Early History of Health Insurance in America

Tip 1 - How did America end up with this health care system?

Pennsylvania in the late 1800s and early 1900s was an unsafe place to work, with a quarter-million recorded industrial calamities a year. So dangerous were the trades, and so gruesome were the accidents, that the chronicling of injuries suffered by workers became its own muckraking genre. A short-lived publication of the Inter­national Association of Factory Inspectors got some its best stories from the steel industry: In one nightmare narrative, an explosion at a Butler County steel mill forced “streams of hot metal [down] on the workmen, engulfing and literally cooking some of them.” Some accounts weren’t as spectacular, but merely ghastly — arms jerked from sockets, regular decapitations, and sawmill accidents with all of the attendant gore and sinew you would expect. In 1907, writer
Tags: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Healthy Pgh

Tip 2 - Health Insurance From Invention to Innovation: A History of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Companies

Tags: BCBSA blog, blue cross and blue shield blog, healthcare blog, health blog

Tip 3 - Accidents Of History Created U.S. Health System

Since the 1960s, Americans have looked at employer-based health insurance as though it were the natural order of things. But economic historians say there was never any central logic at work in building that system.