Playing Politics?

Harry Truman's friends & foes were equally surprised last week by his appointment of a 15-man commission to study the nation's "total health requirements" and to report within a year on what should be done about them. The commission seemed to be a planned withdrawal from the Truman-Ewing "compulsory national health insurance" program, which had won the Administration few friends, made many enemies who denounced it as socialistic. Salient items in the new approach:

P:As head of the commission, the President named Dr. Paul Budd Magnuson, 67, famed bone and joint surgeon, a crack organizer (as he showed in the Veterans Administration), an open foe of bureaucracy in general and of Truman's "compulsory health" program in particular.

P:The President gave Dr. Magnuson a free hand in picking the 14 other commission members, and his choices were plainly nonpolitical: four physicians, a nurse, a dentist, two labor leaders, a farmer-editor, three educators, a philanthropist and a consumers' representative.

P:Dr. Magnuson checked the idea in advance with the brasshats of the American Medical Association, got the impression that they approved it.

Within hours, the A.M.A.'s bigwigs began to act as though they had never heard of the plan before. Snapped Surgeon John W. Cline, the A.M.A.'s pushing, politicking president: "Another flagrant proposal to play politics with the medical welfare of the American people . . . Brazen misuse of defense emergency funds for a program of political propaganda, designed to influence legislation and the outcome of the 1952 election." Wisconsin's Dr. Gunnar Gundersen, an A.M.A. trustee who had halfway accepted a bid to serve on the commission, backed out hastily, saying it was designed "as an instrument of practical politics ... a masquerade." Dr. Magnuson called his commission together in Washington this week to begin figuring out how to boost the supply of doctors, dentists and nurses and spread them more evenly across the land; to set up more local public-health units; to speed medical research; to minister to the chronically ill and the aged; finally, to decide how all these services could best be paid for. Said Dr. Magnuson: "If the A.M.A. hierarchy devoted as much time to care of their patients as they do to political maneuvering, we'd all be better off."

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