In July of 1798, Congress passed “and President John Adams signed – An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen. The law authorized the creation of a government operated marine hospital service and mandated that privately employed sailors be required to purchase health care insurance.
1798: Congress Passes Socialized Medicine and Mandates Private Health Insurance
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6 responses to “1798: Congress Passes Socialized Medicine and Mandates Private Health Insurance”
OMFG! The founding fathers were nazi-socialist-anarchist-atheist baby eaters!
Hmmm, how will Glenn Beck spin this one? It’ll certainly involve crying and a lot of scribbles on his blackboard. That we can be sure of.
The tax was a not a mandate in any sense but rather a single payer system. Taxes where collected and directly spent on health care in a government hospital. There was no private insurance involved.
You’re defense of this Obama’s Poll Tax the most reactionary right wing policy since Iron Fist Thather’s community charge is amusing.
Repeal the Health Insurance company Protection and Bailout Act, Ban for profit health insurance and HMOs, restore Hill-Burton, institute Medicare for all.
Septeus7:
> institute Medicare for all.
I’m with you.
Poll tax?
A poll tax in the European sense of the word is a tax for simply being alive i.e. a subject of the land. The peasant’s revolt 1381 was response to such a head count tax.
Obama’s mandate is actually worse in that it is Stamp tax where like the original stamp tax where the taxes went to support the East India trading company.
Americans who know their history do like to be taxed for the benefit of Imperialist Capitalist racket’s.
For-profit medical insurance by it’s nature is a racket because like a Boiler Room stock dealer the seller has no intention of paying out because all of his profit are created by denying care to patients.
The entire system we currently have was set up by Nixon as such a racket as Michael Moore documented in his film “Sicko.”
You cannot regulate a racket anymore than you can regulate armed robbery. It must be criminalized and not tolerated. I actively opposed Obamacare for this reason and the issue of the pseudoscience of “evidence based medicine” to reduce costs. It is nothing more than gutting medicare by targeting the elderly and disabled.
You may say I have fallen for the Tea Party ideas about “Death Panels” but I have family that work in the Health Industry and trust me the “Death Panels” are standard procedure for Insurance companies and for profit Hospitals and the last thing we need is for those practices to be extended to public health services and programs.
@Septeus7
Ah, I see why I didn’t understand. I think of that as a head tax. A poll tax is a tax/fee prerequisite to voting. (Wikipedia sez this.)
But otherwise I agree with you. Employer-based health insurance is an egregious accident of history/unintended consequence of well-intentioned but ill-considered govt policies. Should get rid of it.
To add: the issue of “evidence-based medicine” and what gets paid for (and how much) is not an obvious or trivial issue. I would not consider it wise, for instance, to pay $10,000 for a spiritual crystal-healing regimen for diabetes. That one’s (kind of?) obvious, but many aren’t.
Key question is: a U.S. hospital night currently costs six times what it does in Europe. How do we reduce that?