gloria.p wrote:
> Sidney Lambe wrote:
>
>> I look at the real world and I remember what it was like when I
>> was a kid in the 1950's. Healthy old people all over the place
>> who died comfortably in their sleep after playing with their
>> great-grandchildren all day long.
>
> I didn't know any of those. WHen I was a kid in the 50s not many
> of my classmates had grandparents who were still alive.

I was a kid in the 1960s. I remember one of my great grandmothers and I
remember the funerals of two of them. There were a lot of grandparents
around playing with their kids. I'm lucky that both of my parents are
still alive and they spend plenty of time with their great gandchildren.

> Because most people just died without a diagnosis. Lots of deaths
> were blamed on things like "probably heart attack" or "shock" (AKA stroke).
....
>> People who only went to the doctor once every 5 years and almost no one had
>> health insurance.
>
> The doctors didn't have sophisticated testing or medications to cure
> many of the illnesses anyway, and w/o health insurance people didn't
> think they'd get their $10-15 worth of care so why bother?

I wonder how much of the increase in US health care costs is from so
much care moving from impossible so not tried to possible so given
vast funding. And how much is is from an overall system that pays more
for more service.