Just a short post to point out how everything is related.
If the country had had a better healthcare system in 1946, Robert McNamara's career might have taken a different course, which might have kept him from becoming such a prominent industrial figure and the Secretary of Defense. You see, he left academia to make more money so that he could pay for healthcare.
Prior to WWII, McNamara was an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard. He then served in the United States Army Air Forces during the war. But after the war, both he and his wife contracted polio and her recovery was expensive, which led him to make a career change.
"After the war, my wife and I both came down with polio, if you can imagine, infantile paralysis," Mr. McNamara remembered in his memoir. "My case was relatively light; I was out of the hospital in a couple of months. But she was in the hospital for nine months, and they thought she’d never lift an arm or a leg off the bed again."
Unable to pay the hospital bills on a Harvard salary, he accepted a job offer from the Ford Motor Company.
The rest is history. After a highly successful career at Ford, Kennedy selected him as the Secretary of Defense. You know the rest.
Of course we can never know, but if McNamara's family had been covered by adequate health insurance, he might have remained a professor or taken some other less prominent path and never left his tragic imprint on American history.