Medicine: The Politics of Health Care

Neither Republicans nor Democrats any longer question the need for federal action to cope with the rising cost of health care (TIME, June 7). What they disagree on is the method of providing such assistance. Liberal Democrats, led by Senator Edward Kennedy and Representative Martha Griffiths, favor national health insurance under which the Government itself would pay at least 50% of the costs of medical care. President Nixon believes that private enterprise can do the job. His plan would provide Government-sponsored insurance for most—though not all—of the non-working poor. The majority of other people would depend on their employers to share the burden of medical insurance payments.

Administration spokesmen have already carried the President’s case for marketplace medicine to Congress. Last week, Nixon himself made a plea to the nation’s doctors. Addressing the American Medical Association’s 120th annual convention at Atlantic City, N.J., Nixon described his plan as a “partnership that would build on the strength of the present health care system,” and urged physicians to support it.

Sharp Salvos. The President did not confine his remarks to praise for his own prescription for health care reform. He fired several sharp salvos at the liberal Democrats’ plan for a national health insurance system, though he did not refer specifically to the Kennedy-Griffiths plan. Existing federal health programs, he said, now cost the average American family 405 tax dollars a year; the Administration proposal would push that cost to $466. The Kennedy-Griffiths plan, he argued, would cost $77 billion, nearly 25% of the total federal budget, and would hit the average family for $1,271 in taxes by 1974. The eventual result, according to Nixon: “Complete federal domination of our medical system.” Nixon’s remarks, however, ignored the fact that much of the funds required by the Kennedy-Griffiths plan are already being spent for private health insurance, Medicare and Medicaid.

The A.M.A., which has long opposed any move toward Government-subsidized medicine, was delighted by Nixon’s criticism of the Kennedy-Griffiths bill. But the organization could hardly have been pleased by the President’s handling of its own health care package. Administration officials have already told the Senate Finance Committee that the A.M.A.’s “Medicredit” plan, which allows tax credits for purchase of private insurance policies, does not go far enough toward reform of the present health care system. The President ignored the A.M.A.’s proposal entirely.