Americans famously don't have $400 for emergencies. I don't know if other countries do better, or if there are national plans to help them out in the case of illness, regardless of the costs directly related to the treatment.
Well, no. But clearly bankruptcies usually include multiple financial stresses. More likely, "i got sick, i had medical bills, i lost my job, my car broke down" kind of thing.
Worth noting the (up to) 60% figure i noted was from a harvard study during the GFC. The more conservative figures have tended towards 20-30% for medical bills being the primary cause of bankruptcy. Even then it seems to still be one of the more common (avoidable) causes of bankruptcy.
You are right, it was a long time ago. But the 1975 system was brought in the by the Whitlam government was only universal in that it brought in a single payer system, but not free and not unrestricted. (Before that we had a hodge-podge not unlike the US before the ACA.) After the coup against Whitlam, the subsequent government further restricted or watered that system down, until Hawke brought in a universal healthcare system in 1984, medicare.
Still, with each period of right wing government in australia, we still seem to get a slow death by a hundred cuts to the medicare system (medicare levy, indexation freezes, closing of bulkbilling clinics etc etc etc).
For context, before we got public health system in australia, the no.1 cause of bankruptcy was medical. Now medical bankruptcy is almost non existent.