Evaluating the Success of the Welfare Program in the 1940s

The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company played a significant role in the successful attack against pneumonia. The campaign against this disease was one of the most brilliant triumphs of contemporary medicine. With the introduction first of serum therapy, and then of the sulfa drugs, the mortality from pneumonia among Metropolitan industrial policyholders was reduced to less than one half the levels of only a few years ago.

The achievements in the field of chemotherapy were still new and so considerable that their full implications were not yet generally appreciated in the early 1940s. A discussion of pneumonia would be incomplete, however, without reference to the influenza epidemic of 1918-1919. Such epidemics had always produced a sharp rise in the pneumonia rate. It was estimated that more than 500,000 deaths occurred in the United States from influenza and pneumonia, or from their complications, in the winter of 1918-1919.

The death rate from these diseases in the industrial department at the peak of the epidemic was more than 20 times the normal rate. For 1918 as a whole the effect of the epidemic was to increase the death rate from all causes by about one third over the rate of the pre-pandemic years. The extra claim payments by American life insurance companies as a result of the epidemic amounted to about $200,000,000. Of this sum the Metropolitan alone paid out more than $26,000,000; and at that time it had less than one sixth of the present amount of insurance in force.

It was this epidemic, among other things, that spurred the company to form the Influenza Pneumonia Commission, whose work contributed so much to the successful fight on pneumonia. Past midlife, the so-called degenerative conditions begin to figure prominently among the causes of death, and their control presented many unsolved problems to science and to the medical profession. Nevertheless, the death rate registered notable improvement since 1911, especially among white women. In these fields the effect of the company's welfare work was also discernible.

Past midlife, the so-called degenerative conditions begin to figure prominently among the causes of death, and their control presented many unsolved problems to science and to the medical profession.