Healthcare In The Late 1800s

It was not until the late 1800s that insurance and healthcare began to receive attention from the public and the government. Nonetheless, there was never any actions taken by the federal government to consider and fund healthcare or force employers to make sick insurance obligatory. The federal government decided it was best to leave these matters in the hands of the state governments which then pushed these responsibilities onto private and voluntary organizations and programs. Unlike in European countries, America did not have a very strong working class yet, so it was problematic to garner support for healthcare for all the working people (Palmer). Notwithstanding, the federal government at this point decided to regulate drugs that were

A year later the first national conference was held by this committee which resulted in a model bill being drafted 2 years later. The premise of this bill was to limit coverage to only the working class, people who made under 1200 a year and dependents. This included the services of physicians, nurses and hospitals, as well as a death benefit of $50 would also be awarded in order to help pay for funeral expenses. This would come back to haunt them since this encroached on the territory of private insurance companies that feared this sort of bill would run them out of business (Palmer). The AMA which initially showed support for the bill had to back out since it was facing many pressure from other medical societies on the grounds that they would be unable to properly pay doctors anymore. The first insurance act that was passed was the War Risk Insurance Act, which covered military troops in the event of injury or death after WWI began. This came to an end with the war in 1918 (Griffin).
The 1920s began with medical expenses starting to get too costly for the average American to afford. In response to this a group of teachers decided to form an organization that would agree "to prepay for future medical services (up to 21 days in advance)" However this organization was only for teachers and was the precursor to Blue Cross. In order to not anger private physicians, this also only covered hospital charges so that private

National health expenditures came out to be 5% of the total GDP of the United States. President John F. Kennedy perceived this as an issue as it national health expenditures would only continue to go up. The particular group he expected would get hit the hardest by this was retirees and senior citizens. He began to push for a healthcare plan of senior citizens, but it again failed for the same reasons, the American Medical Association and the fear of socializing medicine. After the death of JFK, his successor Lyndon B. Johnson took over and in no time was working on JFK's health care bill again. "He proposed an extension and expansion of the Social Security Act of 1935, as well as the Hill-Burton Program (Which gave government grants to medical facilities in need of modernization, in exchange for providing a "reasonable" amount of medical services to those who could not pay.)" Johnson's plan was focused on making sure old and disabled people have access to affordable healthcare. Finally, after decades of trying to get a healthcare bill passed, what is known as the Social Security Act of 1965 was passed. Albeit there were hundreds of amendments to the original bill. The Social Security Act created Medicare and Medicaid (Griffin). Also, during the 1960s Congress passed the Kefauver-Harris Drug Amendments which made it compulsory for