ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that Compulsory State Health Insurance (CHI) was rejected in the United States before 1930 because not enough American workers expected to benefit from it to generate the necessary political support. The origin of the CHI movement in the United States was the formation of the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL) in 1906, which by 1913 had 3,300 members consisting academic physicians, intellectuals and social reformers. Based on J.C.H. Emery's estimates of savings rates, a CHI premium of 4 per cent would have removed any income surplus for most households with heads under age forty. Moss argues that in the United States, 'the progressive concept of security widely attacked as socialistic and un-American during the Progressive Era has developed into one of the bulwarks of American public policy'. Rubinow claimed that American workers lived with the risk of more accidents, more sickness, more premature old age and invalidity, and more unemployment than wage-workers in most European countries.
