Let’s go back to a sleepier time in history, a more depressing time, to a small town called Dallas, Texas in 1929.

One plucky and astute vice president of something important at Baylor Hospital noticed something troubling on the books as the realities of the depression started kicking in. He noticed that revenue and admissions were down. He also noticed the amount of unpaid bills were up.

When you are the VP of important things, this is not a good thing to notice. More importantly, you are the person who needs to do something about it.

Who was this observant white guy? Well, Justin Ford Kimball of course.

In effort to get more heads in beds, his revenues and collections back up, he came up with a masterful plan. One that at the time, seemed reasonable and wholly innocuous. One might even call it down right innovative and wise.

He devised the Baylor Health Plan. I think they called it that, I don’t know. The plan was simple. $0.50 per month that would cover a 21-day stay at the hospital. Anything beyond the 21-days, $5.00 per day.

Here’s a fun tidbit from the annals of history that gets lost today. The Baylor plan did advertise and one of it’s pitches was this: "Baylor uses no sales agency or middlemen, but prefers to deal directly with each group so that all group hospitalization fees paid may be used only for hospital care of members and not for any personal profit.”

From humble beginnings, the framework for our wonderful health insurance system was set.

Blue Cross for hospital coverage. Blue Shield for medical coverage.

This led to the 1942 Stabilization Act. Great name. This act used emergency powers to freeze wages.

But the big dogs aren’t dumb. They had heard of this insurance stuff and thought, maybe we can entice people with benefits outside of money.

Well, it worked.

By 1950, 50% of Americans had employer sponsored health insurance. It was 66% a decade later.

To wrap this jaunt down memory lane up, three Major step changes led us to where we are today:

Hospitals needed to secure revenue and improve collections

Physicians didn’t want hospital power to reign unchecked and employers needed workers to work

Wages froze, so large companies used health insurance to lure talent

Now, profit is not inherently bad. But adding no value by leveraging legal and statutory mechanisms to your advantage to generate obscene personal and organization profit is bad. Very, very bad.

Employers buy $1.2T worth of healthcare each year. Imagine if every employer waived goodbye to their middlemen?

The government buys $1.6T worth of healthcare each year.

Oh right! Labor Day! If we really want to continue to have a strong economy and support workers and the labor that made the US a great world leader (grain of salt), then we need to decouple health coverage from employment.

It shackles us unfairly to jobs that can treat us poorly because we need coverage. Coverage because healthcare has become artificially expensive.

Just ask the nurses at Robert Wood Johnson who are on strike but about to lose their benefits. When that deadline looms, many will have to capitulate, returning to unsafe working conditions because of a few historical twists and turns.