[Torie]

In the 50's, medical care was about births, aspirin, penicillin, and surgery, for a certain limited set of procedures. Folks died relatively young, without much muss or fuss, in general. Ten years before, strike the penicillin. My Dad's first wife just missed out, and therefore died from tuberculosis, over a slow sad period of ten years (ya some muss and fuss there).

[nopardons]

Good grief, you make the 1950s sound like the 1750s, for crying out loud and they weren't! And most, if not all union shops were giving FREE health care to the employees and had been since the late 1940s.

Folks died "relatively young"? In the 1950s? How young is "relatively young"........70? Or are you talking about people dying from illnesses that they can now be saved from, due to great strides in the medical profession, which has absolutely NOTHING whatsoever to do with health insurance?