Doctors in Politics

Fortnight ago every one of the members of the New York County Medical Society* received a ballot stating : "If under Proposition Four of [Senator Wagner's] . . . National Health Program, money is made available to New York State to provide care for the low-income earning groups, do you favor the delivery of this medical care by means of compulsory health insurance?"

Last week when the votes were tallied, society officers found that nearly two-thirds of the 4,800 members ignored the ballot, failed to vote. Final figures: 1,286 against compulsory health insurance, 432 in favor.

The anti-insurance group, in spite of the fact that they outvoted the progressives, three-to-one, could not lay clear claim to majority support. Members of the pro-insurance group felt that a number of doctors, who might have sent in mailed ballots voting for their side, did not vote at all because of a stipulation that the ballots must be delivered to the society's headquarters in person.

Chief medical spokesmen against the New Deal's bill to finance State plans for medical care are Drs. Samuel Joseph Kopetzky and Haven Emerson. Dr. Kopetzky, a youthful-looking, rosy-cheeked-otolaryngologist and veteran of the Spanish-American War, is editor of the official New York Medical Week. He is also an accomplished speechmaker. For months he has been denouncing the National Health Program as "a foreign importation." If doctors were salaried, he argued, they would not render good medical care, for the desire for money is the greatest incentive in medical practice. From the oath of Hippocrates: "In every house where I come I will enter only for the good of my patients. . . ."

Long, narrow Dr. Emerson, a grandnephew of Philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, is bland and diplomatic. His chief arguments against compulsory health insurance are: 1) the U. S. needs no planned medical care, for its citizens are in excellent health [despite Government statistics to the contrary]: 2) political appointees would run insurance systems. Doctors, says Dr. Emerson, must stay out of politics.

Dr. Emerson, however, jumped into politics with both feet last week as the final balloting on the society's insurance question took place. Anti-New Deal Publisher Frank Ernest Gannett gave a dinner at Manhattan's Plaza Hotel to recruit members for his National Committee to Uphold Constitutional Government, and asked Dr. Emerson to speak. About 75 prominent Manhattan physicians were invited to come and bring as guests four of their wealthiest or most influential patients. The committee solicited money from doctors and friends, promised in return to work for the defeat of the "dangerous, menacing" Wagner bill.

Publisher Gannett was absent. Toastmaster was his good friend--bald, shrewd Surgeon Charles Gordon Heyd, former president of the American Medical Association. Dr. Heyd sounded the theme of the meeting: doctors and businessmen must form a political alliance against the New Deal. Chief speakers were Dr. Emerson, who delivered his stock arguments, the committee's treasurer, Sumner W. Gerard, who claimed that the New Deal was out to rook doctors for the sake of a "piece of cheese," and defeated Democratic Congressman Samuel Pettengill of Indiana, who delivered a full-throated 1940 campaign speech.

These speeches were loudly cheered by some 500 guests. Many of the doctors invited found the advances of Publisher Gannett crude, stayed home. And the majority of Manhattan physicians, congenitally afraid of politics, and little under standing the practical meaning of planned medicine or the motives of those for and against it, went about their business, bliss fully ignorant of the whole affair.

*New York County and Manhattan Island are the same. The New York County society is the biggest and most influential of any county medical society in the U. S.

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