What Was The Original Purpose Of Health Insurance? 
A great question and one that the answer for allows us to contrast how a product or service can evolve over time into something quite different from it 's original concept . Over a century ago health insurance was introduced as a financial protection against serious injury or illness . At that time and for decades after , the state of the medical arts was such that there was little your doctor or local hospital could do to deal with your cancer or heart attack other than dull the pain . People 's life expectancies were much shorter than today and a whole host of medical conditions we recognize and treat in the 21st century were unrecognized or untreatable . Wage and price controls imposed by the Roosevelt administration during WWII became the catalyst for wide spread employer based health insurance as employee benefits were not subject to these government controls and offering benefits gave employers a recruitment advantage in the labor force short marketplace of that era . This practice continued and expanded along with the American economy in the post war era and became institutionalized . What has changed in our lifetimes have been the advances in health care , the things that we now consider as being healthcare -LRB- do you ever wonder how our ancestors who were dealing with wars , attacks by native Americans , droughts & floods dealt with stress and depression before we had a pill for everything ? -RRB- , the fact that we live much longer and the introduction of government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid which expanded access to health care while at the same time introducing pricing distortions in the health care marketplace . These government programs , no matter how noble their intent , have never paid market rates for health care and set in motion the cost shifting process by medical providers of inflating their charges for those in private health insurance . Since the late 70 's health insurance has evolved from just protection against catastrophic loss into much more of an ongoing maintenance contract that covers more and more of the routine areas of health care people once paid for themselves . Kind of like buying a car and having all the oil changes & tire rotations included for `` free '' , they 're not really free but are buried into the higher cost you are paying for the car . So , that is how the health insurance concept originated and the story of how it has morphed into the major social and political issue our nation is struggling with today . 