Well, prior to Nixon, US healthcare was decentralized, and absent taxation (in the form of mandates to provide employee insurance) US healthcare was the best in the world, and least expensive. Both those metrics have worsened progressively as increasing mandatory benefits decreased free market incentive to keep prices down and provide better services. At the time many NGOs (such as religious organizations) provided assistance to folks unable to afford medical treatment on their own. This is why today many hospitals still bear names associated with churches and religious orders, even though such religious organizations often no longer are involved, private corporations having purchased the facilities.

Today AI, CRISPR, robotics, and other technological advances are concatenating to enable individuals to tailor nutrition and lifestyle control to their personal requirements, diagnose illness, and produce their own pharmaceutical and treatment regimens to cure or treat themselves. People dependent on government mandated nutritional information on food provided by Big Agra are hopelessly misinformed, poisoned, and then funneled into the Big Pharma profit center.

It is becoming rapidly less useful to seek treatment by institutional walled gardens of specialists controlled and parasitized by corporations, and horrible food quality is the cause of ~50% of epidemic diseases like obesity, cardiovascular illness, and type 2 diabetes, in the west today. Increasingly failing to undertake to ensure your own health is tantamount to suicide.

It is notable that medical malpractice and errors are ~the third leading cause of death in the West today. Little is potentially more profitable for individuals to undertake than avoiding that murderous industry.