Libertarian.ie

Healthcare and welfare

• http://www.ithacahealth.org/
  Ithaca HOURS (http://www.ithacahours.com/ ) has started a non-profit, member-owned health security system, the Ithaca Health Fund. HOURS are accepted as partial payment of the $100 annual membership fee. Anyone in the world may join: payments are made for the services of any credentialed health provider anywhere... Since 1997 the Ithaca Health Alliance has pioneered co-op health financing & community health improvement.
• http://www.fee.org/vnews.php?nid=2908
  Lodge Doctors and the Poor
  Published in The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty - May 1994
  by David T. Beito
  Dr. Beito is a research fellow at The Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia.
  Medical Care Before the Welfare State, 1900-1930
  Before the rise of the welfare state, they were rivaled only by churches as organizational providers of social welfare. By conservative estimates eighteen million American men and women were members in 1920 at least three out of every ten adult males. While fraternal societies differed in ethnicity, class, and gender, most shared a common set of characteristics. In general, this included a decentralized lodge system, some sort of ritual, and the payment of cash benefits in times of sickness and death. By the turn of the century, an increasing number of societies began to add treatment by a doctor to their menu of services. This arrangement was known as lodge practice. It involved a simple contract under which a physician provided care in exchange for an annual salary determined by the size of lodge membership. To qualify, a prospective lodge doctor had to win an election by the members.
• http://debs.indstate.edu/a5412m8_1881.pdf
  Ancient Order of United Workmen.
  Mutual Benefit and Fraternal Aid: A Brief Statement. Virginia , Nev.: Enterprise Job Print, <1881?> 8 pp. Pamphlet A541.2 .M8 1881p. PDF
• http://www.theihs.org/libertyguide/hsr/hsr.php/39.html
  Fraternalism in America
  Review by Steve Davies
  From Humane Studies Review Vol. 13, No. 1
  From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State: Fraternal Societies and Social Services, 1890-1967.
  David T. Beito
  Chapel Hill, N.C., University of North Carolina Press, 2000, 424 pp.
  Why is this book so significant? Firstly, it is simply a very good piece of original research in the great tradition of empirical social history. It both tells an interesting story and provides a resource for teachers and future researchers. Secondly, it is almost the first attempt to look seriously at a hugely important part of working-class life before the mid twentieth century. A history of common life that does not look at the role and place of fraternalism has a massive hole in it. This book is, however, most important because of the way it calls into question widely held assumptions. In particular, it undermines the almost universally held belief that, in the absence of state action to relieve poverty or distress, the only alternatives are private philanthropy or widespread destitution and misery. This work shows that there is another way (one hesitates to say a "third way"), one far more compatible with the principles and values of a free society and with true egalitarianism.
• http://www.acton.org/publicat/books/transformwelfare/beito.html
  Transforming Welfare: The Revival of American Charity
  Fraternal Societies As an Alternative to the Welfare State
  by David T. Beito
  ... before the rise of the welfare state, Americans of all classes shared a deep aversion to dependence on either private organized charity or governmental relief. Indeed, there was a great stigma in the folk culture attached to any form of what today would be called hierarchical relief. Hierarchical relief can be defined as aid dispensed through large, bureaucratic, and formalized institutions. An essential characteristic is that those who control the purse strings are usually from significantly different geographical, ethnic, and income backgrounds than the recipients. ... institutions of reciprocal relief and self-help, such as fraternal societies, were once at the center of social welfare. Today, they have been pushed to the margins.