Publicly funded health care in the United States--1798

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An interesting bit of history around Congress' authority to step into the issue of individual mandates for health care.

A link to the [url="http://blogs.forbes.com/rickungar/2011/01/17/congress-passes-socialized-medicine-and-mandates-health-insurance-in-1798/]Forbes article[/url], a journal not known for its leftist tendencies.

And a link to the [url="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/plum-line/2011/01/founding_fathers_favored_gover.html]Washington Post's[/url] appraisal (a journal that is, perhaps).

While I don't think the articles are conclusive resolution of the question, they do rather diminish the argument about the intentions of the drafters of the Constitution--given than many of them were directly involved in this legislation.

Still, when has history ever interfered with politics?

I already posted a thread about that blog post.

At the time the Constitution of 1787 was being drafted there was no "health care" in the sense that we understand the term. Doctors were still bleeding their patients and leeches were still being used. The most advance treatment was inoculation against small pox by scratching a wound with the pus of an infected person. This was a trick that European learned by the Turks.

In those days there were no anesthetics or antibiotics of any kind. Health care such as it was was a very dicey and unreliable treatment.

In those days (before Pasteur, no one even knew what caused diseases or infections.


ruveyn