Politics
Out of context: Reply #5546
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- TheBlueOne0
@TommyO: For all your "answer my question" yapping about how employment got tied with health coverage. Amazing..it comes down to business and tax breaks - who starting in the 20's saw a growth industry and wanted to keep it out of the public sector. So all your yammering about it being socialist or communist or whatever, the origin of the problem lies in the "free market" ideas of the 1920's...
"Jonathan Cohn, a senior editor at the New Republic, has written such a book, and I would urge Sen. Wyden to read it at least three times. Cohn's book, to be published next month, is Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis—And the People Who Paid the Price. Each chapter of Cohn's book is devoted to one or two patient narratives that illuminate a particular dysfunction of the present medical system, and the chapters are arranged in such a way that the dysfunctions appear more or less in the order in which they first became significant national problems. The result is an 80-year chronology of repeated market failure, with each successive reform serving at best as temporary respite from the previous problem. Read it and weep. Capitalism can't deliver decent health care.
What we recognize as modern medicine, Cohn writes, began in the 1920s. That's when doctors and hospitals, having only during the previous decade learned enough about disease that they could be reliably helpful in treating sick people, began charging more than most individuals could easily pay. To close this gap, which worsened with the advent of the Great Depression, the administrator of Baylor Hospital in Dallas created a system that caught on elsewhere and eventually evolved into Blue Cross. The Blues were essentially nonprofit health insurers who served local community organizations like the Elks. In exchange for a tax break, Blue Cross organizations kept premiums reasonably low.
The success of the Blues persuaded commercial insurers, who initially considered medicine an unpromising market, to enter the field. Private insurers accelerated these efforts in the 1940s when businesses, seeking ways to get around wartime wage controls, began to compete for labor by offering health insurance. If government regulators had thought to freeze fringe benefits along with wages, we might have avoided making the workplace primarily responsible for supplying health insurance, a role that most people now agree was ill-advised. Instead, the government jumped on the bandwagon by exempting from the income tax company expenses associated with health care."
You can read more here:
http://www.slate.com/id/2161736/…Or buy a book:
http://www.amazon.com/Sick-Untol…Or check out a timeline:
http://www.pbs.org/healthcarecri…Or look at other sources:
http://eh.net/encyclopedia/artic…