When I was a kid, my mother could call the local doctor and he would COME TO OUR HOUSE and treat us (an unbelievable concept in America now), and he would charge us $10 for that service. Everyone I knew was about as poor as we were, but I cannot once remember hearing someone say "Oh my God, what will we do about the medical bills?". The mess that the American health care system is in now is another creation of our government - but again, that is a long argument that exceeds greatly the bounds of this thread.
Indeed, it was the creation of a government who traditionally considered health care not to be its concern, and therefore left it entirely to private enterprise. As it always happens, left to its "self-regulation" the health care market degenerated into an oligopoly, whose only concern is to maximize the revenue of their owners; who that maintains their dominance of the market by buying out the government.This statement shows an utter ignorance of the evolution of the current health care issues in the US. Anyone can research this and see that the situation was going pretty damn well until the government decided to dive in to the health care market head first with Medicare. I was a just a kid when Medicare became law, and the effect on health care costs was apparent pretty quickly thereafter, and has never let up since.
There were no old people dying in the streets of America before Medicare, btw.