Flashback, 100 Years Ago: Compulsory Health Insurance
“Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.” -Thomas Jefferson
The posts on this blog are rather short for a reason. I’m no longer interested in writing (or reading) long screeds that detail the circular history of human political and economic folly. Either you get it or you don’t. If you don’t get it, you need to detach from the Mainstream Teat and read more history. If you do get it, I extend my respect and gratitude to you for being able to see through the smokescreens created by The Powers That Be.
100 years ago, Compulsory Health Insurance (CHI) was an issue in America. CHI went on to a resounding defeat in state legislatures around the country because Americans used to be more educated than they are now about the proper place of government.
In 1919, Frederick Hoffman (a respected statistician at Prudential Life Insurance) studied CHI and released his report “More Facts And Fallacies Of Compulsory Health Insurance”. I’ll leave it to you, dear reader, to peruse this work as you see fit. One quote from the collection serves my purposes at the moment:
“In countries with low standards of labor and life, with a government administered by an entrenched autocratic governing class, remote from the life and labor of the wage-earning element, the compulsory insurance principle is quite likely to appeal as a panacea or a solution, even though, as in Germany, it proves merely the means of postponing the inevitable disaster for a generation or two. For the principle itself is unsound and has been proved unsound, because it does violence to the universal law of all social progress, that “Nothing but the slow modification of human nature by the discipline of social life can produce permanently advantageous changes,” and it is equally true, in the words of Herbert Spencer, that “The root of a well-ordered social action is a sentiment of justice which at once insists on personal freedom and is solicitous for the like freedom of others.”
Mr. Hoffman is correct in any century: CHI is the product of “an entrenched autocratic governing class, remote from the life and labor of the wage-earning element”. If you’re in favor of ObamneyCare, why do you support the Autocrats?
No comments:
Post a Comment