Editing Otto von Bismarck (section)

====Sickness Insurance Law of 1883====
The first successful bill, passed in 1883, was the Sickness Insurance Bill. Bismarck considered the program, established to provide sickness insurance for German industrial laborers, the least important and the least politically troublesome.<ref name="Leichter 1979">{{Cite book |last=Leichter |first=Howard M. |title=A comparative approach to policy analysis: health care policy in four nations |publisher=Cambridge University Press |date=1979 |isbn=978-0-521-22648-6 |location=Cambridge |page=<span class="plainlinks">[https://books.google.com/books?id=cfI6AAAAIAAJ&pg=PA121 121]</span> |quote=The Sickness Insurance Law (1883). Eligibility. The Sickness Insurance Law came into effect in December 1884. It provided for compulsory participation by all industrial wage earners (i.e., manual labourers) in factories, ironworks, mines, shipbuilding yards, and similar workplaces.}}</ref><ref name="Hennock 2007">{{Cite book |last=Hennock |first=Ernest Peter |title=The origin of the welfare state in England and Germany, 1850–1914: social policies compared |publisher=Cambridge University Press |date=2007 |isbn=978-0-521-59212-3 |location=Cambridge |page=<span class="plainlinks">[https://books.google.com/books?id=6QysFcGNcBUC&pg=PA157 157]</span>}}</ref> The health service was established on a local basis, with the cost divided between employers and the employed. The employers contributed one-third, and the workers contributed two-thirds. The minimum payments for medical treatment and sick pay for up to 13 weeks were legally fixed. The individual local health bureaus were administered by a committee elected by the members of each bureau, and this move had the unintended effect of establishing a majority representation for the workers on account of their large financial contributions. This worked to the advantage of the Social Democrats who, through heavy worker membership, achieved their first small foothold in public administration.<ref name="GERMAN HISTORY" />

According to a 2019 study, the health insurance legislation caused a substantial reduction in mortality.<ref>{{Cite journal |last1=Bauernschuster |first1=Stefan |last2=Driva |first2=Anastasia |last3=Hornung |first3=Erik |date=2019 |title=Bismarck's Health Insurance and the Mortality Decline |url=https://www.cesifo-group.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp6601.pdf |journal=Journal of the European Economic Association |volume=18 |issue=5 |pages=2561–2607 |language=en |doi=10.1093/jeea/jvz052 |s2cid=8464915 |access-date=16 December 2019 |archive-date=24 October 2020 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20201024121825/https://www.cesifo-group.de/DocDL/cesifo1_wp6601.pdf |url-status=live }}</ref>