The Hospital Shortage.

In the early 1940s, if you needed to go to the hospital, you might have had to travel quite a distance to find one. During the Great Depression of the 1930s little building of new hospitals occurred, and many of the existing hospitals deteriorated. More than one thousand counties in the nation had no hospital facilities of any type. During the war emergency, communities crowded with workers in the munitions and other wartime plants encouraged the building of many small hospitals, often of flimsy construction. After the war the hospital industry was desperate for aid. Its needs had been deferred for a decade and a half of depression and war. Conservatives in Congress were finally induced to build new hospitals as an alternative to national health insurance.

The Hill-Burton Act.

Two hospital-construction programs were adopted immediately after the war, one to expand the Veterans Administration...