Fraternal Sickness Insurance

Herb Emery

Economic History
Financial Economics

Article

This article explains the types of fraternal orders that existed in the late nineteenth and early twentietch centuries and the types of insurance they offered, explains how friendly societies worked to provide sickness insurance as a reasonable price by overcoming the adverse selection and moral hazard problems, while facing problems of risk diversification, and closes by examining historians' assessments of the importance and adequacy of fraternal sickness insurance.