I am not making this up. I read it somewhere a long time ago, I don't remember where, but I am not making it up.
Hardly anybody had health insurance before World War II. I don't know if health insurance was even invented before World War II but, if it was, hardly anybody had it. During the war, prices and wages were frozen to prevent people profiteering from the war. The only way a guy could increase his wages was to quit his job and hire on with somebody else who was already paying more than his current employer. To prevent this, employers started adding "fringe benefits" which, technically, were not considered part of wages so they weren't covered by the freeze. One of those fringe benefits was health insurance. Insurance companies offered discount rates to employers because they bought a group policy that covered all their employees. If an individual wanted to buy the same policy the company would charge him more, if they would sell it to him at all.
Before most people started having health insurance they paid their medical bills out of pocket. If a patient couldn't pay his bill, the provider would eventually have to write it off and charge his paying customers more to make up the difference. In rural areas, doctors were sometimes paid with livestock or other farm produce. In the urban areas, there were municipal or county hospitals that took care of poor people. It was bare bones treatment, but it was free. If a city couldn't provide a whole hospital, one of the private hospitals would have a "charity ward" that was funded by the local government. There were also state hospitals that took care of people that needed long term or even lifetime care. There were also veterans' hospitals, and at least one fraternal order that I know of, the Masons, had hospitals for their members.
At first, health insurance was only for hospitalization because doctors' office visits were so cheap that nobody worried about paying for them. If you had hospitalization insurance you were more likely to be admitted and kept there longer than a guy who didn't have insurance or a lot of his own money. At some point, health insurance started covering office visits, probably to discourage unnecessary hospital admissions. It was at this point that office visits started getting more expensive. I remember when we first got dental insurance at the paper mill. Within a few years, our co-pay was more than the whole bill used to be before we had insurance. I understand that there are multiple reasons why the cost of health care in our lifetimes has risen faster than general inflation, but I'm sure that the invention of health insurance is one of them. Indeed, the way I remember, it was about the time that Medicare was passed when health care started getting more expensive.
When I went into the hospital in 2008, I got a 20% discount because I didn't have health insurance. For months after that I kept getting separate bills from people like the anesthesiologist, and I got a 10% discount off of those for paying within 30 days. All told I paid almost $20,000 worth of medical bills that year, which is less than it would have cost me to carry insurance for two years. I literally paid for it with the money I saved by not buying insurance, and had money left over. Of course, if I got sick like that every year, I suppose I would eventually pass the break even point but, with any kind of luck, I would be dead by then.
There are two ways that I can think of how socialized medicine, or public health care, can be run. The first way is to make all the health care providers government employees and pay them a salary, no matter how many patients they treat. This is what they have in the military and, while there are some problems with it, I think that it works pretty well, all things considered. The second way is to do it like they do in Canada. What they have is called a "fee for service" system. There is a set fee for each procedure, so the providers can make more money by doing more procedures. Periodically, a committee representing the providers meets with a government committee, and they negotiate the fee for each procedure. There may be problems with this system too, but at least is avoids having all the doctors working for the government and getting paid the same no matter how much work they do.
Obamacare is none of the above. As far as I know, it does nothing to control or standardize health care costs. I say "as far as I know" because every time I read something about Obamacare, it says something different than what I'd read previously. How do they intend to administer a program when there is no general agreement about what the particular provisions of the program say? I understand that the original bill was several thousand pages long, and a bunch of amendments were added after the original bill was passed. I know that our own congressman, Bart Stupak, was against it at first, even though he is a Democrat, because he is also a Catholic and didn't like the abortion part, so they took the abortion part out to get his vote. Soon after it was passed, however, they put the abortion part back in, and Stupak caught a lot of flak from his constituents because of it. Stupak was so demoralized by all this that he didn't run for re-election and, last I heard, had retired from politics altogether. He was replaced by a Tea Party Republican, who has won twice now by very narrow margins. Our congressional district had been Democrat for as long as anybody remembers, but at least for now, it has gone Republican, and we have Obamacare to thank for it.
I couldn't find out how to make this spell check program behave, but I guess it doesn't matter because, once you publish your post, all the squiggly red lines under the words disappear.
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