Blue Shield was born. Years later, Blue Cross and Blue Shield nationalized
and conglomerated into one large corporation.
The foundation of Blue Cross and Blue Shield had been built upon
relationships that hospitals and physicians had with employee groups, like
teachers’ unions, factory and steel mill workers, and police associations.
Separately, a surprising collaboration between employers and their
workers during the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt had
resulted in sweeping reformation in almost every state in workers’
compensation insurance. Concessions were made by both sides; employers
were motivated to establish a system of workplace injury insurance to
minimize their legal exposure to employee lawsuits, and employees
finally enjoyed workplace protection from punitive work hours, unsafe
working conditions, and lack of healthcare for injuries sustained on the
job. The combined effect of work-derived health insurance and workers’
compensation insurance meant that many workers enjoyed health care
services that had been absent just one generation before. In the early
1940s, a set of wartime wage and benefit laws and regulations stipulated
that employers provide healthcare as a “fringe” benefit, furthering the link
between a job and health insurance.
Unfortunately, because the reforms had almost exclusively centered on
workers, Americans who were unemployed or elderly were still out in the
cold in the late 1950s, and as medical care got more expensive,
hospitalization was becoming ever more threatening to one’s financial
health. Listerism, the technique of cleansing the skin and surgeon’s hands
with carbolic acid, forever changed the notion and reality of which
conditions could be surgically broached, and the half-century from the
1880s to the 1930s witnessed a titanic shift in the vulnerability of
mankind. However, serious infections usually hastened death, and it was
only the practical introduction of sulfa drugs and penicillin in the 1940s
that broadened the safety zone for surgical interventions that could be
hazarded in hospitals. The combination of aseptic surgery and antibiotic
treatment proved simultaneously heroic and expensive. It’s quite cheap to
let someone die—it’s very costly to save someone’s life.
Wartime American employment, production, and innovation continued
at a dizzying pace. “The stunning growth of the nonprofit Blue Plans was
not lost on the commercial insurance industry, especially those companies
that were already selling life and casualty coverage to employee groups....
marcin
(Marcin)
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