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The general government has its armies and its navies and its great burden of expense for the purpose among other things of protecting property, protecting gathered and accumulated wealth, and enabling men to make fortunes and to preserve their fortunes, and there is no possible argument founded in law or in morals why these protected interests should not bear their proportionate burden of government. We simply call upon those who have the good fortune to have accumulated wealth to respond to the expenses of the great government under which they live and thrive. The Need for Health Insurance Irving Fisher january 1917 At present the United States has the unenviable distinction of being the only great industrial nation without universal health insurance. For a generation, the enlightened nations of Europe have one after another discussed the idea and followed discussion by adoption. It has constituted an important part of the policy and career of some of Europe’s greatest statesmen, including Bismarck and Lloyd George. The need of health insurance, like that of most other forms of insurance, is twofold. There is the need of indemniWcation against loss and the need of diminishing the loss itself. It is more economical to pay a little premium for the Wre insurance each year than to su¤er a big loss when the Wre comes. It is the poor whose need of health insurance is greatest. Millions of American workmen cannot at present avail themselves of necessary medical, surgical, and nursing aid. Health insurance is like elementary education. In order that it shall function properly its needs must be universal and in order to be universal, it must be obligatory. In health insurance, as in education, we are dealing not with obligatory burdens, but with obligatory beneWts. Certain interests which would be, or think they would be, adversely a¤ected by health insurance have made the specious plea that it is an un-American interference with liberty. They forgot that compulsory education, though at Wrst opposed on these very grounds, is highly American and highly liberative. According to the logic of those now shedding crocodile tears over health insurance, we ought, in order to remain truly American and truly free, to retain the precious liberties of our people to be illiterate, to su¤er accidents without indemniWcation, as well as to be sick without indemniWcation. It is by the compelling hand of the law that society secures liberation from the evils of crime, vice, ignorance, accidents, unemployment, invalidity, and disease. —Irving Fisher was the president of the American Association for Labor Legislation. 284 part 14 weaving a safety net ...

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