$8.50 Confinement

All that it cost Mrs. Mollie H. Laibson of Brooklyn to bear her baby in a first-class Brooklyn hospital last week was $8.50. If she had been less provident, this wife of an insurance broker might have paid something like $100 for the hospital delivery room and semiprivate room which she used last week.

Mrs. Laibson enrolled in a 3-c--a-day ($10 a year) hospitalization insurance plan begun last May by the hospitals of the New York City metropolitan area. By last week 174 hospitals and 65,000 prospective patients belonged to the Associated Hospital Service of New York. Four hundred people are now enrolling each day. Mrs. Laibson made news because she was the first member to have a baby.

The hospitalization insurance plan seems to be the most successful of several hundred schemes now being tried out whereby patients, doctors and hospitals can get together with self-respect and mutual benefit. Fifteen hundred Dallas schoolteachers showed that this system would work by paying $6 a year to Baylor University Hospital. Other cities which have followed suit include San Antonio, Houston, New Orleans, Memphis, Sacramento, Minneapolis, St. Paul, Cleveland, Rochester, Washington, Durham, Newark, N. J.

Payless president of the New York association is heavy-browed Karl Emrich Eilers, 70, rich consulting metallurgist and payless president of Manhattan's up-to-date Lenox Hill Hospital.

To equalize risks, members are admitted to Associated Hospital Service only in blocks of ten. After they join, they may bring in their spouses and children by paying 3-c--a-day insurance for each. For their $10 a year members get up to 21 days bed, board, examinations (including Xray) and treatment in a hospital, if their doctors order it. Patients pay their doctors separately. If a member has an accident anywhere in the U. S. or Canada outside the New York area and is taken to a local hospital, the New York service pays part of his hospital bill. A woman must pay premiums for at least ten months, as Mrs. Laibson did, before she can get her obstetrical bills paid.

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