With your free time you can exercise and eat well, which will get you further health wise then having insurance.
You can see this from the inverse too: as you age all of those factors (muscle strength, reaction time) diminish, as do other issues (osteoporosis) so falls become both more frequent and more serious.
Yes, you can be hit by a car at any age, and some fitness enthusiasts engage in activities that can lead to sudden injury (e.g. skiing). But in general, the OP is correct.
Personally, I've been on Medi-Cal for years. I've never taken a cent from it, nor have I paid a cent into it (not counting the taxes I pay). It's great. I feel bad for all the folks that haven't figured it out yet.
You can find evidence for this in numerous ways. For instance studies looking at classical Greeks 'of renown', found a median life expectancy was 70, and average life expectancy was 71.3. [1] Even in the Bible one finds numbers that match up basically exactly, 'Our days may come to seventy years, or eighty, if our strength endures; yet the best of them are but trouble and sorrow, for they quickly pass, and we fly away.' You can also find things like the minimum age for Roman Consuls being 42 years, and so on endlessly.
And all of this was in an era when there were no vaccines, no knowledge of germs or how disease spread, and when cutting edge medical science had to do with balancing the 4 humors (blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile) with some sort of an elemental association of air/water/fire/earth with each. Eating well and exercising can indeed take you extremely far, because it damn sure wasn't their healthcare doing it. That said modern medicine has basically been a miracle worker for childhood survival, but once you make it to adulthood - your body is strong enough, or can be made strong enough, to get you most of the way to your expiration date.
That’s not really true, though. As recently as ~1900 the likelihood of dying in your 20s or 30s was many times higher than now. Various infectious diseases were a huge risk at any age (even if the old/young severely disproportionately affected). Tuberculosis alone was a huge and killed massive amounts of young people every year, just consider how many artists, writers etc. died from it in the 20s/30s/40s and how it was a constant theme in fiction throughout the 1800s. Other currently easily treatable illnesses, malnutrition and/or dietary deficiencies resulted in a significant reduction in QoL even if they didn’t kill directly.
> For instance studies looking at classical Greeks 'of renown', found a median life expectancy was 70, and average life expectancy was 71.3
That’s mainly survivorship bias. Also I don’t think it’s actually true at all..
There were a few geographic pockets were average life expectancy if you survived childhood was close to that due to favorable climatic conditions, low population densities and abundance of resources/land (e.g. colonial New England) but for most of the population even in the most developed European societies that wasn’t the case.
I think you'll find that if you choose nearly to any comparable sample with similar access, near to regardless of the time era, you will again find life expectancy comparable to modern times. For instance here it is for the ten most famous Founding Fathers (data from GPT for convenience, so hallucinations are possible, but it matches up with my knowledge as well) :
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George Washington 67 Acute epiglottitis
Thomas Jefferson 83 Natural causes (suspected kidney disease)
John Adams 90 Natural causes
Benjamin Franklin 84 Pleurisy
James Madison 85 Congestive heart failure
Alexander Hamilton 47 Gunshot wound (duel)
John Jay 83 Stroke
James Monroe 73 Heart failure and tuberculosis
Samuel Adams 81 Tremor, possible Parkinson's disease
Patrick Henry 63 Stomach cancer
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The average age at death, excluding Alexander Hamilton, was 78.8, for people born from ~1700 to 1750! But yeah, like you mentioned - a major issue with is the masses at large were living in crowded unsanitary conditions while and eating/drinking unclean food, often while working dangerous jobs. So I think biasing our sample to the upper class of times past is quite beneficial because now a days even the poor have relatively widespread access to these 'luxuries', so we are more able to compare just life with and without modern medicine/knowledge.
Yes, if you are male. Different story for women who give birth.
But more to the point, a well trained body will hardly ever get into a state where it needs medical attention. Most broken bones are due to poor muscle control and lack of strength later in life (think hip fractures). This can be mitigated by strength training that involves similar dynamic movements.