Harry S. Truman versus the Medical Lobby by Monte M. Poen

Author:Monte M. Poen [Poen, Monte M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780826261342
Publisher: University of Missouri Press

1. Adequate public health services, including an expanded maternal and child health program.

2. Additional medical research and medical education.

3. More hospitals and more doctors—in every area of the country where they are needed.

4. Insurance against the costs of medical care.

5. Protection against loss of earnings during illness.30

Ewing's position on health insurance departed radically from the National Health Assembly's position. While acknowledging that the assembly had not recommended health insurance through social security, Ewing stated, “I have re-examined the whole matter as objectively as possible…, and I still find myself compelled to recommend it.” Each year, he claimed, 325,000 needless deaths occurred because of the lack of proper medical attention due to high costs. Private, voluntary insurance plans covered less than 10 percent of the nation's populace; the only solution was a system of national health insurance.31

Ewing's report had been ready for some weeks;32 by releasing it on the eve of his campaign for reelection, Harry Truman saw that the document had as much political effect as possible. When the Ferdinand Magellan pulled out of Washington's Union Station on the afternoon of 5 September, a copy of The Nation's Health was included among the president's speechmaking materials.33

Truman's advocacy of health security in the campaign had been anticipated by remarks he had made in a speech the previous June. Addressing the Los Angeles Press Club while on a fourteen-day “nonpolitical” preconvention tour of the West, a tour taken ostensibly so that the president could receive an honorary degree from the University of California, Truman complained about Congress's failure to enact his health insurance program. The Republican Congress had had plenty of time to study and debate the issue, he said, yet they had done nothing about it. “Now the health of this Nation is the foundation on which the Nation is built. I have made a personal study of that situation. We have got a health and accident situation in this country that is the most disgraceful of any country in the world.” There were only two classes of people who could get proper medical attention, insisted the president, “the indigent and the very rich”; and something had to be done to solve the cost problem for “the ordinary fellow who gets from $2,400 to $5,000 a year.”34

Truman expanded upon this theme after the campaign had formally begun. In September, returning to California, where the supporters of Henry Wallace threatened to throw the state into the Republican camp, the president told a Los Angeles audience, “We worked out a painstaking plan for national medical care…. It provided for new hospitals, clinics, health centers, research, and a system of national health insurance. Who opposed it? The well-organized medical lobby. Who killed it? The Republican 80th ‘do-nothing’ Congress.” HST ended his talk with an appeal to the Wallacites: “To these liberals I would say in all sincerity: Think again.” The communists run the Progressive party, and it has no chance to gain national power. A vote for Wallace is a wasted vote. “A vote

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