Government Has Been Fixing Health Care For a Long Time

Healthcare is (shockingly) not in the news right now. Regardless, this short article from SwiftEconomics discusses a not-very-well remembered part of American healthcare history:
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I came across a fantastic article a while back by Roderick T. Long titled “How Government Solved the Health Care Crisis: Medical Insurance that Worked – Until Government “Fixed” It.”
As it begins:

Today, we are constantly being told, the United States faces a health care crisis. Medical costs are too high, and health insurance is out of reach of the poor. The cause of this crisis is never made very clear, but the cure is obvious to nearly everybody: government must step in to solve the problem.
 
Eighty years ago, Americans were also told that their nation was facing a health care crisis. Then, however, the complaint was that medical costs were too low, and that health insurance was too accessible. But in that era, too, government stepped forward to solve the problem. And boy, did it solve it!

Basically, there used to be these things called mutual aid or fraternal societies. These groups were made up of people, usually based on a common profession, that negotiated for cheaper services for their members and helped each other out when someone fell on hard times among other things. And they worked really well, at least they did until they were replaced by the dependency-inducing welfare state.
The article is definitely worth the read, and you can find it here.