While insurance seems like a capricious and strange thing today, it wasn't always like that. During ancient times, Babylonian merchants and their wares faced a great amount of risks when selling their wares from bandits to weather induced hardships. As a result, a group of them decided to pay into a collective pool of money so that if, for whatever reason, wares were lost they could collect money to cover their loses. The ancient Romans and Greeks expanded the idea. Cohn writes, "The Greeks and Romans extended insurance beyond commerce by creating... pooled contributions from members to fiance burials for the deceased." (Cohn) Centuries later, Benjamin Franklin furthered the idea for a different use and created a girl to insure houses from fires but it wouldn't be until the early 20th century that the idea of health insurance really came into effect.
It was at this time that a standard education and cerification was beginning to be required for doctors.
Sources:
Cohn, Jonathon. Sick. Harper Collins. New York. 2007.
Goffman, Evering. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. Prentice Hall. New Jersey. 1963
Staff of Washington Post. Landmark. Public Affairs. New York. 2010
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