[caper gal 1]

That's a straw argument. Recently I was cleaning out my mother's apartment and found a document which perfectly illustrates this. In 1968, just three short years after LBJ’s government got in the health care business, my father was attacked by and beaten severely with a tire iron. He spent a week in ICU and had surgery to remove portions of his skull, and a second surgery to put plates in to replace those portions.

He worked as a maintenance man at a manufacturing plant, and my mother was a nurse. The document is a claim they filed against his attacker to be reimbursed for the medical expenses they had paid. The total bill for ambulance, two hospitalizations, surgeries and drugs? $1,168.52. They paid it out of pocket. They didn’t have health insurance. They didn’t need it because health care at that point was still market based. Adjusted for inflation to current dollars that bill would still be only $7,155.13, far less than you can rack up today in less than an hour in your local ER.

[pieceofthepuzzle]

Yes, but back then all surgical instruments were sterilized and reused, as were surgical drapes etc. There weren’t advanced CT scanners and MRI scanners. The monitoring equipment in the emergency room and the ICU was not modern digital equipment, and there were many fewer drugs available. That’s just a start. But yes, there are also dramatic changes that are due to bureaucracy and lawyers, no doubt.