Seamen Quotes
At the time being a seaman was a very dangerous job with a high rate of injury and disease from foreign ports. Congress passed and President John Adams signed this law which provided some marine health services for seaman. However, the reason it is politically most interesting is that it is the first Federal mandate on private citizens. Further it actually required that sailors who were privately employed purchase health insurance. The Federal government was the single payer in what many conservatives would call “socialized medicine.” What is fascinating is that in the huge political debate of the Obama administration over the mandate to buy health insurance this precedent virtually never appeared in the arguments, court cases, news media and political debates. Forbes Magazine ran an article about it in 2011 (http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2011/01/17/congress-passes-socialized-medicine-and-mandates-health-insurance-in-1798/2/ ) As passionate as everyone else was, they just didn’t know the political history of our own country enough to use the example in the debate. This was also the first example of Federal “withholding” where the employer collects the money from the individual by withholding it from his pay and turns it over to the federal government.
Captain W.W. Polk, commanding the Coast Guard revenue cutter Florida, wrote Treasury Secretary asking permission to employ a young Negro on board. Existing regulations prohibited such. The Negro in question was a free Black born in New York who was an “expert sailor for his age and competent to the duty of a boy of the first class.” Polk had hired the boy as a servant after he had worked at sea for another Captain. Good seamen were hard to come by, decision was extremely contentious. Ingham “compromised” by limiting the allowable role of Negroes at sea—a practice that lasted till the Second World War.
Two of the major issues of the War of 1812 were the right of American ships to trade in Europe. The British were at war with France and boycotted all ports controlled by the French. They would seize American ships bound for or having traded with French areas. In addition, many American merchant seamen had formerly served in the British Navy and British warships would stop American merchant ships and remove “suspected” deserters and force them into British military naval service. Captain Lawrence was mortally wounded in this battle. See {625136}.
This quotation shows that there has been government assistance for medical care from the earliest times. In this case a type of Medicare program for seamen. The scheme of paying for social services through payroll deductions with the surplus covered by general government funds was not invented in the New Deal. It was in existence over 100 years before that.
