Mild Health-Care Reform Won’t Do

Increasing demands for major improvements in the way Americans pay for health care should soon force Congress to produce a stopgap measure, but not the comprehensive national health insurance system we really need.

Almost all other industrialized countries have such a system, although one used by the Canadians comes closer to the kind this country should adopt since it offers full medical protection to everyone.

Their tax-supported health-care system pays the health-care provider bills, their costs are far less than ours, patients can choose their doctors and their health is as good as ours by every standard.

During Harry S. Truman’s presidency, the United States had a good chance to get a national health insurance system that would have covered everyone. But the American Medical Assn. killed it with a phony multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign labeling the proposal “socialized medicine.”

Since the Cold War was in full swing, the false label stuck despite strong counterattacks by a widely varied group of national health insurance advocates, including the late, conservative labor leader William Green.

I was as convinced then as I am today that national health insurance made sense, so I got a job with the now-defunct Committee for the Nation’s Health. I was assigned to ghost write an article to be signed by Green, then president of the old American Federation of Labor. The article was published in 1952 in the AFL’s magazine and was widely circulated. Our arguments were about the same as those used today, saying, in sum, that millions of Americans suffer terribly because of financial barriers to health care.

“Sooner or later,” I wrote, “the time-worn, threadbare arguments against national health insurance will give way to the irresistible force of the American people’s good common sense.”

Nearly 40 years have passed and common sense hasn’t yet prevailed.

Meanwhile, perhaps the best chance for some action is a Band-Aid measure sponsored by, among others, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.). It would require all employers to provide health insurance for their workers or pay a tax to help the millions who have no health-care insurance.

But prospects of a Canadian-style health-care system are not dead. Once the first step--a Kennedy-style program has been adopted--there seems to be room for compromise on further advances.

Many corporate executives who have long denounced comprehensive health care are so burdened by the soaring costs of our current system that they are edging toward a new one.

Officers of the reactionary American Medical Assn. of the ‘50s liked to carp at conservative labor leaders such as Green for calling for “socialized medicine,” but they loved even more to hate liberal union leaders like the late Walter Reuther when he headed the United Auto Workers.

That was then. Now Reuther is viewed by AMA President John Tupper as a “brilliant leader (who) was one of this nation’s true visionaries.”

Tupper recently hailed AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland as a comrade in arms, declaring that “for the first time in history, organized labor and organized medicine are headed in the same direction. The ever-growing urgency of America’s health-care crisis requires new alliances and new initiatives toward cooperation.”

Kirkland responded that labor now is not inflexibly demanding comprehensive national health insurance and is working for less sweeping changes “that we can get through Congress.”

The AMA seems to be using sweet talk to get inadequate health-care legislation to relieve the pressure for a Canadian-style system with tough cost-containment provisions.

The AFL-CIO is backtracking, trying to be pragmatic by supporting the Kennedy bill to get at least something soon, but its long-range goal remains the same.

However, several militant AFL-CIO affiliates, disturbed by what they believe is a premature compromise by the federation, are pushing their own nationwide campaigns to reach that goal sooner than later.

Surely, common sense should ultimately prevail and we will get comprehensive national health insurance. But, as the decades go by, I sometimes wonder.