History
Germany has the world's oldest national health insurance, through the world's oldest universal health care system, with origins dating back to Otto von Bismarck's social legislation, which included the Health Insurance Bill of 1883, Accident Insurance Bill of 1884, and Old Age and Disability Insurance Bill of 1889. In Britain, the National Insurance Act 1911 marked the first steps there towards national health insurance, covering most employed persons and their financial dependents and all persons who had been continuous contributors to the scheme for at least five years whether they were working or not. This system of health insurance continued in force until the creation of the National Health Service in 1948 which created a universal service, funded out of general taxation rather than on an insurance basis, and providing health services to all legal residents. Most other countries' national health insurance systems were implemented in the period following the Second World War as a process of deliberate healthcare reform, intended to make health care affordable to all, in the spirit of Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 by nations which had adopted the declaration as signatories. The US did not ratify the social and economic rights sections, including Article 25's right to health.
Read more about this topic: National Health Insurance
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“There is no example in history of a revolutionary movement involving such gigantic masses being so bloodless.”
—Leon Trotsky (18791940)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernisms high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)