Dutch-Uncle Talk

Elder Statesman Bernard M. Baruch is a doctor's son. In the last few years, vigorous, health-minded Bernie Baruch has given millions for the advancement of medical education and research. Last week he talked like a Dutch uncle to a Manhattan gathering of 600 medicos and hospital administrators. It is high time, he said, that doctors give up their stiff-necked opposition to compulsory health insurance.

As President Roosevelt's wartime manpower investigator, he was "shocked to learn that at least 4,000,000 men had been rejected as 4Fs." He was also shocked by a prewar American Medical Association finding that two-thirds of U.S. families could not afford the cost of serious illness. Said Baruch:

"[Voluntary health insurance] is not good enough. . . . What troubles me most are the needs of that sizable segment of society which does not earn enough to pay for voluntary insurance. . . . Nothing has been suggested so far which promises success other than some form of insurance covering these people in by law and financed by the Government, at least in part. ... A form of compulsory health insurance . . . can be devised . . . without the Government taking over medicine, something I would fiercely oppose."

Specific Baruch demands: "More and better doctors--in more places"; more general practitioners; more hospitals; more group practice; more preventive medicine; "a new Cabinet post for health, education [and] social security"; a "watchdog committee" to help guard veterans' medicine against politicians.

Said Baruch, staring defiantly at his silent audience: "I do not fear Government taking its legitimate part in medicine, any more than I fear it in education or housing. ... I urge the doctors to get in and pitch--not stand by on the sidelines."

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