…Ronald Reagan was elected president.

And its probably not a coincidence that it was also about that time that real salaries, corrected for inflation, stopped increasing and began the decline which has persisted to this day. It is also the time when the current “wealth gap” that is characteristic of today’s economic landscape began to really take off. As the society became more productive and wealthy, the benefits of that prosperity were hijacked and diverted to the upper income brackets and systematically denied to those who were actually doing the work.

The deterioration of our medical system is not coincidentally correlated with the overall economy and wealth distribution, it is caused by it.