Summary |
This book examines the rise and fall of a little-understood financial institution: the industrial sickness fund. Such funds, organized by workers through their employer or union, provided the rudiments of health insurance, principally consisting of paid sick leave, to a large minority of the industrial workforce of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sickness funds grew steadily in membership at a time of much public debate about increasing the role of state governments in health insurance provision. This book is not a study of the political reasons why the United States lacks a universal, government-directed health insurance system. Rather, it proposes that one reason why such a system did not develop from Progressive-Era efforts was that these funds were reasonably well run and served a large share of the labor force that wanted insurance.
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