"Under the Nazi regime after 1933, the compulsory health insurance system became even more centralized and controlled. The insurance funds lost almost all autonomy and became subservient to the Fuhrer principle. And the employer share of health-insurance payments was increased from one-third to fifty percent. Once the Nazis were in power, explained Melchior Palyi, in Compulsory Medical Care and The Welfare State (1949):

The ill-famed Dr. Ley, boss of the Nazi labor front, did not fail to see that the social insurance system could be used for Nazi politics as a means of popular demagoguery; as a bastion of bureaucratic power; as an instrument of regimentation, and as a reservoir from which to draw jobs for political favorites and loanable funds for rearmament.

Thus, ended the first experiment in socialized health insurance. Begun by Bismarck as a tool of state policy to fight radical socialism through the implementation of Imperial State Socialism, it ended up as one of the cogs in the wheel of Hitler's National Socialism."