Abstract
Even though Franklin Delano Roosevelt would have wanted a comprehensive Social Security system that would have covered every individual "from the cradle to the grave?, the system that was finally adopted by the United States in 1935 consisted only in unemployment and old-age insurance. Frances Perkins, the first woman cabinet member and Roosevelt's secretary of Labor, is the mother of this US Social Security system. Perkins and her team consulted numerous international experts, among which was the British expert William Henry Beveridge. A Committee advised FDR on the subject of health care in 1932. The purpose was to create a national insurance system for medical care. Everybody would pay a premium in the form of taxes and the government would pay everybody's medical expenses, drawing the money from the collected premiums.
