History
The first system of socialized medicine based on compulsory insurance with state subsidy was created by Bismarck's social legislation, a pragmatic answer to vanishing traditional networks of mutual support in a world of modern individualism, as well as an attempt to take the wind out of social democrats sails in the 1880s. Socialized health care was implemented by the Soviet Union in the 1920s. New Zealand was the first country with a mixed economy to initiate the direct provision of health care by the state when, in 1939, it provided mental health services free of cost to the recipient following the passing of the Social Security Act of 1938. After World War II in the 1940s the United Kingdom established its National Health Service, which was built from the outset as a comprehensive service, and most of Europe followed suit in the immediate post-war years with systems varying from universal insurance coverage funded by the state, to universal healthcare provision by the state. A socialized model was used in China in from the 1950s to the 1970s during the first two decades of communist rule. Cuba adopted socialized medicine in the 1960s under the leadership of Fidel Castro. Also in the 1960s, the United States initiated its Medicaid program to help poor mothers and their children.
Read more about this topic: Socialized Medicine
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“The steps toward the emancipation of women are first intellectual, then industrial, lastly legal and political. Great strides in the first two of these stages already have been made of millions of women who do not yet perceive that it is surely carrying them towards the last.”
—Ellen Battelle Dietrick, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)