Excerpt: In 1943, the Internal Revenue Service ruled that employer-based health care should be tax free. A second law, in 1954, made the tax advantages even more attractive.... By the 1960s, 70 percent [of the population] is covered by some kind of private, voluntary health insurance plan.' Thus employer-based insurance, which started with Blue Cross selling coverage to Texas teachers and spread because of government price controls and tax breaks, became our system. By the mid-1960s, Thomasson says, Americans started to see that system -- in which people with good jobs get health care through work and almost everyone else looks to government -- as if it were the natural order of things.  MORE >>