Does universal health care come in waves

Factual Questions
1

Or am I just seeing patterns where none exist?

In the 1990-1995 era Switzerland, Iceland, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Israel implemented it. In the US Clinton tried to implement it but failed.

There were also about 10 nations that implemented it in 65-75, which was also the time that Nixon tried to implement it in the US.

There are a bit over 30 nations on that list covering about a 100 year period starting in 1912, but about half of them implemented UHC either in the 1965-1975 period or during the 1990-1995 period.

I’m not a mathematician, but did GDP (both global and national) grow at such a rate that during certain periods various unconnected nations realized they could afford universal health care? Did Singapore, Israel and Taiwan all grow their economies enough that they could afford UHC around the same time period?

Or are the rates at which nations adopt UHC unconnected? The years above cover 17 years, so that could be an arbitrary number. But supposedly with democracy a nation needs a GDP of about $5000 per capita to successfully transition to liberal democracy. Is there some kind of GDP per capita cutoff for UHC (maybe $10-20k per person per year)/

If so the oil rich nations (Kuwait, Bahrain, UAE, Brunei) probably wouldn’t fit in that pattern.

2

I think it’s more that somewhere around WWII medicine became advanced enough that one could run up serious medical bills. Aesthetics came in around the turn of the century, antisepsis a little before that, commercial volumes of penicillin then other antibiotics as part of the war effort. Serious patent drugs, even later.

Before all that, you lingered and died, died quickly, or recovered.
“Mommy, mommy, what’s Santa doing here in September?”
“If I told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times- you’ve got leukemia!”

Once medicine became something the middle class could barely afford, and the unemployed could not, and charity hospitals could not handle the load, when a chicken was not enough to pay a doctor for a visit, all first world countries began to cover more and more of the total cost once they were advanced enough to have that level of medical care and technical enough that the costs were out of range.