Ike Sat at His Feet

A couple of hundred educators from 17 Midwestern states gathered in Kansas City, Kans. last week and listened to a call for vigorous action to keep education under local control and save it from the tentacles of big government. They liked and applauded what the speaker said--'We need not lose our freedom if we face up to our responsibilities."

Many in the audience were more interested in the speaker than in the speech. They had heard that Dr. Franklin David Murphy had been consulted by General Eisenhower on U.S. health policies. They expected that, in the event of a Republican victory in November, Franklin Murphy would become an important figure in national planning for health. He might, they figured, become the nation's first Secretary of Health and Welfare.

At 36, Franklin Murphy is already in his third career: chancellor of the University of Kansas. Before that, he had been dean of its medical school, and before that a promising heart specialist in Kansas City, Mo., where he was born, the son and grandson of physicians. To his well-wishers and admirers, it seems only natural that a man with his drive and imagination should go on to a fourth career on the national scene.

Prairie Plans. Kansas got to know and respect Murphy's energy and initiative when he became dean of the School of Medicine in 1948. He promptly put into effect a plan for grass-roots action to get more doctors in service in prairie townships. (The communities raise money to provide quarters and equipment for a doctor, who may rent them or buy on time.) The "Kansas Plan" was copied in several states.

Dwight Eisenhower, as the new president of Columbia University, got to know about Franklin Murphy from brother Milton Eisenhower, then president of Kansas State College. Ike liked the Kansas Plan because it started at the grass roots and demanded the participation of individual citizens. It was not long before Milton Eisenhower arranged for Murphy to meet the general; later, Murphy put his ideas on paper for him.

Ike said in his Abilene press conference last June: "I believe that every American has a right to decent medical care. Incidentally, the best plan I ever heard about came right from this state, from [Dr. Murphy]. I sat at his feet for several hours. He is a man who, it seems to me, has real sense."

Murphy feels that in his present position he should stay out of politics, but leaves no doubt that he is a Republican at heart. He makes a careful distinction between areas in which he thinks the Federal Government can legitimately help to boost the nation's health (e.g., aid to medical schools, loans for building hospitals, and far-reaching public-health programs) and the area he insists it must shun. As he put it: "The Government has an important place in the picture, but England has proven to us that doctors and the application of medicine cannot be put on an assembly-line basis . . . but must be an individual and personal thing between the doctor and the patient."

Premium Plans. How to pay for this? Those who can afford private health-insurance plans should pay for them,says Murphy. And more people must be brought into these plans. Those who cannot afford to pay their own premiums must be helped by either state or federal governments.

Franklin Murphy has no illusions about the public's reaction to the way organized medicine has carried on its fight against nationalization. "The American people," he says, "are no longer dumb about medicine and they are going to have modern medical care at a price they can afford. They are getting tired of the bickering and fighting between government and private medicine. They want them to get together." The first step, he says, would be to get government and medical authorities around a table without distrust. With his friendliness and enthusiasm, Franklin Murphy would be a good man to sit at the head of that table.

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