Historically, medical care was something that a working person could afford. Something (or many things) have changed in the last century to the point that the average working class person can't afford to pay for any of it out of his own pocket...
Mind you, the state of medical care today is in many ways so much more sophisticated than it was in 1907. Practically all pharmaceuticals worthy of being called medicine have been invented since then. Antibiotics, antivirals, most anaesthesia, psychotherapeutics, insulin, blood clotting agents, blood thinning agents, heart medications, you name it.
And not just the drugs themselves. Surgical techniques have improved greatly. A surgeon from 1907 might manage to sew up nearly any wound that didn't kill you before he could attend, but now it's possible to remove an appendix and to even transplant organs. Tumors that were inoperable in that time can now be excised.
We have modern medical imaging, which itself is light years ahead of the crude x-ray images that were possible then.
And, lastly, but in no way least, trauma and critical care themselves have become full-fledged sciences in this period of time. I'm not sure any primitive equivalent even existed 100 years ago.
If one were to just appreciate how truly awesome these developments are (and read that with the real meaning of the word, and not the lame 80s slang), it'd be easy to think that these changes are responsible, if not in whole then in part, for the dramatic increases in cost. Someone in 1907 could afford medical care, one assumes, while we cannot, because they would have died while surgeons and other medical workers peer inside our very bodies with million dollar MRI machines and perform amazing feats of life-saving in million dollar surgery rooms.
But is this really the case? What sorts of medical care to we need, and what goes into these procedures? It seems to me that both the left and the right have it wrong. One claims that the costs are so exorbitant that only government can pay them for all, nevermind why they're so high in the first place or whether this should be normal. The other believes that malpractice insurance and liability somehow "trickles down" to the patient. Both supposed explanations seem flawed, both proposed solutions seem capable of causing even more harm. Can anyone guarantee that it won't be another case of of $1000 Pentagon hammers, or that shielded from malpractice liability that the few quack doctors won't run rampant causing harm and not being held accountable?
And yet, things can't continue as they are, either. Certainly not with all the costs trending ever upward.
What sort of medical care do most people need? Am I wrong in assuming that the majority of people need routine health care, checkups and doctor's visits for minor injuries or illness?
What percentage need any sort of heroic or complex care? In my mind, the first example that comes up is organ transplants, or hospital stays for extreme trauma and injury, but certainly there are many others.
Are there classes of care that truly fall between the two? Chemotherapy for instance... it hardly seems routine either in the strict sense of that word, or in my more general sense of a procedure that is minor and doesn't require the care of more than one or two medical workers.
There are those that might argue that routine health care isn't that big of a deal, that we need universal health care for those catastrophic illnesses or injuries. Is this true, in whole or in part? Certainly it can't be more than partially true... routine health care would prevent at least some of the catastrophic illnesses in the long term, and my gut feeling is that for those in poverty, routine care is the bigger issue.