There are more details to the history of health insurance, but here is a brief summary.

In 1929, "a group of 1,500 Dallas-area teachers offered to prepay premiums to the Baylor Hospital in exchange for up to 21 days of future care, and the forerunner to Blue Cross was born." In the late 1930s Kaiser Construction started offering dam workers health insurance, eventually leading to Kaiser Permanente.

"In 1940, less than 10 percent (12 million people) of the U.S. population had any kind of health coverage. By 1950, about half of America was covered." The increase is attributed to WWII and the government limiting wage increases. Employers used the health insurance benefit as a way to recruit employees. As a result certain groups of society were left out; those unable to work or had low paying jobs without health insurance and retirees.

"In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson, with Democratic majorities in the U.S. House and Senate, created the Medicare and Medicaid systems. Today, the two programs, administered jointly by federal and state governments, insure more than 105 million Americans at any given time, about a third of the U.S. population."

In 2010, President Barack Obama, again with Democratic majorities in the U.S. House and Senate, created the Affordable Care Act. "A larger percentage of Americans will see their care arranged through government programs, with boomers entering Medicare en masse and millions of low-income workers now eligible for newly expanded Medicaid programs."

"And as more people sign up for individual plans through HealthCare.gov and state-operated health insurance shopping exchanges, incrementally, health coverage will become further divorced from employment, a slow unraveling of the job-based insurance system that has developed over the last century."

Alas, we now have a Republican president and a Republican majority in the U.S. House and Senate. Will health insurance continue to evolve or will it devolve?