"Why are we worried about having 100s of different types of each food, when we have people dying from health care shortfalls?"

Because once again you’re measuring the wrong things. If all one is worried about is how long someone lives, then there is no end to "how much we should spend to increase life expectancy".

“We don’t care about having tons of differnt brands of tomatoes, we care about having a better quality of life”

But having tons of different types of tomatoes (tomatoes being anything, really) could very well be a way we measure quality of life.

You are so wrapped up in the healthcare debate because it deals directly with simplistic things like “how long someone lives” you appear to be blind to what makes life worth living. Life expectancy is an easy metric. Digestible, repeatable, people who cant even read understand it, so that is the focus of the debate. At which point we could opt for putting every near death person on full blown life support “forever” to increase this number and call it a win. But obviously that isn’t what you are advocating for either.