Medicine: Insurance

For $9.60 a year apiece, 1,510,000 U. S. citizens are entitled, if sick, to 21 days board and nursing in a semiprivate hospital room, use of maternity delivery room, ordinary X-ray and laboratory examinations, anesthesia. For $18 a year man & wife may get the same accommodation, for $24 a year an entire family (TIME, April 6, 1936, et seq.). From those fees 15% goes for hospitals’ charges, 12% for administration expenses of the service, the balance into reserve. During the four years since these hospital services developed subscribers paid $7,681,517 to hospitals. $1,230,000 to administration, banked $1.331,000 in reserve. To lay heads together, chiefly with an eye to putting another 1,200,000 names on their books this year, the youngish directors of the 60 U. S. hospital service plans now functioning held their first national convention in Manhattan last week.

In passing, the conveners saluted the few men who in only three years have made this novel kind of insurance a nationwide big little business: Clarence Rufus Rorem, accountancy expert, onetime associate director of the Rosenwald Fund, who establishes these plans for members of the American Hospital Association ; Homer Wickenden, onetime social worker, who raised the money to start the first hospital service in Manhattan, now general director of New York City’s United Hospital Fund; Frank Van Dyk, fund-raising specialist, who sold the idea to 600,000 New Yorkers, and as executive director of the Associated Hospital Service of New York organized last week’s convention.