USS Tuscaloosa (CA-37) steaming at high speed through heavy seas off Cape Hatteras, April 8, 1943.
Franklin Roosevelt instituted wage and price controls in an effort to combat inflation, and froze employment in place. The move, of questionable constitutionality, had a permeant, unintended impact on the U.S. economy.
While wages and prices were frozen, benefits, including health insurance, were not. That's because many employers didn't offer it until this time. Unable to induce workers to switch from one employer to another, they switched to offering benefits, such as health insurance, although Roosevelt's order also precluded workers from switching jobs. Employees required permission to move employment, and unions lost the ability to bargain for higher wages in an era when wages were rising, but the benefit inducements came in none the less.
We pick that story up here, from a prior thread:
Americans like to think we have a fee market health care system, but we do not and haven't since World War Two. What we really have is a health insurance based system, although it's breaking down by anyone's measure.. Prior to WWII, most Americans just paid as they went for health care, which had the collateral effects of making health care generally very service oriented on a person to person basis. I.e., "family" doctors were the majority of doctors not just because of the times, but because if mostly "health care consumers" were average folks with average wages, that's where the work was, and it wasn't going to pay all that well as a rule either. That doesn't mean that there weren't surgeons, etc., of course, and it doesn't mean the level of care, where received, wasn't very good. Anyhow, the switch to an insurance based system, with health insurance companies regulated on a state by state basis, alters the free market system as the carriers determine what benefits exist and what they regard as a fair price, based upon actuarial concerns and analysis. Whatever that price may be, it's not the same as an average person going in to the doctor, and of course people who are covered can go in for much, much more than they otherwise would be able to afford. In contrast to the US's history in this area, Germany introduced a type of national health insurance in the Bismarck era as a type of industrial insurance to combat the rising influence of Socialism and to acknowledge the increased danger of industrial work. The German model of health insurance is the model for at least one states Workers Compensation law, my state's, which provides it as a state benefit (no private carrier) and taxes employers accordingly. The Germans seem to like their system, but there's always a lot of complaining about the same basic type of system here in the state, even though it actually runs fairly efficiently and pays for a lot of horrific injuries and their medical treatment. It's interesting to note here that the Germans, whose political history is extremely different from ours, introduced national health insurance to combat socialism, when here its generally regarded as a type of socialism. That doesn't mean it is or isn't, but it's interesting to note that Bismarck took that approach in an effort to take the wind out of the sails of his primary opponents. It worked fairly well too, in that the Socialist did not take over in Germany until the Weimar Republic, at which time they were the first, and ineffectual, party to govern under the Post World War One parliamentary system that fell in 1932.
At any rate, technology and an evolving practice model, funded mostly by insurance, has provided us with wonderful health care, but it's also become very expensive. From World War Two, and increasing on through the 1970s, this was largely funded by health care which was purchased by employers. Some people bought their own health insurance, which was affordable at the time. Those without insurance paid as they went, which was inconvenient for most, and bad for some, but generally workable.
Now, expenses have reached the point where many cannot afford to pay themselves and health insurance has gone from being a workplace benefit to a near necessity for most. People actually keep jobs just for the insurance. I've known, for example, of one person who kept a job she wanted to leave to return to school for just that reason. As a practical matter, the government has become the insurer of last resort for many who have no insurance and who end up using the hospital, in emergencies, as their health care provider. Increased private medical competition, in the meantime, has become an increasingly common feature of health care as the large dollar amounts that are present in the industry naturally has resulted in private competition. County and state facilities, therefore, end up in competition with each other, with the practical result of that often being that county and state facilities end up becoming more and more in the nature of public clinics in some ways. And people have an expectation of health care, which is not abnormal, nor greedy, in a generally affluent society. That's true of our views on a lot of various things, and its particularly true of health care. People generally feel that anyone ought to, and even should, seek the health care that they need, when they need it, and there's a feeling of distress when a certain percentage of the population cannot afford it. Put another way, back in the 1940s if a person was afflicted with a stroke died, it was probably the case that this would have occurred no matter what. If they were unable to secure health care for some reason for that condition, the result probably would have been the same as if they did. This would not be true, of course, for every sort of condition, but what that does mean is that there was an overall greater acceptance that if economic conditions prevented treatment, that this was part of the nature of life, rather than being something that would be regarded as deeply unfair. And, for that matter, the medical community made a dedicated effort to include those who could not pay in their practices. They still do, but the nature of that society wide had become different.
Preventing workers from moving from one job to another was frankly a shocking move, in the modern context. It effectively imposed a type of conscription, or even darned near slavery, upon the civilian population during the war. Employees could move jobs if they secured permission, but it required that.
The 1943 NFL draft was held.
French actor Harry Baur died shortly after being released by German authorities, having been tortured by the Gestapo after his arrest which stemmed from his efforts to secure the release of his wife, Rika Radifé. A Turkish actress, she had been arrested on charges of espionage and would survive the war.
I guess on this one, I should ponder what this meant for my family. My grandfather owned his own business, a meat packing business, so the order wouldn't really apply to him, save for the fact that it did for his employees, which must have been an odd experience.
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