Medicine: Fishbein’s Kaiser

Henry Kaiser is obstructing the draft of doctors to maintain his own individual empire, cried Editor Morris Fishbein, in his American Medical Association Journal last week. For retort, Henry Kaiser “implored” that the medical profession “immediately investigate the honesty and integrity” of Dr. Fishbein.

The trouble began last spring in Vancouver, Wash., when it became apparent that a new Kaiser shipyard would boom the town from 18,000 to 60,000. Kaiser brought in 20 doctors to look after his employes. Vancouver’s 22 regular doctors tended the rest of the townsfolk. The State branch of the Procurement & Assignment Service went easy on Vancouver, drafted none of its overworked doctors for the Army (two volunteered). But Vancouver needed still more hospital space. So, after Dr. Sidney Garfield, one of the Kaiser doctors, talked it over with the county medical society. Kaiser built a model hospital at a cost of $450,000.

The finished hospital included a nursery and full obstetrical and pediatric equipment. Said Dr. John Harrison, Clark County Medical Society secretary: “We were rather nonplussed. It was a little hard to understand how they were going to have babies around a place where only industrial workers were cared for.”* Kaiser, the doctors discovered, planned to provide medical care not only for his employes (who pay $2.60 a month for it) but their families as well. Family care is “contract medicine” and will be established in the U.S. only over the dead body of the A.M. A. (which represents 145,000 of the 155,000 active U.S. physicians).

Next Dr. Raymond Zech of the State medical procurement board announced that Kaiser’s doctors would be declared “nonessential” (subject to the draft) if they compete with private physicians by treating employes’ families. Federal directives state that doctors may be declared essential “if they serve war workers.” If they also serve workers’ families, said Dr. Zech, they are no more essential than other U.S. doctors.

To Washington, D.C. sped Kaiser’s Dr. Garfield, where he told Senator Claude Pepper’s labor subcommittee that he and his fellow shipyard doctors had been “threatened.” Henry Kaiser rushed to Dr. Garfield’s aid, bumped heads with Dr. Fishbein. Said Clark County’s Dr. Harrison last week: “It’s a goddam misstatement that Garfield was ‘threatened.’ ”

Not easily scared by anything, Henry Kaiser is not scared at all by what the A.M.A. calls socialized medicine. His medical ideas are no less sweeping than his other projects—he wants to doctor everybody. Bursting with health himself, Kaiser carries a medicine kitwherever he goes to “look after my folks,” often stops in his plantsand shipyards to offer pills to gravel-shovelers and executives. Thisconcern goes back to his boyhood: Henry Kaiser believes his mother diedtoo young for lack of medical care.

* Not so very extraordinary. The U.S. Army has lots of obstetricians and Army hospitals have maternity wards, for the Army has long provided the same kind of care for the wives and families of its employes.