Chapter 3 The Evolution of Health Services in the United States Learning Objectives To discover historical developments that have shaped the nature of the US health care delivery system To evaluate why the system has been resistant to national health insurance reforms To explore developments associated with the corporatization of health care To speculate on whether the era of socialized medicine has dawned in the United States “Where’s the market?” 81 26501_CH03_FINAL.indd 81 7/27/11 10:31:29
The beginnings and ends of what we choose to call centuries are almost invariably years of little significance. But there is little agreement over when the twentieth century c.e. arrived, and there were several points both before the year 2000 (the collapse of the Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany, the surge of globalization from the mid-1990s) and afterward (9/11, or the global recession of 2008) when one could quite plausibly argue that a new era had begun. A compelling case can