In the days before Medicare and Medicaid, for instance, the poor and elderly were admitted to hospitals at about the same rate they are now, and received good care. As a physician I never accepted Medicare or Medicaid money from the government, and instead offered cut-rate or free services to those who could not afford care. Before those programs came into existence, every physician understood that he or she had a responsibility toward the less fortunate, and free medical care for the poor was the norm. Hardly anyone is aware of this today, since it doesn't fit into the typical by-the-script story of government rescuing us from a predatory private sector. Laws and regulations that inflated the cost of medical services and imposed unreasonable liability standards on medical professionals even when they were acting in a volunteer capacity later made offering free care cost prohibitive, but free care for the poor was common at a time when American wasn't so "governmentish" (to borrow a word from William Penn). We have lost our belief that freedom works, because we no longer have the imagination to conceive of how a free people might solve its problems without introducing threats of violence- which is what government solutions ultimately amount to.
