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You are overlooking a few minor details.
Of course technology has been a boom for us. Productivity has risen to an all time high. It will continue.
You are forgetting that we all pre-pay our medical costs in our retirement years already. it is a vicious cycle. On one hand we want lower drug prices. However, R&D is not cheap. If we don't allow companies to make a reasonable profit, where is the incentive to pay for R&D? I invest in quite a few Drug companies, believe me if they just greedy as so often portrayed, I would make a lot more money from their profitability.
Social systems are not funded by technology, but with cash.

Mitigation? =Tort reform, I am with you on that one.

Ther is one way to decrease medical costs. Mandate that every one has to have medical coverage. One thing that would do is lower premiums, since we would have the young, healthy individuals come into the pool and equalize our risk factors in medical coverage. At the present, a system that is totally out of balance since the young, healthy people refuse coverage and then blame the government for the lack of it.
Let them live in Europe where they are made to apy a percentage of their income as premiums. Contrary to leftist belief, there is no free health care anywhere on the globe.

As I've said repeatedly the problem is more cultural and political than economic.

Yes, R&D costs plenty of money but even without new drugs we can do much better than we do now by adopting changes such as you suggest...or others similar.

But can we or anyone else muster the will to make the changes? Can we even agree on what they should be?

Currently we believe that our system is the best and that proves that democratic capitalism is superior to socialism or communism. But democratic capitalism failed many times in the past. It took special conditions to establish our system and no one knows how durable it will be. Historically, aristocratic, slave-holiding tyrannies have been the most durable because they best reflected innate human differences. Does that apply today? Who knows...and who knows what will best accomodate future conditions?