The American Health Care System Has Lots of Problems. Here's When They Started.

With Senate Republicans planning to introduce a new version of a health care bill on Thursday, in their latest attempt to find a way to fulfill the promise to repeal former President Obama's signature health care law, it's as clear as ever that, in the words of President Donald Trump, health care is "so complicated."

But, while those complications are traced by some to President Obama's impact on the system or a half-century back to the introduction of Medicare and Medicaid, an even earlier moment is really at the heart of the problem, says Christy Ford Chapin, author of Ensuring America's Health: The Public Creation of the Corporate Health Care System.

It was in 1938, she argues, that the structural problems with the U.S. health care system began.