Health Care Timeline

Health Care Timeline
Student’s Name
Institution Affiliation
Health Care Through Out the Years
Date Event and Significance
1860-1870 Creation of the first system to offer national medical care. This initiative came into existence after the civil war, and it was established by the federal government in the south. This system would provide health services to the slaves who had been freed after the war. To put the system to action, the government constructed hospitals and employed medical officers who treated the many sick slaves in the region.The hospitals, however, did not exist for long, and new health programs had to be introduced to meet health needs (Rosen, 1974).
1901-1920s Establishment of the social welfare for citizens. The social welfare put into place that was established in this period was to help the governments of that era to subsidize health care industry or to directly run the heath programs operating in their countries. Additionally, in this period the United Kingdom came up with an Insurance Act that saw employees get medical attention but no dependants benefitted from it. The president of America in 1912 started a campaign that wanted the state to provide insurance security for its citizens. However, the American Medical Association (AMA) opposed this plan because it would hinder the progression of the private health sector (Miles et al., 2001).
1930-1940 Private health centers started to offer insurance programs. This began after the American Medical Association succeeded in stopping the government from offering the ‘compulsory health insurance’ in 1935 which was to help people in the period of Great Depression.

The Blue Cross became the first insurance program to be offered by the private health sector. The Later legislation was passed that saw the government accepts and supports the third-party insurer. The legislation gave the private health programs a chance to grow to offer better services to the citizens (Rosen, 1974).
1940-1950 The introduction of wage and price regulation by the government. The control of wages and prices came to place during the second world war. Due to these new laws, the private sector employers were at the risk of losing their employees. For them to maintain their workers a new system was introduced, and the employers began to pay for employee insurance benefits instead of them paying their salaries cementing the third-party insurance program. The benefits acted as a motivation to the employees because it reduced their health costs. Besides, the right to medical care was added to the bill of rights by the Congress to ensure all citizens had access to health services (Miles et al., 2001).
1950-1980 Innovation on more medicine and advancements. In this period, more advancement in the field of medicine was made a discovering variety of medicine to heal more diseases. These diseases included arthritis and infectious diseases. Vaccines for diseases like polio were discovered. Moreover, due to technology advancement, the first organ transplant was done. Additionally, in this period people discovered their rights and fight for the rights of the elderly who cannot afford insurance premiums. This led to the introduction of Medicare which covered the old people. Due to the Medicare insurance old and neglected elderly have no reason to worry because they are covered (Rosen, 1974).
1990-2000 The emergency of HIV/AIDS virus. This virus increased the mortality rate worldwide posing a huge threat to the human existence. Consequently, the cost of getting a health service was on the rise due to inflation and also the less number of doctors existing in that time. The crises in the health sector made the developed countries begin to support the developing countries. The United States government did the funding ensuring that the developing countries provided care to the people with HIV. Today the rate of deaths caused by this virus has reduced following the issue of this funds which focused on improving health care ( Travis et al., 2004)
References
Miles, A., Bentley, P., Polychronis, A., Grey, J., & Melchiorri, C. (2001). Recent developments
in the evidence‐based healthcare debate. Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, 7(2), 85-89.
Rosen, G. (1974). From medical police to social medicine: essays on the history of health care.
Science History Publications, Neale Watson Academic Publications, Inc., 156 Fifth Avenue, New York 10010, USA.
Travis, P., Bennett, S., Haines, A., Pang, T., Bhutta, Z., Hyder, A. A., … & Evans, T. (2004).
Overcoming health-systems constraints to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. The Lancet, 364(9437), 900-906.