Going Forward, On what it means to be ill

The recent ubiquity of the phrase going forward is difficult to explain. Examples: 

Will online soap operas become more the norm going forward?

If the government changes into one less respectful of human rights then we need to know what safeguards there will be going forward.

We can erase the final two words of such sentences without loss. That is why we have the future tense. What is strange is that there is no confusion displayed by the use of 'going forward', and it is not pretentious; no one feels puffed up, clever or cool by sticking it in.  Only a false sense of command, perhaps. 

The closest like phenomenon is the use of 'actual' or 'actually'.  It does some semantic work, contrasting a modal, hypothetical, or thought-to-be case with the actual case, as in:

Such an assailant would have had to be a fast runner; we know the actual assailant had only one leg.

It serves to signal that the scope of 'would' does not include the term that follows. There is also the case where it does not have, strictly speaking, a semantic function, but it has an analogous and quite excusable pragmatic function:

This equation holds where the bodies involved are situated on a friction-less plane. Of course, there are actually no such planes. 

But bombs are unbelievable until they actually fall.

She looks young, but she's actually 50.

It's not clear who actually pulled the trigger.

Strictly you could say the same thing by erasing 'actually', but it does serve as a useful indicator to the listener, that after musing on or being misled by other scenarios, the real case is thus and so.  It's related to prefacing what you say with 'Basically, ... ', 'Now, ...', or 'Listen, ...'. 

But one can easily get what Nick Zangwill once called the 'actually' bug, putting it in to one's sentences too liberally, to the point of its being an irritating nervous tic. As in: 

When the ball actually came to me, it was so easy to actually put it past the keeper. 

Or a headline in the Sun:

A Young Woman Refugee On What it’s Actually Like to Cross the Channel!

So is 'going forward' like this degenerate use of 'actually'?  It's tempting to think so.  But it is not, as is the case with 'actually', a case of peeling away from an established and valuable use. I've no solution. 

What it means to be ill

To be ill, to an one speaking U.S. English, is to have an infection, or more generally to have some disease.  Unlike the U.S. use, the British use of 'ill' also includes, for example, having a broken leg.  It covers almost any incapacity.

But not any.  If your arm is chopped off, you don't become ill-for-life.  If you're born with a disability, you're not thereby ill.  Yet it does not mean having something temporary either; if one contracts a incurable form of cancer one is still ill (even if the cancer merely dwells within you but makes no significant difference to your life or life-span).  

It seems to me that the U.S.-use is clearer.