Wow, so you have this defeat that Even I'm not all that familiar with as a history major...
Seems to me it couldn't have been that impressive.
I think 46 million people without insurance is a bit more of a pressing matter than some obscure battle where all of 600 people were killed. Just saying.
Right there's your problem. There's a lot of our history that the colleges and universities don't teach.
No, they teach what is important. One battle in our 200 year campaign to exterminate the native people in this country isn't that important. One might even argue that they don't emphasize it that much because this was one of the few white people lost.
Health insurance as we know it did not exist until World War 2. When Roosevelt froze wages, employers began offering incentives such as health insurance. Prior to that, people were not dying like a zombie apocalypse because they couldn't get health care. They got care. Once the modern health care insurance industry was created, the cost of health care rolled like a snowball downhill.
And a reading from the book of Limbaugh. Yes, we've all heard that story. I should point out that prior to world war II, people might not have been dying like the Zombie Apocolypse, but when they did get sick, there wasn't really jack diddly anyone could do about it. Which is why the average American Life expectency in 1930 was 59 and today it's 78.
Life Expectancy at Birth by Race and Sex, 1930–2010 — Infoplease.com
Part of this is because we actually developed programs like the ones you denounce below to treat people... the other is because we developed technologies to treat them, and guess what, those technologies cost money.
Then the government stepped in with Medicare and Medicaid, you know, government health insurance, and began to regulate the living daylights out of medical services, which drove up the cost. Now, if you can pay out of pocket and cash is good because it doesn't require office staff to sort out the billing and deal with insurance, a doctor can't charge you less than Medicare rates or it's considered discrimination.
Get government the hell out of the way and you'll actually see the cost of medical care go down.
Actually, what drove up the cost was that we were starting to actually treat people, as stated above.
Now you do blunder into one thing. If we got rid of private insurance and just went to a single payer system, a lot of overhead would be cut down... that's for sure.
But of course, most "out of pocket" expenses might work for getting a prescription to treat that cold, but when you are talking about treatment for colonic cancer, not so much. Then you really do need for those costs to be "socialized" either through a government program or private insurance. Pay your own way won't work.