The History of Health Insurance and Mental Illness

The successful passage of health insurance reform legislation in the United States moves me to wonder about the extent to which scholars have looked into the role of health insurance in mental health care. About ten years ago, a number of us historians examined the impact of mental illness on social insurance in Germany around the years 1880-1930. Perhaps not surprisingly, the rise of shellshock in World War I and the killing of 200,000 psychiatric patients by the Nazis under their T-4 prog..