EP 484: The Freedom to Buy

So, health insurance is in the news. And so is Americans' feelings about it. I got to wondering how we ended up with this terrible health insurance system in the United States. I uncovered a fascinating story about the marketing campaign that sunk Truman's national health insurance program in the 1940s. I also discovered some interesting parallels to popular marketing messages among today's influencers, gurus, and marketers.

Today's episode is a little trip through history that will hopefully put some of our current issues in perspective.

Footnotes:

• Gallup's survey data on healthcare
• "The Lie Factory" by Jill Lepore, in The New Yorker
• Interview with Leone Baxter in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting
• "Campaigns, Inc." via the California State Archives
• "The deprofessionalization of medicine. Causes, effects, and responses." by RR Reed and D Evans
• "Professional Identity Misformation and Burnout: A Call for Graduate Medical Education to Reject “Provider” by Deborah Ehrlich and Joseph Gravel
• "White Privilege and Professionalization: A Decolonial and Critical Feminist Perspective on Professional Nursing" by Natalie Stake-Doucet
• "Why Doesn’t the United States Have National Health Insurance? The Role of the American Medical Association" by Marcella Alsan and Yousra Neberai
• "Oli London & the Right Wing Grift" by Matt Bernstein

Find an essay version of this episode at whatworks.fyi!

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What is What Works?

"Work" is broken. We're overcommitted, underutilized, and out of whack. But it doesn't have to be this way. What Works is a podcast about rethinking work, business, and leadership as we navigate the 21st-century economy. When you're an entrepreneur, independent worker, or employee who doesn't want to lose yourself to the whims of late-stage capitalism, this show is for you. Host Tara McMullin covers money, management, culture, media, philosophy, and more to figure out what's working (and what's not) today. Tara offers a distinctly interdisciplinary approach to deep-dive analysis of how we work and how work shapes us.