Podcast: How America Adopted Private Health Insurance
Podcast: How America Adopted Private Health Insurance
In this podcast, Marcella Alsan discusses the AMA's role in creating the country's private health-care system.
Americans pay more for health care than any other nation, but few know that the system's current model reflects nearly a century of PR campaigns and competing interests.
SHP’s Marcella Alsan, MD, PhD, MPH, joins host Maxwell Dorey on his podcast, Marginal Babble, to examine how today's private health-care system was built through a coordinated campaign by the American Medical Association (AMA) and PR firms like Whitaker & Baxter, which transformed a voluntary, doctor-led prepayment model into the foundation of the modern industry.
Alsan, a professor of economics and courtesy faculty member at Stanford Health Policy, talks about how that campaign launched after World War II still shapes today’s challenges, from limited price negotiations to rising costs and uneven access.
Their conversation centers on a new paper by Alsan and her Harvard University colleague Yousra Neberai, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. It examines how the American Medical Association (AMA) shaped today’s health insurance system. The abstract from the paper:
