Many hunter-gatherer cultures helped those who could not contribute fully. Many of us have read stories about hunter-gatherer cultures caring for the elderly and healing the sick, but do we know how much they cared for those younger who could never contribute a great deal to the group?
As it is, archeologists have found cases of primitive societies caring for people that couldn't even feed themselves or could not keep up as the group traveled. See "Ancient Bones that Tell a Story of Compassion", James Gorman, New York Times, 2012-12-17.
The archeologists, Lorna Tilley and Mark Oxenham, ask "what care for the sick and injured says about the culture that provided it."
These pre-historic cultures were close-knit communities that knew all of their members. It is hard not to care for those in a small community. But what happens as the community becomes larger, more diverse, and more dispersed? Children move to another city or even another country. People associate more with those at the factory or office than they do with people on their own block. Driving out the garage and down the street we may not even meet many of our neighbors. We don't know who is sick and disabled. Even when we know our own neighbors, we aren't aware of all of their problems. It took a mail carrier asking a neighbor about my step-father before anybody realized that he had died.
Even when we know a neighbor is ill, do we have the skills needed to care for the neighbor? Our expectations of health-care are much higher than in pre-historic times. In the last few centuries, charitable groups established hospitals to take care of people who couldn't be cared for at home. But our expectations became even higher and many of those groups could not raise sufficient funds to give care to all who needed it. Hospitals needed to charge all comers in order to have the funds; those without enough money often did without needed care.
If we are to replicate in today's dispersed societies the attention given to the sick and injured in primitive societies, wouldn't we need to have universal health care? We still must ask "what care for the sick and injured says about the culture that provided it." We certainly have many politicians who are more concerned with guaranteeing people access to guns than guaranteeing people access to health care.
