Medicine: Health Service, Inc.

Harvard's choleric surgeon, Hugh Cabot (the Boston tribe which according to legend "speaks only to God"), is vice chair man of the Committee of Physicians, a group of 1,000 critical American Medical Association members. For three years Dr. Cabot has stamped and stormed for group medical service. Last year a group of prominent Boston laymen, headed by Law yer Francis Henry Russell, dumped a plan for cheap, wholesale medical care on Dr. Cabot's doorstep. Dr. Cabot read and ap proved the plan, discussed it with four sympathetic colleagues—among them Dr. Channing Frothingham, former president of the Massachusetts Medical Society, and Dr. Robert L. De Normandie, head of the Society's Ethics Committee. Last week Dr. Cabot and his friends announced the birth of their new "Health Service, Inc."—a group plan for all Boston residents who earn less than $3,500 a year.

Lay directors of the plan include: Economist Alvah Eugene Staley of Tufts Col lege; Manager Daniel Bloomfield of the Boston Chamber of Commerce Retail Trade board; Secretary J. Arthur Moriarty of the Boston Typographical Union; New England Wage & Hour Administrator Thomas H. Eliot. Medical directors (headed by Dr. Cabot) do not belong to Health Service, but are banded into a brother corporation called Medical and Surgical Associates. This group will ex amine and appoint about 100 doctors to serve subscribers; Health Service, Inc. will pay them.

Medical directors will receive "nominal salaries." Doctors will be paid a lump sum every three months, based on the number of patients they have treated and the kind of services they have ren dered. They will treat patients in their offices until the organization can build a clinic. If the plan prospers, the directors hope to engage a staff of doctors for full-time services.

Rates for Health Service subscribers: $1.50 a month for single persons, $2.50 for married couples, 50¢ for each child under 21, a maximum family charge of $4. In addition, heads of families must pay a $3 initiation fee, an extra dollar for the first four home calls, an extra $25 for obstetrical care, 50¢ a month for infant care. Benefits include medical examinations, complete medical and surgical care, "preventive care," laboratory tests, X-ray study. Not included: hospital service, medicines, nursing, medical appliances, treatment for alcoholics, radium for cancer. Subscribers who wish cheap hospital care can also join Boston's "3¢ a day" Associated Hospital Service, an independent organization.

To get under way, Health Service has raised $3,000 in private contributions. In addition, the Service has the privilege of dipping into a $20,000 emergency pot guaranteed by Boston philanthropists. To make the Service selfsupporting, it needs a minimum of 4,000 participants. Last week when the plan was announced, members of Boston clubs and unions eagerly called for details, began to round up recruits for a grand opening, March 1.

Dr. Cabot & friends, in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine last week, promised that they would cause "minimum disturbance to existing private medical practice." But the Journal pointed out that plans for Health Service, Inc. had been submitted to the Massachusetts Medical Society last spring, had been flatly turned down.