Funny how it coincides with the very year the government started providing health insurance. Funny how the same thing happened when the government started providing education subsidies.
Funny how the inflation did not happen with medical procedures not covered by the government, such as Lasik eye surgery.
A longish, but good read about this:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-ame...
P.S. Antibiotics came out in WW2, not 1968.
Government provided health care was introduced in 1965 as part of Title XIX of the Social Security Act under President Lyndon B. Johnson, not in 1968.
I dunno what went wrong but something did.
Your final sentence is just the same point upthread: you want a simple coincidence[2] to make your argument.
[1] There is a ton of analysis and argument to do there too, but suffice it to say that "because medicare" is just as terrible an explanation.
[2] It's not even a coincidence! Desire for government-guaranteed health care came about precisely because of and simultaneous to the availability of late-life care that actually worked. No one wanted medicare in the 20's because there wasn't anything to pay for even if you had it. But they damn sure wanted their walkers and hip replacements in the 60's.
This is just wildly wrong. What you're looking at is the "advent of modern medicine". Prior to the middle of the 20th century, doctors were more or less limited to stitching people up after injury. Since then, we can treat... almost everything, honestly. But that's expensive, in particular in regimes like the US that want to provide all that stuff to everyone in the private markets that have the ability to pay for it.
It's got absolutely nothing to do with how the payments are handled. That's just silly.