"Better Health"

The President's health message to Congress this week emphasized the "freedom, consent and individual responsibility [which] are fundamental to our system." In the field of medical care, it said, this means "that the traditional relationship of the physician and his patient, and the right of the individual to elect freely the manner of his care in illness, must be preserved."

Within this carefully limited framework, the message proposed that the Federal Government should help combat the problems of 1) uneven distribution of medical facilities (only four or five hospital beds per 1,000 persons ip some states, with ten or eleven in others), and 2) high medical costs (some 10% of American families spend more than $500 a year for medical care, and the national average is $200). Said the message: "While continuing to reject Government regulation of medicine, we shall with vigor and imagination continously search out by appropriate means, recommend, and put into effect new methods of achieving better health for all of our people."

The new program, drafted by the White House in close cooperation with Secretary Oveta Gulp Hobby and her Department of Health. Education and Welfare, stressed nongovernmental and nonprofit health-insurance organizations, with voluntary membership. The President suggested a limited (initial capital: $25 million) federal reinsurance program to "encourage private and nonprofit health-insurance organizations to offer broader health protection to more families." Also recommended: intensified public-health research, a simpler formula for allocating grants-in-aid to the states, expanded vocational rehabilitation and hospital construction grants-in-aid programs.

Just before the message went to Congress, Mrs. Hobby met with officials of the American Medical Association and went over the text with them. After the session, the A.M.A. leaders declined to comment, pending "a careful study and review."

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