Right-wing Republican activists and "Tea-Baggers" have been showing up at town hall meetings with posters of President Obama photo-shopped to look like Hitler and have been asking their representatives why they support a "Nazi" policy. But, as usual, these "protesters" display an appalling ignorance of history.
As Peter Muehlbauer points out in his Telepolis article Obama, Hitler und die Krankenversicherung (Obama, Hitler and Health Insurance) the Third Reich was actually a paradise for private health insurers: they were innovators when it came to disenfranchising policy holders - especially Jews.
Tatsächlich ähnelt die Gesundheitspolitik im Dritten Reich sogar sehr viel eher jener, wie sie die Gegner öffentlicher Gesundheitsfürsorgepläne propagieren. (In fact, the health care policy of the Third Reich had much more in common with what the opponents of public health care plans are advocating.)
Private insurance industry leaders played key roles in the Nazi regime. Hitler appointed Dr. Kurt Schmidt, a director of Allianz Insurance Group, as economic minister - an indication of the importance of private insurance in the Third Reich. Dr. Gerhard Wagner , who worked for the private health insurer DKV, became the chief advocate of Nazi euthanasia, setting up Hitler's original Death Panels. Muehlbauer points out how the private health insurers seized on the growing anti-Semitism of the Nazis as a method for optimizing their profits:
Wo sich der Antisemitismus mit dem Profit verbinden ließ, waren die privaten Krankenversicherungen durchaus eifriger als der Staatsapparat. Bereits kurz nach der Machtergreifung Hitlers strichen sie die Erstattung für Behandlungskosten, welche bei jüdischen und kommunistischen Ärzten entstanden waren. Dies ging allein auf die Initiative der Privatwirtschaft zurück: (The private health insurers were even more ruthless than the state agencies when it came to profiting from anti-Semitism. Shortly after Hitlers seizure of power they cut reimbursements to Jewish and communist physicians. This was an initiative taken solely by private industry.)
Muehlbauer makes reference to the ground-breaking work of the historian Ingo Böhle in researching the role of private health insurers in the Third Reich. I was able to find an article by Ingo Böhle online (alas, only for German readers) -The Insurance Industry and the Jewish Insured under National Socialism- the Example of Hamburg. Here Böhle examines the activities of property and casualty insurers, life insurance groups and the health insurance industry. By far, the health insurers were the most radical among all the German insurance groups in implementing restrictions against Jews long before this became the official policy of the Nazi regime. Insurance claims by Jewish policy holders were denied, and the reimbursement claims by Jewish doctors were also denied when "review boards" of Aryan physicians "determined" that there were no valid medical reasons for the diagnoses. Eventually long-time Jewish policy holders were simply cut from the rolls as "bad risks". Some of the insurers even used this as part of marketing campaigns, advertising to German consumers that they were "Judenfrei" - free of any Jewish policy holders. By the time the Nazi insurance authority directed the termination of Jewish insurance contracts up to April 1940, most of the companies didn’t have Jewish clients any longer. The "free market" approach had worked beautifully.