After 40 Years, Truman Is Proved Right on Health Care

President Harry S. Truman would be grinning with satisfaction if he could hear about giant corporations joining unions, prominent doctors and a wide assortment of other influential folk in an increasingly urgent call for some form of a universal health-care system.

Truman was vilified in the late 1940s and early 1950s when he strongly supported a national health insurance program that was falsely denounced as “socialized medicine” by the American Medical Assn. in its successful, multimillion-dollar media blitz against it.

Corporate executives then said that if Truman’s proposal were adopted, it would mean the beginning of the end of free enterprise in this country.

Nowadays, one rarely hears a peep of opposition to the concept of much needed universal health care. Instead, there is a broad array of powerful forces advocating government participation in a program to make sure all Americans have comprehensive health care.

Some companies and unions are even uniting to campaign for legislation that would at last curb the soaring costs of health care and bring it to the millions who are partly or entirely excluded from the present system.

For instance, the United Steelworkers of America and Bethlehem Steel Co. disclosed Friday that their just-approved contract includes a pledge to jointly develop and then advocate a national health program to replace the present unfair, costly system.

Lynn Williams, the union’s president, said his organization is seeking similar joint programs with other steel companies and with firms in the can, copper and aluminum industries, among others.

Auto companies are also showing interest in joining the United Auto Workers in a drive to revamp the nation’s health-care system.

Lee A. Iacocca, chairman of Chrysler Corp., has moved ahead on his own. He wrote a column last month saying that “just 10 years ago, any red-blooded American business leader caught even whispering the notion of national health insurance would have been asked to turn in his pinstripe suit.”

Now Iacocca is doing just that and still has many pinstripe suits.

And last week, Morton Bahr, president of the Communications Workers of America, said all employers should unite with labor “to force the government to take action to stop the obscene rise in health-care costs in this country.”

The CWA is negotiating major new contracts for 550,000 telecommunications workers, and AT&T;, among others, is said to be ready to approve Bahr’s proposal.

These joint labor-management efforts are only part of the new drive to drastically change our costly health-care system, which ignores the needs of far too many Americans.

Others doing the same thing but with less self-interest at stake include the blue-ribbon commission whose honorary chairmen were former Presidents Richard M. Nixon, Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter--not an easily ignored group.

There is also a coalition of executives from many of the nation’s largest corporations in the Washington Business Group on Health. They have joined the growing crowd demanding a drastically changed health-care system.

If fact, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles) seem to be following instead of leading the crowd with their modest mea sure that would require most companies to provide minimum health insurance for their employees and would extend Medicaid to those not covered by job-based insurance.

A more comprehensive proposal comes from the Committee for National Health Insurance, which is led mostly by union leaders who recognize the need for an extensive federal and state program to maintain high-level medical care and for enforcement of a cost-containment program that the Kennedy-Waxman plan doesn’t include.

The companies acting alone or joining unions in the call for a better health-care delivery system are almost always motivated primarily by the cost of the present system. The problem has been forced on them by health-care costs that have been shooting up twice as fast as the general inflation rate.

For the past few years, many companies--especially large ones--have been trying other, less drastic approaches to the problem: cost shifting, which means making employees pay for more and more of the insurance costs, and cost containment to help reduce their own expenses.

But none of these tactics are effective. They only infuriate hard-pressed workers who cannot afford higher medical costs and they do little to contain employers’ still-exploding health-care expenditures.

The problem is a national one. Hospitals and others boost the fees they charge companies that have insurance plans to offset the cost of caring for those too poor to get their own insurance and who are not covered by a company’s plan.

A million workers a year are losing their private health insurance either because they have lost their jobs or have found new jobs in firms that don’t offer it.

The number of Americans with no health insurance already totals 37 million. And then there are the 54 million others whose insurance is too inadequate to do them much good.

American opinion about national health insurance has changed dramatically since Truman’s day. The nation has moved, albeit in a slow, piecemeal fashion, toward the Truman ideal by adopting Medicare and its recent extension, catastrophic health care.

The Truman plan was not socialized medicine. Doctors and hospitals would not have been on the government payroll. He wanted a federal health insurance system. It should now be clear to everyone that Truman was right 40 years ago when he pressed so hard and so in vain for an overhaul of our outmoded health-care system.

There is now wide agreement on the goal. The problem is the differences that exist on how to reach that goal. Some want to require almost all companies to provide health insurance and let the government take care of those who are excluded.

Others want a similar plan, but also want the government to set minimum standards and impose cost controls. Now that there is so much support for modernizing the system, the differences over how to make the changes should not be allowed to kill the idea.

We must finally end the shame of being the only major industrialized country in the world other than South Africa that does not offer all citizens health care not based on their ability to pay.