The White Cross Fights
Putnam, Harold
The White Cross Fights By HAROLD PUTNAM npHE BIGGEST FIGHT in the history of Massachu-setts medicine is building up for a showdown before the State Legislature next year. In that corner, I...
...He cited th& Associated Press case, in which the Wagner Act's application to the press was upheM by the United States Supreme Court...
...Why...
...Professors And War AS A GROUP, college presidents and professors are running pretty close to their 1917 form when they were counted among the most bloodthirsty of the warhawks and the most bigoted of the witch-hunters...
...What Ails The South...
...Morton that his ether anaesthesia was fantastic...
...Those are medical giants—who've gathered around them more than 130 like-minded saints of surgery and public health to advance the group program...
...Mongrel Plan Pushed To Stymie Group Health 'T'HE SOCIETY PLAN, if the Legislature approves, will place all group health plans under the control of the Massachusetts Medical Society, despite the fact that the Supreme Court has already chastized organized medicine once for operating in restraint of trade...
...It will sabotage the important preventive medicine feature of the White Cross...
...Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes...
...The White Cross is designed to fill this middle class need...
...If any region in America faces a greater challenge at home—a challenge which requires every bit of its energy and resources—we haven't heard of it...
...Federal Judge Francis J. W. Ford, sitting in Boston, told the owners of the Lowell Sun that it was sheer nonsense for a newspaper publisher to claim special exemption from the Wages and Hours Act...
...The American Newspaper Publishers Association hustled its highest priced lawyer, Eiisha Hanson, to the firing line...
...Proof that it is filling it well ia this renewed opposition...
...War would crush the south's great opportunity to emerge from the doldrums...
...De-Normandie, obstetrician of national repute...
...Gallup's investigators don't penetrate to the tumbled-down shacks of the sharecroppers or the miserable hovels in which the colored folks live to ask them how they feel about things, although they, of course, will be expected to do their share of the fighting and dying if war comes...
...Coalition In Minnesota (From The Minnesota Leader) •"pHE MEMBERS and supporters of the Farmers-Labor party, so-called, are invited by prominent Democrats to abandon the Farmer-Labor party and join the Democratic party—a blessed invitation like that of the spider to the fly...
...They accuse the White Cross of "soliciting subscribers" (which isn't ethical, you know, and which the White Cross doesn't) but in their own plan which they hope to foist on the Legislature they allow themselves as much as ten per cent of the group plan income "for the solicitation of subscribers...
...Here is a section of America which the Roosevelt administration has stamped the problem child of the nation...
...The paper had refused to produce employment records for the Wage-Hour Administration on the ground that it should not be subject to the Act lest its freedom be impaired...
...We can pay to be kept well...
...If they want to sabotage group health, they're going to be up against a tough customer—by next spring...
...By what process can the Democratic party absorb completely every vestige of the Farmer-Labor political organization and assimilate such an excess and incongruous mass...
...We hope Mr...
...Lately some of the headline-hunting pedagogues at Harvard and Yale, all of them too old to bear arms, have rushed into print to denounce the "softness" of youth because students at their institutions have expressed opposition to a foreign policy which will end by making cannon-fodder of them...
...The real destiny of the United States is to maintain a continent of peace, not for the negative reason that we may thereby escape the physical destruction of war, but for the positive purpose of a vital and universally helpful leadership in the establishment of world peace...
...War would halt, perhaps for years to come, the slowly-gathering drive to emancipate the south from the economic bondage which has imprisoned it for nearly eight decades...
...Famous Dr...
...and Dr...
...Here is the area where poverty is greatest, where 10,000,000 citizens in the humbler stations of-life are denied the right to vote, where housing_and hunger are at their wretched worst...
...As a matter of fact the liberal Democrats ought to join forces with the Farmer-Laborites to prevent reaction in whatever name to entrench itself in Minnesota...
...Butler, assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard and physician to the Children's Hospital...
...In her calm, quiet way, the author has done a devastating job in exposing the actual workings of the William Allen White Committee interventionists...
...It will operate only on a private insurance—old fee system basis...
...Far the right of a group of consumers and doctors to contact together for their mutual benefit...
...So these "gentlemen," only interested of course in preserving the "ethics" of the profession, are out to sabotage the White Cross program...
...We're just wondering out loud...
...The large and successful vote in Minnesota for Roosevelt came largely from the Farmer-Labor supporters rather than from the so-called Democrats...
...Morley can get to some of the Christmas recess conventions of college professors and do some proselyting for peace among a group which seems to forget just about every 20 years what it has been teaching for the preceding two decades...
...but the Democrats have not been a unit in their support and still are at war with him...
...For the first time in local medical history a prospective patient can examine doctors' qualifications and make their own selections from a large and qualified group...
...We don't profess to know...
...White Cross Will Fight For Consumers' Health Plan AGAINST THEM will be organized labor and all its progressive allies in the state, such conservative business men as Daniel Bloomfield and Minturn Sedgwick, such New Dealers as new Congressman Tom Eliot and every other political, religious and business leader who puts the public interest above special privilege...
