The article consists of nothing by heresay by a single medical professional. If we look at actual, y'know, research we see that about half of seniors didn't have any sort of medical insurance until Medicare was passed, at which point the rate rapidly shot up to the high 90s. Take a look at some CDC research: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhsr/nhsr017.pdf
Now that is to say that half of seniors were uninsured in the early 60s, two decades after social security was implemented. If you are going back to before social security then you don't just have more then half of seniors uninsured, you have half of seniors living in poverty. There is no way that most people had access to decent healthcare through professional societies.
Okay, now where I'd say the previous poster
probably didn't read the article, I'd say you
definitely didn't read the article.
Okay, now let's get into some more detail here. Yes, half of seniors were uninsured in the early 60s. That is true. What's your point? The COST of healthcare out of pocket was in the realm of $3,000 adjusted for inflation per year, lower than what most countries today pay for healthcare. Unless you're going to argue that the cost of single payer systems cause poverty, I don't think you can seriously argue that in this case. Some people, the very poor, indeed were unable to pay even that; but such people were sufficiently rare that they were generally covered by either charity or the hospital itself engaging in charity work (since because the hospitals weren't forced to do so and were mostly privately run, they had enough excess money to justify it). Because insurance wasn't as widespread as today and didn't feature many of the mandated benefits that it now does, it didn't act as a barrier between the patient and doctor and instead was more of a safety net in the case of catastrophic injury.
But lets go back to 1910, when the article is actually focused. Most people weren't insured then, either, yet the working poor and immigrants had some of the cheapest healthcare around due to mutual aid associations. These associations (also known as lodges and fraternal organizations) were organizations in which working class men would get together and pool their money to pay for things such as medical care. Because they very much needed to keep costs down, the organizations would hire individual physicians with a yearly retainer, and then use them as much as required. If the doctors were substandard they probably wouldn't receive the contract the second year, and since the societies provided great job security they were in high demand. They actually pushed costs down to the point where the yearly cost of healthcare was around $2. If a member had a serious problem and required surgery, they could go to a fraternal hospital, where the cost was around $25 and quality was above average.
However, this mostly declined after the AMA was given monopoly over the licensing of doctors. Many physicians were outraged that their profession was becoming subservient to working class immigrants and blacks (who composed a disproportionate amount of lodges at the time) and wanted the practice stopped. Since the AMA now had monopoly, they first shut down a little over half of all existing medical schools to ensure that they massively increase their own wages, and then they threatened any doctors working in lodges with license removal. This quickly killed lodge healthcare coverage (among other laws restricting coverage of children and so on) in the US. In the UK, lodges were even more common, yet they stopped providing healthcare once the government started; after all, why pay for a lodge doctor when the government is already forcing you to pay in taxes for healthcare?
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Topic: American Election Megathread - It's Over (Read 720963 times)