George Will said it best: World War II changed everything about healthcare, everything. That is because prior to World War II, we didn't have competent medicine. There was no competent medicine prior to anti-biotics. If you went to a hospital in 1900, they could put a cast on your arm if you broke it, OR, they could cut the arm off. That's about it. President Calvin Coolidge's son played tennis without socks one day, got a blister on his foot, he got an infection, he went to the hospital, and he died. The son of a President died from a blood blister. That is not competent medicine. Because it wasn't competent, it was affordable. Healthcare cost nothing in 1900. And not much more than nothing in 1920. Pay cash for healthcare, it costs nothing.aTm wrote: ↑Mon Dec 16, 2024 6:54 pm I'm no expert on healthcare, but what I suspect is probably the best/simplest thing the government could do to improve it would be just to outlaw insurance paid by the employer as compensation (unless its just a stipend or something and the insured person chooses the insurer and the policy) and have insurance that is much more similar marketing wise to what exists for like car and homeowners insurance, sought out by the individual and tailored to the individuals needs.
Then, we had World War II. And we got anti-biotics. And vaccines. And machines. And computers. And information technology. Machines can breathe for you. Feed you. Your heart can stop and we put you on a bypass and you are "dead", but we can talk to you, and you might have full brain activity. We have diagnostic tools that can snake your arteries (all of them) looking for plaque that we can clear away with a stent. We have an MRI that finds everything and anything that is happening in your body. Everything will be found. We can open your skull and clamp a brain bleed. We can radiate and surgically remove your malignant cancer cells. Failing that, we give you chemotherapy. All of this, all of it, post World War II. And now, healthcare costs a shitload of money. So the insurance claims are huge, gigantic.
Also, FDR froze wages in World War II. Tank manufacturer needed 10,000 laborers working the line but airplane engine factory right down the street offered ten cents more an hour, so all 10,000 men working the tank line went down the street. So all the millionaire industrialists bitched to FDR that their organized labor was too powerful and we risked losing the war to the Krouts and the Japs if the millionaires couldn't count on men showing up to work. They couldn't just keep raising wages because the government didn't have infinite money to build a Sherman tank. So with wages frozen in World War II, how could the millionaires compete with each other to keep employees happy? They gave them health care instead of cash because FDR couldn't freeze that. And thus, the first employer paid health insurance system was created and funded.
Obamacare? All that is, is employers forcing their under-35 childless bachelor employees to enroll in the company healthcare. You see under-35 childless bachelors do not go to the doctor. They just don't. And because they don't, they never put in claims. And because they don't, their premiums that they pay are just free money to the health insurance company. And that free money makes it much more affordable for all the married employees and employees with children at the same company (with the same plan) to get health insurance at lower premium prices. People on the left referred to these selfish under 35 year old childless bachelors (who refused to pay into the system) as the "Invincibles." Afterall, who cares if childless under-35 year old bachelors are insulted or offended or forced by law to pay for something that we all know they will never use. They are expendable.
World War II changed everything.
