First off, the US healthcare market wasn't a free market in 1968. State licensing boards regulated the supply of doctors and as Milton Friedman argued in his bo

First off, the US healthcare market wasn't a free market in 1968. State licensing boards regulated the supply of doctors and as Milton Friedman argued in his book "Free to Choose", powerful interest groups used the US court system to impose massive costs on unlicensed healthcare practitioners; "The AMA has engaged in extensive litigation charging chiropractors and osteopathic physicians with the unlicensed practice of medicine, in an attempt to restrict them to as narrow an area as possible." [0]. So no, even before Medicare and Medicaid, there wasn't a free market for healthcare in the US. Still, in that time, there was much less government involvement in healthcare and the stats show significant improvement after the implementation of the SSA of 1965 Act. Infant mortality fell from over 2.5% in the early 1960s to just over half a percent now [1], with the decrease accelerating in the late 1960's before tapering in the 1980's. Life expectancy also jolted upward in the late 1960's [1]. Healthcare has increased in cost significantly since the time before Medicare and Medicaid, when the treatment for a heart attack was to lay in a hospital bed and wait to die, whereas now, we have much better treatments that can add decades on to people's lives. [2] And regarding the pandemic hypothesis, there's so much evidence to support my claims. If vaccine shots hadn't been made free to individuals, uptake would have been far slower and life would be far worse as the death rate would be much higher than the (still horrifying) ~500 people per day. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Medical_Association#Criticism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Medical_Association... [1] https://datacommons.org/place/country/USA?category=Health#Infant-mortality-rate https://datacommons.org/place/country/USA?category=Health#In... [2] https://www.politifact.com/article/2012/jan/20/was-early-1960s-golden-age-health-care/ https://www.politifact.com/article/2012/jan/20/was-early-196...