For the Old Folks

House Republican Leader Charles Halleek stormed out of the Capitol, kicked the side of his official Cadillac in anger.

G.O.P. Whip Les Arends gasped, "I'm astonished." Halleck and Arends were roiled not by a new Democratic ploy, but by a political move from one of their own: New York's Representative William Miller, who doubles in brass as chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Miller had just abandoned the party's cautious position on medical care for the aged. Snapped Wisconsin's John Byrnes, chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, when he heard the news: "Bill Miller doesn't make party policy." Previously, House Republicans had stood with a medical care plan passed two years ago and still on the books; it provides for voluntary participation, offers aid only to those financially unable to pay for themselves, and is financed out of general Government revenues. The Kennedy Administration has been pushing hard for a far more expensive, expansive mandatory program, to be financed by Social Security. In Election Year 1962, Bill Miller thought that he could sense public pressures rising for Republicans to present something "positive" in the way of medical care. Without consulting his fellow G.O.P. House leaders, Miller came out for a program offering even more to the aged--and costing even more--than that of the Democrats.

Miller seized on a medical care bill authored by Ohio's Republican Representative Frank T. Bow. It had been casually conceived (recalls Bow: "I got the idea one morning while I was shaving") and tossed into the House hopper without any expectation that much would come of it.

Miller reworked the bill with Bow, then fired off letters to all the House Republicans, asking them to support it and become cosponsors. Quickly, 27 of them agreed. As the bill stands, it endorses the principle that all citizens over 65, regardless of their financial status, deserve Government-sponsored health insurance if they want it. It would provide income tax credits of $125 a year for everyone over 65, this money to be used to purchase health insurance carrying the following benefits: $12 a day for hospital room and board up to $1,080 a year; $120 for other hospital charges a year; $6 a day for convalescent rooms up to $186 a year; $300 maximum for surgery. There seems little chance that the bill will get through the House, but despite his colleagues' anger at him, Republican Chairman Miller seems happy. "Now," he says, "we have a program." Also in Congress last week: > The Senate gave the U.N. a convincing vote of confidence by authorizing President Kennedy to provide the hard-pressed organization with up to $100 million for its operations in the Congo and the Middle East. The 70-22 vote ended three months of argument in which Vermont's internationalist Republican Senator George Aiken led opposition to the President's request to buy 25-year bonds, insisting instead on a three-year loan. The adopted compromise (which Aiken agreed to) permits the President to do either. Hero of the occasion, from the Administration viewpoint, was none other than Republican Senate Leader Everett Dirksen, who brushed aside charges by conservative Republicans that the compromise amounted to a "surrender" to the President. In an impassioned argument (Rhode Island's Democratic Senator John Pastore called it "one of the finest speeches ever delivered in the Senate"), Dirksen declared: "With all the fever and flames of controversy upon every firmament at this good hour ... I will not charge my conscience with any act or deed which would contribute to the foundering of the United Nations, because I do not know how I would then be able to expiate that sin of commission to my grandchildren." The lopsided Senate vote improves the prospects for the measure in the House.

> Members of the House, who had ex pressed great skepticism before approv ing the creation of the Administration's Peace Corps a year ago, wholeheartedly praised the Corps while voting 316-70 to increase its personnel from 2,400 to 6,700, boost its budget from $30 million to $63,750,000.

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