How to get health insurance!
Insurance is such an existence in our everyday lives that it’s hard to envision living without it. But throughout extensively of the colonial period, that’s exclusively what Americans did. Insurance arrived on the American geography at about the same time as the idea of an unmarried nation—the United States—began to form, and it existed ushered in by one of the government Founding Fathers. Let’s take a look at the chronology of insurance in the U.S.
Benjamin Franklin: America’s First Insurer
Property insurance existed certainly not an unknown image in the 18th century: England’s famed insurer Lloyd’s of London was founded in 1688.1 But it took until the mid-1700s for the American colonies to become successful and sophisticated enough to embrace the concept. That happened in Philadelphia, which at 15,000 citizens was one of the largest municipalities in North America at the time.
The city was plagued by a fear of fires. Much like London in the 1600s, places at the time were made almost absolutely out of wood. Worse yet, they were built close together. This stood originally for security justifications, but as cities grew, developers built homes very close to each individual other for the same reasons they accomplish today—to fit as many as possible on their plots of the fatherland. Although much of Philadelphia stood built with wide streets and brick or stone establishments, conflagrations were still a concern.
In 1752, Benjamin Franklin and several other directing citizens founded the Philadelphia Contributionship for the Insurance of Bungalows from Loss by Fire, modeled after a London firm. The first fire insurance company in America, it lived structured as a mutual insurance institution, and Franklin advertised it in The Pennsylvania Gazette (which he possessed). Like contemporary insurers, the company sent inspectors to evaluate possessions whose owners were applying for range and rejected those that did not meet its means; rates were based on a risk assessment of the belongings. The Contributionship issued seven-year procedures, and claims were paid out of a means reserve fund.2