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?
Medical care is at once more efficacious since the glorious 1950's,and exponentially more expensive. At least by the 1950's medical care did more good than harm, which was once arguably not the case. My grandfather was a surgeon back in the dark ages. I used to talk with his wife, my grandmother, who lived to be 99 years of age, about his practice, often, when I drove from Chicago to Davenport, Iowa, to visit her while in college (along with her fascinating civil war stories that her parents shared with her; her father was in Sherman's march to the sea).
One little sidebar. My grandfather kept the founder of ciropractery out of the Outing Club in Davenport, with a "black ball." He considered him a dangerous quack, and a clear and present danger to the health of the citizens. Cheers.