The National Insurance Act 1911 : being a treatise on the scheme of national health insurance and insurance against unemployment created by that Act, with the incorporated enactments, full explanatory notes, tables, and examples / by Orme Clarke.

  • Clarke, Orme (Orme Bigland)
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The National Insurance Act 1911 : being a treatise on the scheme of national health insurance and insurance against unemployment created by that Act, with the incorporated enactments, full explanatory notes, tables, and examples / by Orme Clarke. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    such as this lies in its details, and as a guide to those details Mr. Clarke’s book will, I am convinced, prove useful to many. This book has nothing to do with the controversies of the moment, but I may perhaps be permitted to use this preface (without thereby tainting the undefiled fount of learning which follows) to point out one substantial reason why the whole Act should come into law at one and the same moment. At the time of the second reading of the Bill, it was in some quarters strongly urged that Part II., dealing with Unemployed Insurance, should be postponed, and that we should in the first instance confine ourselves to Part I. On the third reading of the Bill, its critics in terms suggested that Part II. should take precedence of Part I. But there is an over- whelming reason of practical convenience why Unemploy- ment Insurance and Sickness Insurance should, if possible, come into force at the same time. It is a necessary condition for receiving Unemployment Benefit that the unemployed man should be “ capable of work ”; on the other hand, it is a necessary condition of the receipt of Sickness Benefit that the sick man should be “incapable of work.” If therefore one half of the scheme came into force without the other, there would be a strong temptation for unjustified claims to be made upon the fund first set up. If (as was demanded on the second reading) Sickness Insurance is set up in priority to Unemployment Insurance, the man who is out of work from purely economic causes will be under an inducement to represent himself as ill. If, on the other hand (as was urged on the third reading of the Bill), Unemployment Insurance is to be set up in advance of Sickness Insurance, then the man