...Every year, if not every day, we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge...
...And Jud^e Ford, carrying this same reasoning into an analysis of the press' relation to the Wages and Hours Act, concluded: "It would be unfortunate if the employes of the press were deprived of the benefits of this general legislation that would do so much to improve their general welfare, upon any plea that the press is sacrosanct...
...In view of the belligerence which issues so regularly from campus ivory towers it is refreshing indeed to inhale the crisp common sense of Felix Morley, new president of Haverford College and until recently the editor of the Washington Post editorial page, who maintains that the entry of the United States into the- war would have "the most serious repercussions on our political, social, and economic structure—win, lose or draw...
...It costs only $1.25 per person per month...
...Press Is Sacrosanct NEWSPAPER publishers who try to find protection for sweatshop working conditions in the constitutional guarantee of a free press had their ears pinned back again recently...
...The wealthy can pay for good medical care The poor can't pay for anything...
...Whatever the cause—-and if our readers have some good notions on the subject we would like to have them—the whole business doesn't make sense to us...
...Young, the Faulkner's chief surgeon...
...Channing Frothing-ham, chief of medical service at the Faulkner Hospital...
...Organized Medicine Is Out To Lick White Cross A GAINST THIS BAND of stout-hearted men is be-ing launched the large-scale opposition of organized medicine...
...Middle class people can pay moderate costs, but can't risk the sock of a big medical bill...
...Hugh Cabot, formerly of the Mayo Clinic...
...they've been nurtured on a system that provides a payoff only when a patient is physically down and almost out...
...There is no area in America which is cited more by Nazi, Fascist, and Communist propagandists in their tirades against the inefficiency of democracy than the south...
...This proceeding is not as simple as it may seem to the superficial-thinking politician...
...They want no group program, that will encourage a patient to select his physician with the care and reliable information (it would be hard on the quacks...
...The White Cross will be handicapped in this historic battle, prevented as it is by medical "ethics" from soliciting members...
...In that corner, I present the reactionaries of the Massachusetts Medical Society, the modern counterparts of the doctors who told Pasteur he was "crazy" and Dr...
...The group health fight is a battle for the right of a minority to mind its own business...
...In it's decision in that case the highest court ruled that ';the publisher of a newspaper has no special immunity frcn the application of general laws . . . The regulation here in question has no relation whatever to the impartial distribution of news...
...The White Cross is a non-profit plan offering budgeted medical and surgical care...
...In this corner, I present the White Cross, a struggling group of doctors working unselfishly to provide exceptionally fine services at a moderate, budgeted cost...
...News of its great work is spread only by word of mouth and an occasional newspaper boost such as this...
...The Society lets in all physicians "licensed to practice medicine," in other words about 2,000 who are not up to the high standards of the White Cross...
...Turn To Page Two THE PROGRESSIVE hopes that every reader will give the closest attention to the brilliant article on Page Two by Edith O. Newby...
...The legislation involved here does not even remotely tend to control or restrain freedom and liberty to publish news...
...The elements in the Farmer-Labor movement are homogeneous and mobile so they can be readily transferred somewhere else and transformed into something alien...
...EVERY POLL of public opinion on questions of foreign policy discloses a far greater sentiment for intervention and war among the people of the southern states than in any other region of America, including New England...
...Equally valuable is her shrewd but simple formula for combatting the propaganda of the warmongers...
...The Democratic party itself is composed of warring elements, held together by a great and successful liberal leader, Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom some of his sulking followers would pounce on and tear to pieces if the opportunity were presented...
...Turn now to Page Two, if you haven't already, and read "It Can Be Stopped...
...Fer the first time you and I can budget for the services of a qualified general practitioner and a wide assortment of specialists...
...They want no White Cross, which threatens an end of the fat fee system...
...They want no White Cross interested in keeping people healthy...
...The White Cross permits doctors to affiliate who are graduates of Grade A medical schools...
...The Medical Society apparently thought it was picking on a pretty weak sister...
...Perhaps Dr...
...For the real thing (the White Cross) will be substituted a mongrel program with about as much social value as a Nazi-Stuka...
...They're wrong...
...The fact that the basic elements constituting the Farmer-Labor movement extend back nearly three-quarters of a century and the liberal economic and political principles of that early day are the best guaranty that passing political advantage will not tempt their betrayal again as in '96...
...It is true, President Roosevelt has always received the solid support of the Farmer-Laborites because he does represent progressive action...
...And the White Cross offers physicians whose skill is unmatched in all New England—courageous doctors who have risked their financial necks to launch a progressive medical program...
...But Judge Ford said "fiddlesticks"—in judicial language...
...Then again, perhaps immersion in the war and the tremendous enthusiasm for a belligerent American policy constitute a sort of escapism by which men can find release from the squalor and hopelessness of their lives...
Vol. 4 • December 1940 • No. 51
