es how the current economic reorganization of health care requires a reevaluation of those values.
Prior to the mid-1900s, physicians had relatively little to offer patients other than attentive observation, dietary recommendations, and a limited array of medications and surgical procedures. Public health and sanitation measures accounted for most of the important improvements in morbidity and mortality.(2) Payment for services was generally out-of-pocket and seldom posed an economic crisis for patients. As insurance for hospitalization and later for physician services emerged in the 1930s, it quickly became a major workplace benefit, particularly during World War II as wage and price freezes precluded most other ways of increasing employees' compensation.(3) Thereafter, tax exemptions for employer-provided insurance, plus a rising general inflation that put higher wages into higher tax brackets, encouraged increasingly comprehensive hea
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