Marking Time

"I do not recommend more of the same--but more that is better," said Lyndon Johnson in his health and education message to Congress last week. Actually, the President was mostly marking time in two fields where he has been almost too productive in the past two years. Having gotten 18 new education laws and 24 health measures through the 89th Congress, he now placed maximum emphasis on consolidating and making existing programs more efficient, and he carefully muted the few new spending proposals included in his message.

Inspire the People. In the area of education, one of his special concerns, Johnson's major recommendation was the establishment of a public television corporation to support noncommercial TV and radio broadcasting. The initial cost would be only $9,000,000, though no price tag could measure its real importance. To the delight of officials at the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation, who recently issued "white papers" supporting noncommercial broadcasting, Johnson tentatively accepted a few ideas from each.

From Ford, he borrowed the idea of using communications satellites, if they prove economically feasible, in a public, noncommercial system; from Carnegie, he took the idea of strengthening regional program-production centers and local stations as a guarantee of diversity. "I am convinced," he said, "that a vital and self-sufficient noncommercial television system will not only instruct but inspire and uplift our people."

The President deferred the most sensitive decision to next year--how the corporation should be financed to protect it from political pressures. Also in the education field, Johnson called for a fourfold increase in the Teacher Corps (to 5,500 volunteers) by mid-1968 and expansion of programs to train new teachers and administrators, combat adult illiteracy and eliminate school segregation. Total cost of his education proposals: $11 billion.

Better Delivery. In the health section of his message, Johnson abandoned last year's proposal for a $10 billion, ten-year loan program for hospital construction. He did earmark $1.5 billion of the total $12.4 billion health budget for biomedical research and called for the training of 1,000,000 more health workers in the next decade. But his chief emphasis was on achieving "better delivery of health care" through such measures as using doctors' offices for many examinations that are now conducted in hospitals.

Inefficient use of present facilities, said Health, Education and Welfare Secretary John Gardner in a report issued the day after Johnson's message, helps to explain last year's staggering 16.5% jump in the cost of hospital care. Before embarking on an expensive new expansion program, he indicated, the Government should rigorously examine the programs it already has.

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