Social Security and Biological Security for the 20th century: The experience of the medical section of the Mandatory Insurance Fundy

Abstract

In 1924, as a result of the political and social crisis that affected the government of reformist President Arturo Alessandri, a new institutional stage arose with the issuance of Law No. 4,054 that founded insurance for illness, disability and work accidents. One hundred years after this transcendental milestone for Chilean social security, this article aims to verify the important role that the Compulsory Insurance Fund played in this field, one of the main institutions that were born to materialize a generation of social rights and that, In turn, it was a tool to ensure the social and biological security of workers and their families.

In this way, by examining the main guidelines of the work of the medical section of the Compulsory Insurance Fund, between the 1930s and 1940s, it is possible to appreciate that the preventive, medical-social approach and the principles of planning and Technical and administrative rationalization were the essential features of its institutional identity. At the same time, based on the analysis of this experience, it is possible to propose that, in the desire to safeguard the application of a social right and guided by an inspiring socializing conception of health, the professional teams of the Compulsory Insurance Fund forged pioneering experiences that They were key to designing the preventive medicine law and the future National Health Service, which ultimately became undisputed milestones that favored the consolidation of social security in the Chilean 20th century.