‘Our Health Care Is Sick’

You’ve made a valuable contribution towards health care in your editorial in support of a universal comprehensive national health plan.

Also significant in the editorial is the report of an article in the current issue of the New England Journal of Medicine relating to a nationwide group of physicians forming a new organization, Physicians for a National Health Program. The group is promoting a health program that would be patterned after Canada’s 20-year-old health plan.

In a related article on Jan. 12, Times staff writer Lonnie Jones reports that one of the naysayers, Dr. William G. Plested III, president-elect of the California Medical Assn., questioned whether Americans would accept the Canadian-style health plan and said, “I don’t think the American consumer will stand for it.” His remarks are reminiscent of objections raised in the late ‘20s and early ‘30s to the movement then for Social Security. As an octongenarian, I remember the classic objection that “The American people will never accept the dole.”

The years that followed have proved that, thankfully, the American people did support the need for Social Security. And, significantly, without the monthly payment of $16 billion to beneficiaries (based on 1986 reports), which for the most part is poured back into the economy, the United States would be in one heck of a depression.

CARL M. LEVIN

Los Angeles