Universal Care history

In 1906, the American Association of Labor Legislation (AALL) finally led the campaign for health insurance.

In 1914, reformers sought to involve physicians in formulating this bill and the American Medical Association (AMA) actually supported the AALL proposal.

Despite its broad mandate, the committee decided to concentrate on health insurance, drafting a model bill in 1915.

In 1917, the AMA House of Delegates favored compulsory health insurance as proposed by the AALL, but many state medical societies opposed it.

For a number of reasons, health care costs also began to rise during the 1920’s, mostly because the middle class began to use hospital services and hospital costs started to increase.

China’s Nationalist party opened a westernised department of public health service in 1927, aiming to go beyond the limitations of traditional medicine.

In the 1930’s, the focus shifted from stabilizing income to financing and expanding access to medical care.

Though it never received FDR’s full support, the proposal grew out of his Tactical Committee on Medical Care, established in 1937.

FDR’s second attempt — Wagner Bill, National Health Act of 1939: But there was one more push for national health insurance during FDR’s administration: The Wagner National Health Act of 1939.

First introduced in 1943, it became the very famous Wagner-Murray- Dingell Bill.

In 1944, the Committee for the Nation’s Health, (which grew out of the earlier Social Security Charter Committee), was a group of representatives of organized labor, progressive farmers, and liberal physicians who were the foremost lobbying group for the Wagner-Murray-Dingell Bill.

They assessed their members an extra $25 each to resist national health insurance, and in 1945 they spent $1.5 million on lobbying efforts which at the time was the most expensive lobbying effort in American history.

In 1946, the Republicans took control of Congress and had no interest in enacting national health insurance.

But it was not until 1948 that Britons gained universal health coverage, with the establishment of the National Health Service, free at the point of use and financed by the state.

Global population growth hits lowest rate since 1950

Finally, Rhode Island congressman Aime Forand introduced a new proposal in 1958 to cover hospital costs for the aged on social security.

Medicare, established in 1965, covers the elderly, while Medicaid caters for the unemployed and the poor.

Medicare coverage was extended in 1972 to cover the disabled and people with chronic kidney disease, and later under President Barack Obama to include low-income families.

In 1978, an international WHO conference at Alma-Ata, in what is today Kazakhstan, praised the barefoot doctors and identified primary care as essential for global public health.

Similar proposals had been made earlier, as universal health care was also part of the platform of Jesse Jackson's failed 1988 presidential bid.

Bill Clinton campaigned for president on a platform that included health care reform in 1992.

In contrast to the Health Security Act, Representative Jim McDermott (D-WA) introduced the similarly named American Health Security Act in 1993, which would have created a single-payer system.

In 2003 Representative John Conyers Jr. (D-MI) first introduced the United States National Health Insurance Act, which called for a single-payer health care system, but the bill received neither a debate nor a vote on the House floor.

While the federal government took little action toward achieving universal health care, state legislators experienced success at expanding health coverage in Massachusetts in 2006.

In 2008 Barack Obama campaigned on health care reform in his bid for president, drawing heavily on the Massachusetts model.

A frequently cited study conducted by researchers at Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Health Alliance in 2009 determined that almost 45,000 Americans die each year due to problems related to their lack of health insurance.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the percentage of Americans who did not have health insurance dropped from 16 percent in 2010 before the law went into effect to 8.6 percent in the final months of Obama's presidency.

McDermott reintroduced the bill at each session of Congress until choosing not to seek reelection in 2016.

Since 2017, 12 December has been proclaimed by the UN as International Universal Health Coverage Day (UHC Day).

In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2018 unveiled ambitious plans — dubbed ‘Modicare’ — to reform the public health system in the second-most populous country in the world.

As of 2019, single-payer health care systems could be found in seventeen countries, including Canada, Norway, and Japan.