The earliest health insurance policies were designed primarily to compensate for income lost while workers were ill. Long absences were a big problem for companies that depended on manual labor, so they often hired doctors to tend to workers.

Insurance, broadly speaking, is designed to protect someone from loss and has been used in different forms since the second millennium BC. As medical knowledge became more advanced it also became more valuable. Medical practitioners soon moved from practicing medicine in their homes to a centralized medical practice.