HEALTH SCHEME URGENT IN U.S.A., SAYS PRESIDENT

Grey River Argus, 22 May 1947, Page 5

HEALTH SCHEME URGENT IN U.S.A., SAYS PRESIDENT

WASHINGTON, May 20. President Truman has sent a message to Congress asking that immediate attention be given to the enactment of a Federal health insurance scheme. Such a scheme, the President declared, was crucial to the national welfare. He said: “Until it is part of our national fabric we shall be wasting our most precious national resource and shall be perpetuating unnecessary misery and human suffering. President Truman said that adequate medical treatment was expensive, and its cost could not be anticipated by the average individual. Consequently many persons were compelled to -go without needed medical attention. Children did not receive adequate medical care. Many symptoms which should have early attention were often ignored until too late.

The New York Herald Tribune, in a leading article says: “The President’s message to Congress throwing the question of a national health, insurance system into the declining weeks of a Congress already tangled in many difficulties and more immediate issues seems so maladroit as to raise a doubt either of the President’s purpose or of his intelligence. “There will be a time when the question of health insurance will have to be considered but this is not the time, and President Truman is merely showing his talent for getting first things last, in the middle or backwards, or forgetting them altogether.”