Manhattan Ballot

Last fortnight Senator Wagner introduced into Congress a "National Health Bill" which asked for an appropriation of $98,000,000 for maternal and child welfare, cancer, pneumonia and malaria control, construction of new hospitals, extension of medical research.

State medical societies paid particular attention to Section Four of the bill, which proposes that States use Federal grants "to provide medical care for low income groups." Since this proposal leaves the set-up of such medical care to individual States, and since State legislators will heed the recommendations of State medical societies, doctors last week began making up their minds on the vital question of compulsory health insurance.

Hot and hard-fought was the battle which raged in the country's largest medical community last week as five thousand New York County members of the State Medical Society prepared to vote on the bald question: "Do you . . . favor compulsory health insurance [in New York State]?" Exactly how members were divided no one ventured to predict, but certain it was that the opposition was well organized. For the last few months Manhattan physicians have been bombarded with propaganda drawn up by smart Publicist Edward Bernays, financed by anti-New Dealer Frank Gannett, who was quick to capitalize on the American Medical Association's opposition to compulsory health insurance, which the New Deal fundamentally endorses. Fancy leaflets, magazines and reprints, some of them issued under the name of the Medical Society of the State of New York, ask doctors such sly questions as:

"Do You Want a HEALER or a HEELER?"

"Can a Person Really Profit By Medical Care If It Is Forced On Him?"

"Do You Want to be Classified or Cured?"

"Is There an Organized Effort to 'Smear' the Medical Profession?"

"Do You Want a Doctor--or a Job Holder?"

Compulsory health insurance, says this propaganda, encourages malingering, actually costs more than private medical care, is "detrimental to the nation's health." Under the English health insurance system, says one booklet, "the . . . patient will not hesitate to come along into the waiting-room collarless and even coatless, nor does it add to the comfort of other patients when one is compelled to put up a large notice [asking] . . . patients . . . not to spit on the floor."

In answer to these statements, a group of nine Manhattan physicians including Drs. Ernst Philip Boas and Henry Rawle Geyelin of Columbia, and Drs. Foster Kennedy and Henry Barker Richardson of Cornell sent Manhattan colleagues a mimeographed campaign sheet of brief, basic arguments for health insurance. Compulsory health insurance, they said, would lower the "financial burden of illness by spreading the cost over . . . large groups of people. It would enable the sick to seek medical treatment early in disease. ... It would enable the physician to give more adequate care to [poor] patients because such care would not entail an added financial burden to the patient. ... It would give greater financial stability to the physician as it would enable him to treat privately a large group of people whom he cannot treat today because of their inability to pay."

Whether Manhattan doctors would heed the high-powered bulletins of Laymen Bernays & Gannett or the arguments of their nine colleagues was a question which only next week's ballot will decide.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.