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The War Risk Insurance Act (WRIA) of 1917 established
a program of government-sponsored voluntary life and disability
insurance for soldiers fighting in World War I. A part of the WRIA
also created a system of "allotments and allowances" which,
taken with the insurance provisions, combined to constitute a fairly
full-featured social insurance system--nearly two decades before
the advent of Social Security. Although the allotments and allowances
under the War Risk Insurance were of small-scale and short duration,
they were an important precedent for the fuller and more permanent
programs of the New Deal. The types of benefits paid (dependents,
survivors, disability) were similar in key ways to the benefits
that would eventually become part of the Social Security Act. Actually,
the WRIA was even more precocious than it seems at first blush,
since the Social Security program itself initially only included
retirement benefits for the individual worker. It was 1939 before
dependents and survivors benefits were added to Social Security
and 1956 before disability benefits became available under Social
Security. The recent article by Walter Hickel is groundbreaking
research which has recently produced a new appreciation of the significance
of the War Risk Insurance program.
We are including here two significant items related to the WRIA.
The first is a speech delivered in 1917 by the President of the
Casualty Actuarial and Statistical Society of America. The President
of this society of professional actuaries is by way of explaining
the provisions and purposes of the new program to this key group
of subject-area experts. This speech came at a time shortly after
the War Risk Insurance program was enacted and it provides a contemporary
expert analysis of the new program. |
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