In the politically turbulent post–World War II period, proposed federal legislation to expand the welfare state pitted conservative Republicans against liberal Democrats in Congress. The conflict over national health insurance introduced between 1943 and 1947 in the Wagner-Murray- Dingell bill ended in a conservative victory with the bill stalled in committee. The primary constituents of the two sides were American Medical Association (AMA) spokesmen and corporate interests on the political right and labor leaders and public health advocates on the left. By 1946 the conservatives controlled Congress; thereafter liberal congressional reformers defaulted on the national health issue, as they had throughout the twentieth century, to corporate progressives and the tenets of “welfare capitalism.” Government continued as a regulator of “minimum standards” for business and industry. Provision of voluntary health insurance and direct medical services was left to the private sector. The Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program emerged out of the political stalemate over health care in the middle 1940s as a highly efficient and popular prepaid group health plan, innovative in its large scale and total integration of service and facilities. Its survival and growth was due to its acceptability to both liberals and conservatives as a model private-sector alternative to national health insurance or any other form of state medicine.
Comparison of the implementation of extra root canal treatment before and after fee schedule change in the Taiwan National Health Insurance System
