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I don't recall who first relayed this to me but I believe the answer to the question in the title is "path dependence". Modern (US) health insurance started of

I don't recall who first relayed this to me but I believe the answer to the question in the title is "path dependence". Modern (US) health insurance started off as hospitalization insurance and was originated by hospitals themselves. It covered hospital procedures such as surgery etc. We should note that dentists and opthomalogists do not typically operate from a hospital setting, at least not in the early (1920-1950) era. Over time it was spun out of hospitals and extended to more medical procedures. The tax advantage of having employers pay for coverage began to dominate the market and has led to the current state of the medical marketplace. But the original dichotomy remains. "Health" insurance covers things that doctors do, and mostly those things that happen in hospital settings. There is an interesting article [1] that has some of the history of group health coverage which I found just now. [1] https://www.peoplekeep.com/blog/the-complete-history-of-employer-provided-health-insurance https://www.peoplekeep.com/blog/the-complete-history-of-empl...

atombender 3y ago
It's also because medicine and dentistry evolved separately. Dentistry started more as a kind of "mechanic"-type profession of rather crude surgery (of course, all surgery was quite crude before modern times), and was often a sideline of other professions (e.g. dentures were made by jewelers and other types of craftspeople). By the time dentistry started to turn into a serious medical discipline in the 1800s, the existing branches of medicine didn't want anything to do with it. So dentists founded their own medical schools, developed their own licensing boards, and so on. By the early 1900s, dentists were so used to being separate that they actually actively lobbied against any attempt at unifying medicine and dentistry. There's a good article in The Atlantic about it: "Why Dentistry Is Separate From Medicine" [1]. [1] https://archive.ph/4HIxk https://archive.ph/4HIxk
jhayward 3y ago
I should have said "dentists and optometrists", rather than " .. and opthamologists". Sorry to catch this so late.

atombender 3y ago

It's also because medicine and dentistry evolved separately. Dentistry started more as a kind of "mechanic"-type profession of rather crude surgery (of course, all surgery was quite crude before modern times), and was often a sideline of other professions (e.g. dentures were made by jewelers and other types of craftspeople). By the time dentistry started to turn into a serious medical discipline in the 1800s, the existing branches of medicine didn't want anything to do with it. So dentists founded their own medical schools, developed their own licensing boards, and so on. By the early 1900s, dentists were so used to being separate that they actually actively lobbied against any attempt at unifying medicine and dentistry. There's a good article in The Atlantic about it: "Why Dentistry Is Separate From Medicine" [1]. [1] https://archive.ph/4HIxk https://archive.ph/4HIxk

jhayward 3y ago

I should have said "dentists and optometrists", rather than " .. and opthamologists". Sorry to catch this so late.