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Before socialized medicine.

Article Excerpt
ORIGINS OF AMERICAN HEALTH

INSURANCE: A History of Industrial Sickness Funds

by John E. Murray

313 pages; Yale University Press, 2007

An old saying is that history is written by the winners. That used to be true, but isn't any longer. The losers often write their own versions and such histories now tend to follow this template: We were righteous and had the good ideas, but were defeated by forces of evil and greed that used money and deceit to prevail. That is the standard line used, for example, by advocates of socialized medical care to explain why the Clinton administration's big 1993 health care reform bill died in a Democratic Congress. It was a grand, visionary plan done in by the nefarious insurance companies. Losers craft their histories to defend their purity and perhaps set the stage for a win later on.

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In his new book Origins of American Health Insurance, University of Toledo economist John Murray investigates a century-old instance of this phenomenon, namely the defeat of the Progressives' zealous push for government benefits for sick workers. Such "social insurance" had taken root in Europe--most notably in Bismarck's Germany--and reformers were adamant that the United States needed to emulate and improve upon the German model. Their proposals were not, however, adopted and the losers wrote the history of the dispute to fit the story line of virtue defeated by nasty special interests. According to that narrative, the United States would have adopted this enlightened approach to sickness insurance around the turn...

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