Costs were to be shared between workers, employers, and the state. This death benefit becomes significant later on. The services of physicians, nurses, and hospitals were included, as was sick pay, maternity benefits, and a death benefit of fifty dollars to pay for funeral expenses. In a nutshell, the bill limited coverage to the working class and all others that earned less than $1200 a year, including dependents. Despite its broad mandate, the committee decided to concentrate on health insurance, drafting a model bill in 1915. In 1912, they created a committee on social welfare which held its first national conference in 1913. They were a typical progressive group whose mandate was not to abolish capitalism but rather to reform it. In 1906, the American Association of Labor Legislation (AALL) finally led the campaign for health insurance. Roosevelt’s successors were mostly conservative leaders, who postponed for about twenty years the kind of presidential leadership that might have involved the national government more extensively in the management of social welfare. Theodore Roosevelt 1901 - 1909ĭuring the Progressive Era, President Theodore Roosevelt was in power and although he supported health insurance because he believed that no country could be strong whose people were sick and poor, most of the initiative for reform took place outside of government. Therefore the first proposals for health insurance in the US did not come into political debate under anti-socialist sponsorship as they had in Europe. However unlike European countries, there was not powerful working class support for broad social insurance in the US The labor and socialist parties’ support for health insurance or sickness funds and benefits programs was much more fragmented than in Europe. In the Progressive Era, which occurred in the early 20th century, reformers were working to improve social conditions for the working class. The US did have some voluntary funds that provided for their members in the case of sickness or death, but there were no legislative or public programs during the late 19th or early 20th century. What was the US doing during this period of the late 1800’s to 1912? The government took no actions to subsidize voluntary funds or make sick insurance compulsory essentially the federal government left matters to the states and states left them to private and voluntary programs.
US circa 1883-1912, including Reformers and the Progressive Era: They used insurance against the cost of sickness as a way of “turning benevolence to power”. In a seeming paradox, the British and German systems were developed by the more conservative governments in power, specifically as a defense to counter expansion of the socialist and labor parties. Programs were not universal to start with and were originally conceived as a means of maintaining incomes and buying political allegiance of the workers. The primary reason for the emergence of these programs in Europe was income stabilization and protection against the wage loss of sickness rather than payment for medical expenses, which came later. So for a very long time, other countries have had some form of universal health care or at least the beginnings of it. Other European countries, including Sweden in 1891, Denmark in 1892, France in 1910, and Switzerland in 1912, subsidized the mutual benefit societies that workers formed among themselves. Some European countries started with compulsory sickness insurance, one of the first systems, for workers beginning in Germany in 1883 other countries including Austria, Hungary, Norway, Britain, Russia, and the Netherlands followed all the way through 1912. Other developed countries have had some form of social insurance (that later evolved into national insurance) for nearly as long as the US has been trying to get it. The evolution of these efforts and the reasons for their failure make for an intriguing lesson in American history, ideology, and character.
The campaign for some form of universal government-funded health care has stretched for nearly a century in the US On several occasions, advocates believed they were on the verge of success yet each time they faced defeat. Palmer MPH, MS in San Francisco at the Spring, 1999 PNHP meeting) Late 1800’s to Medicare (Transcribed from a talk given by Karen S.