President Truman Urges Congress to Enact National Health Insurance Scheme

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26466, 21 May 1947, Page 5

President Truman Urges Congress to Enact National Health Insurance Scheme

Rec. 8 p.m. WASHINGTON, May 19. President Truman sent a message to Congress asking that immediate attention be given to the enactment of a Federal health insurance scheme, which the President declared was crucial to the national welfare. He said; “ Until it is a part of our national fabric, we shall be wasting our most precious national resource and shall be perpetuating unnecessary misery and human suffering.” The President pointed out 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 and many symptoms which ghould have early attention were often ignored until too late. This applied not only to the poor. The truth was that all except the rich might at some time require medical care which they could not afford. The President’s message recommended —first, adequate public health services, including an expanded maternal and child health programme; secondly, funds for research and medical education; thirdly, more hospitals and doctors, especially in sparsely settled areas. President Truman asserted that an insurance plan would be the most effective and democratic w r ay of coping with the menace of serious illness which required expensive care and services. He said that under his programme patients would be as free to' select their doctors as at present, and doctors and also hospitals would be free to participate or stay out of the programme, which would be administered through State and local agencies, subject only to reasonable national standards. Presidents Intelligence Questioned The Herald-Tribune, in a leader, says President Truman’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 doubt either of the President’s purpose or of his intelligence. “ There will be a time,” the paper adds, “ 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.”