Harry S Truman and the AMA

National Health Insurance and the AMA.

In the 1940s, if an American president wanted to stir up a hornet's nest with the American Medical Association (AMA), all he had to do was propose some form of national health insurance. National health insurance already existed in many European nations, including Germany, which had established the first national system of compulsory sickness insurance in 1883. The first attempts to secure some form of national health insurance for the United States began in 1915 with an early proposal from the American Association for Labor Legislation to give medical coverage to workers and their dependents. Since reformers saw health insurance as a way to subordinate medical practice to public health and to change the method of payment from fee-for-service to salary or capitation (a single fee for each patient during each year), tensions arose when physicians saw this potential attack on their income and...

[The entire page is 1236 words long]

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