> In a hypothetical country with sane health care and social safety net policies? Yes that would be hugely beneficial.

I think you're forgetting the Soviet Union, which looked great on paper until it turned out that it wasn't actually great...

Real GDP can go up, and it doesn't HAVE to mean you are producing more of anything valuable, and can - in fact - mean that you're not producing enough of what you need, and a bunch of what you don't need.

A very simple way to view this is: currently x% of GDP is waste. If Real GDP goes up 4% but the percentage of waste goes from 1% to 8% - you are clearly doing worse.

This is a reduction of what happened in the Soviet Union.