#41 The History of Health Insurance w/ Melissa Thomasson
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 23 January 2017
⏱️ 54 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Fixing the American healthcare system has been one of the most difficult and divisive problems in modern US history. The Affordable Care Act has helped more Americans than ever gain insurance, yet the remaining problems have led the Republican-controlled Congress to put "repeal and replace" at the top of their legislative agenda in 2017. Why has health insurance been such a tricky issue in the United States? Why did our insurance model develop differently than in other industrialized countries, and how can understanding this help us overcome the problems we face today?
In this episode of The Road to Now, Dr. Melissa Thomasson helps us answer these questions by taking us through the history of the American health insurance system. We also offer up another installment of Path to the Present (the podcast within a podcast) in which Matt Negrin and Alex Trowbridge provide a concise history of the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare). Believe me- this episode is YOUGE!
Melissa Thomasson is Julian Lange Professor of Economics at the University of Miami and an expert on the economic history of the American health care system.
For more on this episode can be found at our website: www.theroadtonow.com
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Fixing the American healthcare system has been one of the most difficult and divisive problems in modern U.S. history. |
| 0:06.0 | The Affordable Care Act has helped more Americans than ever gain insurance, yet the remaining problems have led the Republican-controlled Congress to put repeal and replace at the top of their legislative agenda in 2017. |
| 0:17.0 | Why has health insurance been such a tricky issue in the United States? Why did our |
| 0:22.4 | insurance model develop differently than in other industrialized countries, and how can this |
| 0:26.4 | help us understand the problems we face today? In this episode of The Road to Now, we speak with |
| 0:31.2 | Dr. Melissa Thomason of Miami University to find out. |
| 0:41.0 | I'm Ben Sawyer. |
| 0:42.2 | I'm Bob Crawford. |
| 0:43.8 | This is the roads now. |
| 0:51.0 | Well, Ben, this is going to be Monday morning when people hear this. |
| 0:51.8 | Right. |
| 0:54.0 | Our first episode of the Trump administration. That's right. |
| 0:55.0 | And perhaps the day that Obamacare, the signature piece of legislation for the 44th President, |
| 1:03.0 | Barack Obama, now regular citizen, Citizen Barry, if, um, will be repealed and possibly replaced. |
| 1:15.6 | Yeah. And, uh, maybe, maybe it will, maybe it won't. Uh, maybe that's not as easy to do as what |
| 1:22.9 | people have said. And it's kind of interesting because, uh, uh, you you know Trump has set a really high bar for |
| 1:29.4 | Congress by proclaiming that everyone will have health insurance and that it will be way better |
| 1:33.8 | when as we talked about today history doesn't suggest that that's so easy to do well there's |
| 1:41.3 | one thing I know about Trump care it's going to be huge it's going to be huge we're |
| 1:47.9 | going to love it bigly and it's going to be great it's going to be just it's going to be great |
| 1:53.3 | i can't wait that you i'm sold bob i'm sold bob i don't need any details i don't need any |
| 1:58.3 | details whatsoever well here we here we are, man. |
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