Word: health
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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With disarming casualness, President Truman sent up to Capitol Hill one day last week what was potentially one of the hottest political and economic issues Congress has ever had to handle. The President asked Congress to enact a compulsory health-insurance program for most U.S. citizens. Said the President in a special message: "To see that our people actually enjoy the good health that medical science knows how to provide is one of the great challenges to our democracy...
...challenge was there all right; the question was how wisely the President had proposed to meet it. The essentials of the Truman health program...
Douglas gagged at the stench and bolted for the door. Ferguson demanded: "Aren't there any health laws? Surely, we don't permit that kind of thing?" The police officer explained that eviction notices were served but seldom enforced: where would these people go? In 1946, Congress had authorized $20 million for District of Columbia slum clearance, but it had never appropriated the money. Cried Baldwin: "The smell! The smell! It's bad enough when this high wind is blowing. What must it be like in the hot summer months...
There were already two other major health bills (by Ohio Republican Robert A. Taft and Alabama Democrat Lister Hill) before Congress. Both would pay the premiums of the poor so that they could join such voluntary private health-insurance programs as the Blue Cross which already cover 50 million Americans. Taft's bill also provides federal subsidies for training doctors and building hospitals. Truman's answer to these bills: "Medical care is needed as a right, not as a medical dole." One sign of the trouble the President's bill faces: seven of the 13 members...
...From Kyoto, headquarters for the Occupation Army's First Corps, the Americans have also launched a program to educate adults-a 19-lesson course, with films, lectures and discussion groups. It meets for two hours twice a week, covers every field of postwar reform from taxes and public health to trade unionism and the new constitution. Given in seventh-grade language, it is designed to teach 30 million adults, in the next five years, "the principles of democracy which everyone can understand...