Why will we get National Health Insurance?
Because we’re beginning a paradigm shift that’s all about the working classes.
If you've been waiting with baited breath, sure that if national health doesn't happen now, it will never happen, then let me put your mind at ease. Yes, this is a good time to get started on enhancing the social safety net, but guess what? This is just the beginning of more than three decades that are going to be focused on just that. How do I know?
History.
If history follows the pattern that it has carved out for at least the past 500 years in western Europe and the United States, national health insurance is a shoe-in — beginning next year.
That’s right. The middle of 2010.
Do I sound like I’m drifting into some kind of Mayan prophecy?
Over the past five years, I’ve been gathering historical data that demonstrates a three-fold cycle of changing world views. The cycle takes place over 97.5 years in modern times, and 133.5 years before industrialism and democracy set in. The new world view that we’re teetering on the edge of is one I’ve named spirit — traditionally spiritual "awakenings" occur in these times.
But that’s not all. Each of the world views seems to support a different base — the oppressed, the elite — that’s the one we’re leaving — and the working classes (spirit). So in the times that are coming, members of the working class benefit. That 40-hour work week we’ve been saddled with since the elite "took office" in 1977? No, that just isn’t to the benefit of your normal working class person, now is it? Got to go.
Let's look at the evidence that the working classes tend to profit in these times --- even before democracy supercharged their ability to change things in their favor.
Let’s begin with the 16th century spirit era.
Mid 1572-1616. Suddenly an exceptional number of hospitals were being built in England. In 1572 a law was passed that is considered a landmark step in realizing that the jobless were a responsibility of the state, not of private charity. A 1576 act required that every town provide work for the unemployed. A 1601 Act established overseers who would make sure that people were provided with materials like flax, hemp, wool, thread and iron to give them work, that those who couldn’t work would be the legal responsibility of their close relatives, who would be fined if they refused to do their duty, and children without caretakers would be apprenticed. From no national legislation intended to benefit the unemployed to this landmark social legislation less than 30 years later.
Let’s look at the next spirit era in the 18th century.
1706-mid 1750. The king of Prussia, Frederick William I, began a policy of Bauernschutz, which translates as "farmer protection."
In England, pension benefits increased. More of the temporarily sick or unemployed were covered. According to economist George Boyer, real expenditures per unemployed person rose 84% from 1696 to 1750, even though prices were actually falling and the population growing.
The 19th century spirit era.
Mid 1815-1847. In 1834, Britain passed the Factory Act, regulating child labor for the first time. Children under 9 couldn’t be employed and those from 9-13 were to have 2 hours of education a day, with no one under 12 working more than 48 hours a week. Prussia in 1839 and France in 1841 would also pass laws limiting child labor.
Meanwhile, France passed the Guizot Law of 1833, which required communities of 500 or more to maintain a public schoolteacher for boys and allow kids who couldn’t afford it to have free tuition.
But it’s the 20th century spirit era that really brought in massive benefits to workers. (That's when so many countries experienced their first spirit era where the working classes got to vote. Makes a difference.)
1913 - mid 1945. We see a few signs of the coming times in the transitional years just before the paradigm shift, but again, the changes seem to come much more readily after the tipping point has been reached.
Switzerland and Sweden developed sickness and accident insurance laws in 1912 and 1916.
Voluntary national unemployment insurance plans began to be subsidized in the years just before the shift in France, Norway and Denmark, in 1905-1907. But the first compulsory insurance system came in Britain in 1911. And then suddenly everybody wanted in with either voluntary or compulsory systems between 1916 and 1940, as in the Netherlands, Finland, Italy, Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, the United States and Canada.
Pension plans: Britain, Germany, Sweden, Norway Italy and France all developed or expanded pension plans from 1908 to 1936. The United States passed its Social Security Act in 1935.
We could talk about all of the money paid out by countries like the United States to keep people working during the Depression. We could talk about help for farmers, for home-buyers, benefits for mothers — here and in Europe.
We could talk about Germany’s government subsidizing a "people’s car" that 336,000 working class Germans were able to afford through modest payments — the volkswagen.
But let’s talk specifically about national health insurance. How Britain got national health insurance for employed people at a reasonable cost in a 1911 bill. How France in 1930 instituted a health insurance program that required low-income workers on a salary to participate. This is when it all got started.
Except here. It didn’t quite get off the ground.
And if it wasn’t done by 1945, well, it wasn’t an easy sell thereafter. Programs benefitting the working classes just haven’t been front and center.
But they’re about to be.
So, if you’ve been worrying about national health insurance — relax. It’s coming. We’ve been behind western Europe on this policy, but these are the times when we catch up.
And frankly, unless you’re currently waiting for that health insurance to come through for personal reasons — you’ve got bigger problems to worry about. There's more to these spirit eras then expanding the social safety net.
Just wait until 2010.