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The article reports on the compulsory health insurance in California in 1934-1935. According to health surveys in the 1920s and 1930s, poverty and ill health were closely associated. There is an estimated forty percent of the American people who were not receiving adequate medical care as well as medical physicians who were experiencing financial difficulty. Adoption of health insurance was urged by other groups saying that without some method of spreading the risk of medical costs, the diagnostic and therapeutic value of modern medicine would remain beyond the reach of those who needed care the most.

The article focuses on the public health insurance in the U.S. This article is a study of the economic and social hazards of ill health and accidents and of the ways in which health insurance can lessen these hazards. This method of payment also operates on the insurance principle. Under this arrangement medical and hospital expenses would be paid from a government created insurance fund supported by employer-employee contributions through pay roll deductions. The Catholic Church's attitude toward the sick is best indicated by her practice. For almost two thousand years, the Church has founded and encouraged hospitals, institutions, and charitable agencies to aid the sick, infirm, lame, and blind. Religious communities dedicate their lives to serve the sick in the name of Christ. A health insurance program should provide all the basic medical and hospital needs. In the home there should he provision for medical care by a general practitioner and specialist, visiting nurse service, and ambulance service. In the doctor's office the patient should be allowed eye examinations, psychiatric advice, medical attention by general physicians and specialists, vaccinations, diagnostic and laboratory tests, periodic check-ups, physiotherapy, etc.