Catalyst for Health

If the entire U.S. were as provident as Rhode Island, some 91 million Americans would have the security of prepaid hospital bills. In Rhode Island, 65% of the population is enrolled in the Blue Cross (total for the U.S.: about 20%).

The world's two biggest voluntary plans for prepaying hospital and doctors' bills have grown so fast that they are unwieldy. The Blue Cross (which takes care of hospital bills) has 85 locally organized corporations in 47 states*; the newer Blue Shield (for doctors' bills) has 48 corporations in 29 states. Last week, at a joint Blue Cross-Blue Shield dinner in Washington's Hotel Statler, a merger was announced. A single administrator will take over the job of nationwide coordination.

The man chosen for this huge medical job is a top expert in mass medicine : Major General Paul Ramsey Hawley, who resigned last fall as medical director of the Veterans Administration after doing a "miracle" job of reorganization (TIME, Oct. 13). Dr. Hawley, a stocky 56, described his new job as that of "catalytic agent." One example of what he will have to tackle: coordinating 139 plans so that a national corporation can give its employees both hospital and doctor insurance in one "package." Another: working out a national average charge while keeping enough flexibility in local plans to meet varying conditions.

Hawley starts work April 1 at $15,000 a year (he will also get $6,000 Army retirement pay) . He will find his potential practice nine times bigger than it was. In the VA he had 4,000,000 patients ; there are now 29,250,000 members in Blue Cross, 7,250,000 in Blue Shield. And that is only a beginning, announced Roy E. Larsen, president of Manhattan's United Hospital Fund/- and former director of the New York Blue Cross. Blue Cross membership increased 15% last year; on that basis, Larsen said, it would take only eight years to reach 100,000,000 members; at Blue Shield's present rate of growth, membership would exceed 30,000,000 in three years.

The success of voluntary medical prepayment plans, Larsen asserted, is an adequate answer to advocates of compulsory Government health insurance measures like the Wagner-Murray-Dingell bill. He also tossed a few barbed statistics at the Federal Government: only 300,000 of the 2,000,000 federal employees now participate in Blue Cross plans "because of the difficulties of handling subscription payments without the cooperation of the employer. ... In this important instance the much-maligned American businessman is way ahead of a federal Administration which has preached medical protection for the low-income wage-earner for the past 15 years."

*Missing: Arkansas.

/-And president of TIME Inc.

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