The Need for Health Insurance
Friday, May 1, 2009 at 11:34 “At present the United States has the unenviable distinction of being the only great industrial nation without universal health insurance.
Health insurance is like elementary education. To fuction properly, it must be universal and to be universal, it must be obligatory.
Certain interests which tink they would be adversely affected by health insurance have made the specious plea that it is an un-American interference with liberty. According to the logic of those now shedding crocodile tears, we ought, in order to remain truly American and truly free, retain the precious liberties of our people to be illiterate, to suffer accidents without indemnification, as well as to be sick without indemnification.
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.”
By Irving Fisher,
January, 1917
La Follette’s Weekly Magazine
reprinted: April 2009 issue of The Progressive
From Wikipedia:
Irving Fisher (February 27, 1867 Saugerties, New York – April 29, 1947, New York) was an American economist, health campaigner, and eugenicist, and one of the earliest American neoclassical economists and, although he was perhaps the first celebrity economist, his reputation today is probably higher than it was in his lifetime. Several concepts are named after him, including the Fisher equation, Fisher hypothesis and Fisher separation theorem.