Antitoxin

The U.S. would become a member of the U.N.'s World Health Organization, after all. But the lawmakers wanted to make sure that the U.S. would not also catch a bad case of socialized medicine. To many Congressmen the key provision of the bill passed last week is the requirement that the U.S. representative on WHO's executive board must have "spent at least three years in active practice* as a physician or surgeon." The House wanted to make it ten years; that would have barred most of the experts who have spent their lives in the U.S. Public Health Service, in state health departments, in public health research.

House committees that worked on the bill knew what they wanted--and didn't want. Indiana's Forest A. Harness (House Rules Committee) has charged that public health careerists are trying to force "socialized medicine on America by use of federal employees and Government money." What the U.S. wants in WHO, said he, is "some practical man, rather than some Government career man."

The three-year provision seems to rule out Dr. Thomas Parran, former PHS Surgeon General (TIME, Feb. 23), who had been considered a likely choice. Dr. Parran has been careful in his public statements, but Congressmen have accused him of using "extraordinary executive pressure" to stir up public demand for socialized medicine. Except for a six-year term as New York State health commissioner, Dr. Parran, graduate of Georgetown University School of Medicine, has served in the PHS ever since he finished a one-year internship in 1916. One PHS man cracked of the new bill: "Well, they didn't say a man 5 feet 7 inches tall with a mustache [see cut'], who was a graduate of Georgetown . . . That would have been a little too obvious."

The bill also provides that the U.S. is in no way to be committed to any legislative program approved by WHO. Harness explained the congressional suspicion: "We're in there with Great Britain, Russia, Yugoslavia, Rumania and Hungary. All have some form of socialized medicine or compulsory health insurance."

* The bill does not spell it out, but committee members say that internships and hospital residencies may count as "active practice."

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