Excerpt from Report of the Health Insurance Commission of Pennsylvania: January 1919 We realize that the principal object of our appointment, as of the appointment of similar Commissions in eight other states, was to obtain a report on the advisability of taking in this state this next step in social insurance, the insurance of the employee against sickness. The Commission was appointed on the seventeenth of October, 1917. The fifteen months which have since elapsed have enabled us to gather much information relating to the extent and nature of sickness among wage workers in Pennsylvania, its economic and social effects and the adequacy of the present methods both of treatment and of meeting the losses caused by such sickness. But the time and money at our disposal have not been sufficient to enable us to examine thoroughly, in the light of these facts, the sickness insurance systems in force in other countries or to consider the numerous modifications of these systems which have been proposed in this country. We are therefore not in a position to embody in this report definite recommendations concerning the legislative or other action which should be taken to meet the problems presented by sickness among the wage workers of the state. The Commission might have assumed that the situation created by sickness among employed wage workers in a great industrial state like Pennsylvania is a serious one, and might have expended the appropriation of $5,000 in meetings called to hear the advocates and opponents of the various remedies which have been suggested. But all of us were, and are, unanimously opposed to such a procedure. We believe, and we submit, that the interesting and important nature of the facts relating to sickness among the wage workers of the state which we are now prepared to lay before you justifies the belief that a proposition of such moment and magnitude as that involving the general insurance of all wage workers against sickness can be properly passed upon only in the light of adequate knowledge of existing conditions. It is generally realized that the Workmen's Compensation Act deals with a large subject of great difficulty and importance. Some idea of the extent of the problem which we have been directed to investigate may be obtained by contrasting the amount of disability among employees due to industrial accidents with the amount due to sickness from other causes. In 1916 there were 255,616 industrial accidents in Pennsylvania and 3,025,371 working days were lost through such accidents. In the same year approximately 16,800,000 working days were lost on account of illness not due to industrial accidents. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.