Time To Bring Back Mutual Aid Societies?

While debating what we should do about today's social problems, like providing affordable health care, it's interesting to look into the ways the same problems were addressed in the past. History yields both horror stories illustrating what should be avoided and intriguing ideas worth taking another look at.

In the early 20th century, America had hundreds of mutual aid societies which provided members with health care, among other privileges. These voluntary organizations were set up to serve various affinity groups: trades, fraternal clubs, immigrant societies, freed slaves. Somehow, by the late 20th century, most of the societies had been disappeared (although, there are still some around today). With their decline came the rise of modern insurance mega-corporations and employer-provided health care.

Here are a couple of articles that delve into the history of mutual aid societies:

First up, we have Eric Laursen (no relation, but the last name helped get his article picked for this post) giving an anarcho-socialist view on the history of mutual aid. As your reading the article, notice how it underscores yesterday's topic about the communication disconnect between leftists and libertarians when using words like "free market" and "capitalism":

"The Legacy of the Lodges: Mutual Aid and Consumer Society"

"The orders provided a powerful demonstration that mutual aid could serve as an alternative method for organizing a complex modern society. And at least in embryo, they had the potential to supplant the government-run social-services system that evolved during the New Deal ..."

Next, we have a rather dry, but thorough analysis from a libertarian think tank, the Institute for Humane Studies, at George Mason University. (Well, they claim to be libertarian. I hadn't heard of them before.) You may want to skip the "The Economics of Asymmetric Information" section that goes into more than you would ever want to know about the game theory that underlies the insurance business:

http://mason.gmu.edu/~ihs/s92essay.html

"Another factor that may have contributed to the decline of fraternal insurance was the imposition of wage controls by the federal government during the second world war. To get around these wage controls, employers offered benefits which were not considered taxable income (and hence not violations of the wage controls). These benefits came in the form of, among other things, health insurance."

Could mutual aid be part of the solution to making health care more affordable? It still seems like a workable (and wonderfully non-coercive) model to me, even in the much more complicated world of modern medicine.