![Kyle Willis, who died this year of an entirely preventable wisdom tooth infection, due to a lack of insurance and funds. Via This Is All Kinds Of Wrong of the Day - The Daily What.
”’[Willis] might as well have been living in 1927,’ Dr. Jim Jirjis, director of general internal medicine at Vanderbilt University, told ABC News. ‘All of the advances we’ve made in medicine today and are proud of, for people who don’t have coverage, you might as well never have developed those.’”
Jirjis’ reference to a specific year intrigued me, and led me to this article by Joseph S. Ross, “The Committee on the Costs of Medical Care and the History of Health Insurance in the United States” (pdf file). It turns out that the Committee on the Cost of Medical Care was created in 1927: “The committee was explicit in its purpose: to address the problem of the ‘costs’ of medical care. Costs referred to the fact that middle-class people often could not afford higher-priced technologic and specialty services. In fact, in 1927, the first item on the agenda at the AMA convention was a demand problem: the inability of the people to pay the cost of modern scientific medicine.”](http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lr11zusf6Y1qzc7awo1_400.jpg)
Kyle Willis, who died this year of an entirely preventable wisdom tooth infection, due to a lack of insurance and funds. Via This Is All Kinds Of Wrong of the Day - The Daily What.
”’[Willis] might as well have been living in 1927,’ Dr. Jim Jirjis, director of general internal medicine at Vanderbilt University, told ABC News. ‘All of the advances we’ve made in medicine today and are proud of, for people who don’t have coverage, you might as well never have developed those.’”
Jirjis’ reference to a specific year intrigued me, and led me to this article by Joseph S. Ross, “The Committee on the Costs of Medical Care and the History of Health Insurance in the United States” (pdf file). It turns out that the Committee on the Cost of Medical Care was created in 1927: “The committee was explicit in its purpose: to address the problem of the ‘costs’ of medical care. Costs referred to the fact that middle-class people often could not afford higher-priced technologic and specialty services. In fact, in 1927, the first item on the agenda at the AMA convention was a demand problem: the inability of the people to pay the cost of modern scientific medicine.”
