>>Lets look at our teacher in 1955.
>>The first cardiac bypass surgery was performed in 1960.
>>The MRI didn't exist.
>>I could go on.
>>They extend life, for sure, and reduce life insurance premiums but that life extension runs up some hefty medical bills that my teacher's insurers couldn't possibly had set aside funding for.
>>In fact, pay as you go is really the only practical way to fund health insurance.
>>Basically you divide the total payout by the number of participants and that's next year's premium.
>>If you were lucky enough to dodge an illness, you paid for the guy who got the quadruple bypass.
>>Blaming my teacher doesn't make sense.

Yes, that's the recipe for a $47T deficit.

Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accident_Compensation_Corporation

It's a no-fault scheme covering consequences of accident or misadventure in New Zealand. It covers almost all of your resulting healthcare costs, income coverage for as long as you can't work- potentially decades- counseling and now consequences of sexual violence. However, the vast majority (over 90%) of its expense is medical treatment costs. The scheme has had various stops and starts, including a brief change from underwritten to PAYG (pay as you go) in the '80s and involvement of the exciting private insurance market in the '90s, both of which were overturned in the early 2000s when a centrally administered underwritten scheme was restored. Premiums did need to be increased at the start to work towards a self-sustaining model, supported by prevention strategies, anti-fraud measures and incentives/reduced costs for employers with strong safety records. But premiums are static or reducing now- I think for 2017 we paid employer's premium at about $200 per annum per $100K salary. IOW $17 per month. Anecdotally, that might be $400 in a PAYG scheme, rising steadily until payers are squeezed dry when the deficits and Ponzi behaviors take over. Instead it's cheap because there are enough reserves to cover predictable future costs, despite the fact that almost all the cost is medical treatment you say can't be predicted, and nor can you predict what accidents may occur in future. And yet it moves, as Galileo once said. ;-)

Also worth looking at the Australian Superannuation scheme, to deliver decent pensions for Aussies. At the start there were all the usual "government is bad at managing money, people can make better investment decisions for themselves, can't predict the future" etc etc but most recently the scheme's contribution was increased to 12% of income. Not even the most rabid free marketeer opposes the scheme now, because it's a success with wide support. The point is that you don't know what you don't know, until you try.