Question

Would Franklin D. Roosevelt have supported Canada's universal healthcare system? why or why not? also what kind of actual social programs did FDR give to the public? (if he did at all; I know that giving subsidies to farmers to produce less crop is not a social program, nor was the NIRA)

Answer 1

Yes, Franklin Roosevelt would have supported Canada's universal medical care arrangement.

With the Great Depression, an increasingly more number of persons couldn’t afford healthcare services. In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt asked Edgar Sydenstricter to assist drafting provisions to the pending Social Security statute to incorporate publicly-funded medical care programs. These reforms were opposed by AMA as ‘mandatory health insurance.’ Roosevelt then erased the medical care provisions from the legislation in 1935. Concern over organized medicine's disapproval to universal medical care became standard for years after the 1930s.

During this period, individual hospices started providing their own insurance schemes, the 1^st of which was Blue Cross. Groups of hospices & physician groups soon started selling group medical insurance policies to firms, who then offered them to their staff members & gathered premiums. In the 1940’s Congress passed a law which backed the new 3^rd -party insurers. During World War 2, industrialist Henry Kaiser utilized an arrangement in which physicians bypassed conventional fee-for-care & were contracted to fulfil all the medical requirements for his personnel on construction projects . After the war ceased, he opened the proposal to the public as a not-for-profit organization ( Kaiser Permanente).

During World War 2, the government introduced pay & price controls. In an attempt to continue attracting & retaining personnel without breaching those controls, firms sponsored medical insurance to their staff members in lieu of gross compensation. This was a beginning of the 3^rd -party paying arrangement which started to supplant direct out-of-the-pocket payments.