Me and a friend were talking about how, historically, the indigenous people here were superb doctors, which was a necessity because of intense feudalism otherwise killing everyone off. They not only knew how surgery worked but practiced a higher level of hygiene than everyone else. It wasn't like modern stuff with machines or anything, but everything was proto-scientific and non-superstitious and you would've thought Hippocrates tutored the masses here.
Then the place got conquered and the doctors here just got terrible because society introduced its current capitalist medical system post-conquest. It's been like that for centuries now. Doctors regularly downplay things, pass patients around, fight with each other, overmedicate, misdiagnose, and so on. They say that, when you move between countries, your mental illness diagnosis list changes because different countries have different definitions of mental illness, but here you can accomplish that effect just by crossing the street.
The question asked what our governments did better in the past. This is one thing the indigenous stage of the local government did superbly that "better" successor stages of the nation happened to screw up.