Health Care Was An Issue Even In The 1960s

A few weeks ago I was watching an old episode of one of my all time favorite television shows, "Get Smart," a comedy show I watched faithfully all those years ago in the mid to late 1960s. In this one particular episode the Chief is wounded inside a hospital and has passed out, but when Max and Agent 99 get a nurse for help, in spite of the seriousness of the situation, the first question by the nurse is, "Does he have insurance?" Followed by, "Does he have his insurance card?" While this was a comedy, it was the sort of thing Americans could relate to even back then; that's why they put it into the show's script. The American health care system has been debated for a long time, and things are not about to change now, because this is about BIG money.

WORD HISTORY:
Mean (1)-There are three different words "mean" in English. This is the one for "midway, middle, intermediate." It goes back to Indo European "medhyo," which meant "middle." This gave its Italic/Latin offspring "medius," with the same meaning. This later gave Latin "medianus," which meant "that of the middle, that which is in the middle." This gave Old French, a Latin-based language, "meien." English borrowed the word as "meene" in the mid 1300s, either directly from French, or from Anglo-Norman^ "meen."

^ The Norman French dialect was naturally carried to England by the Norman invaders in late 1066. That dialect, away from every day contact with continental French and influenced by English, developed into what many call Anglo-Norman.