Free-Enterprise Medicine

Sir / I cannot allow your statements regarding Professional Standards Review Organizations [Dec. 17] to go unchallenged. As a practicing physician for 15 years, I feel that I am the better judge of what is good for medicine than some Washington bureaucrat. Your article leads one to think that Americans are dying by the thousands because of the incompetency of the American doctor. Nothing is farther from the truth. American medicine is recognized worldwide as being the best.

Wake up to the realization that American medicine is the last bulwark of free enterprise in the country, free to a great extent of government control. This is what has allowed it to progress to the heights it has attained.

SALVATORE J. ANGELO, M.D. Toms River, N.J.

Sir / Health-care delivery in this country seems to serve the well-being of doctors and insurance companies, but hardly anyone else. Let's hope that the introduction of PSROs, timid first step that it is, represents a movement toward bringing accountability into health care. As the nation's largest union of health-care employees (including a handful of doctors), we believe that shedding light on medical practices and patient care in America will benefit the taxpayers, the workers and, most of all, the patients.

JERRY WURF President

American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, AFL-CIO Washington, D.C.

Sir / If your readers don't know that a patient-be-damned attitude exists within the medical profession, it is time they learned. I have been close enough to doctors to not want to get closer (respiratory trouble), and have come to view the American doctor in general as the most repugnant, money-grabbing and discourteous animal on the face of the earth.

VIGGO PETERSEN San Francisco

Sir / Amidst our complex problems and difficulties there are some reassuring facts: the average American doctor is better trained than his colleagues elsewhere; his opportunity for postgraduate education is the most extensive in the world; and medicine is the most tightly controlled profession in the U.S.

JAMES SCOTT, M.D. Streator, Ill.

Sir / The Union of American Physicians does not oppose an honest review of the quality of our work by those trained to evaluate it. We do object to the PSRO law because it is merely a device to hide cost control behind the illusion of quality control. It is designed to brainwash the public into accepting bargain-basement medicine.

SANFORD A. MARCUS, M.D. President Union of American Physicians San Francisco

Ford and the Future

Sir / As a result of the careful screening of Gerald Ford [Dec. 17] by Congress, we probably have the best Vice President in years. Consideration was given only to his fitness for the office and not whether he could deliver the vote of a certain section of the country. Perhaps we should pick future Presidents in a similar manner. The country is so large that we have outgrown our original method of choosing a man to lead the nation. Some way must be found to choose men of merit.

ELSIE A. WILSON Lansdowne, Pa.

Sir / Thank you, Democratic Congress, for conducting a thorough investigation to produce a Mr. Clean (in the person of Jerry Ford) to reside in the White House for eight years after the 1976 election.

ADELLA E. HOVERKAMP Massillon, Ohio

Sir / Gerald Ford showed great courage and ambition in volunteering to serve aboard a sinking ship.

SHELDON RUDOLPH Downsview, Ont.

Sir / Now that Gerald Ford has been sworn in, Congress must accelerate its moves toward the impeachment of President Nixon. At the core of our democratic process is the right to make a choice. Implicit in this concept is the right to make the wrong choice. However, to continue to be a great nation we must show that we have the guts to right our wrongs.

(MRS.) NANCY D. POWELL Newport News, Va.

Sir / My morning prayer is: O Lord, will you please admonish Vice President Ford that we are not playing football.

ROBERT BUCKLEY Cambridge, Mass.

Deductible Tapes?

Sir / It hurts to know that the President's $200,000 salary yields no more income tax than my $7,000 a year [Dec. 17]. What hurts even more is that his lawyers contrived figuring appears to be perfectly legal under our rich-get-richer tax laws.

Maybe the President would have given up his precious tapes much more generously had we only offered him an additional tax deduction for them.

BRUCE H. DAVIS Austin, Texas

Sir / Millions of people will want to know since when it was reasonable or necessary for our President or anybody else to pay any taxes that were not due.

WILLIAM HALSEY WOOD Little Compton, R.I.

Sir / I do hope that those people who willingly sacrifice a great deal when they contribute to various worthy charities will not become too discouraged after studying Mr. Nixon's record of giving that totaled a whopping $295 of his rather sizable salary and income in 1972.

SAMUEL M. BEZ Southfield, Mich.

Sir / Although Richard Nixon is President of all the states, he pays taxes in none. Is he therefore a stateless person?

JOSEPH MANNIX Washington. D.C.

Wrong Lament

Sir / "When blame is apportioned . . Who gets the rest? Just about everybody" [Dec. 10]. You can say that again, only please add: including the press. Look at TIME during the past twelve months. How many pages about the impending energy crisis, how many about Watergate? While the house was on fire, you kept lamenting somebody's stealing the petty cash.

ERNST FREIMANN Zug, Switzerland

Sir / I was taught that the U.S. Government is "of the people, by the people, for the people." Now, alas, my fond beliefs have been shattered by the Nixon Government "of the rich, by the rich, for the rich."

Mr. Simon's statement that there probably will be no rationing but added costs to inhibit the use of gasoline was the final blow. Would Mr. Simon please explain how people who live in areas with no public transportation are supposed to get to work if only the rich can afford to buy gasoline? I know that rationing is much less than perfect, but it should provide a means by which low-income persons can purchase enough gasoline to get to and from work.

HELEN V. ENGLEHART Caldwell, Idaho

Sir / Solar energy, solar energy, solar energy--forget oil, gas, coal and everything else thousands of feet underground. Solar energy is open, aboveground and free for the asking--not in billions of gallons but billions of years.

Scientists, the time has come to concentrate on the sun.

A.C. WILSON Jackson Hole, Wyo.

Sir / How good it would be to be Dutch at this moment, and how proud so many people are of the Dutch people!

Walking in the cold with your head held high can be so much more comfortable than queuing for petrol with head bowed --the difference, metaphorically speaking, between being "bloody, but unbowed" and bloody and bowed. At a time when such a sickeningly large part of the Western world (the U.S. excluded, but my own country unfortunately included) is facing toward the East on its stomach, Holland is like a shining light.

R.C.W. WESTON Windsor, England

The New 38

Sir / Congratulations to Professor G. Etzel Pearcy, whose concept of a new 38-state union [Dec. 17] also releases budget-starved urban areas from rural domination in state legislatures.

Suburban sprawl across state lines has created severe problems in transportation, education and welfare that can only be solved by coordinated regional planning. Solutions require that local tax dollars be allowed to remain within the region.

Man-made political boundaries are not inviolate and they deserve Pearcy's sort of reevaluation.

S.I. ALTMAN New York City

Sir / Professor G. Etzel Pearcy has come up with a very good idea, but I don't believe he has gone nearly far enough in reducing the number of states to 38. The borders of the present 50 states often were drawn up for reasons that are now thoroughly obsolete or are the results of historical happenstance. They are, in many cases, illogical, inconvenient, inefficient and unfair to their inhabitants.

If our country were redivided into eight to twelve states, they could be of sufficient size and population to maximize efficient, economical administration.

DAVID HUTCHISON New York City

Wax Slippers for Fleas

Sir / The prodigious jumping power of the flea [Dec. 3] seems to be one of those mysteries that has forever tantalized the mind of man. Aristophanes' comedy The Clouds (423 B.C.) shows Socrates and his students carrying on experiments to determine how many times the length of its own foot a flea can jump.

The solution is to make wax slippers for the insect, then remove them after the leap and use them as yardsticks to measure the distance.

J.E. RIVERS JR. Assistant Professor of English University of Virginia Charlottesville, Va.

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