support it. People simply aren't productive enough to pay for the cost of the most advanced treatments.
Money will impossible to get out of politics as long as the government has massive power to regulate the economy. As long as congress can give subsidies and contracts to favored industries and firms (necessarily at the expense of less favored firms and industries, who have to compete in the market) and also increase taxes and regulations on disfavored industries (finance, oil), then businesses would be insane to not spend as much money as they need to paying off senators to make sure they don't get screwed.
Everyone who votes for politicians that promise to increase Washington's power needs to realize that they're also voting to increase the influence of money in politics.