THE ADMINISTRATION: Shared Responsibility

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Last week the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Oveta Gulp Hobby, took the wraps off the Administration's health program. The plan, which the President sent to Capitol Hill, is an expanded version of the one Congress talked about but failed to pass last year.

Key to the plan is Government reinsurance of private medical insurance, e.g., Blue Cross, to encourage broader coverage, including payments for doctor's visits, financial help through periods of long illness, and coverage of low-income and rural families.

Secretary Hobby's program is designed for a minimum of federal control, a maximum of free enterprise. Mrs. Hobby calls it a plan of "shared responsibility." Under the program the Government would promise to reimburse (out of a $100 million fund) insurance concerns that may lay themselves open to abnormal losses.

Among other provisions of the program :

¶ Additional federal grants to help states in providing medical care of the 5,000,000 impoverished aged, disabled, orphaned and blind people already getting public assistance. Estimated 1956 cost: $20 million. Eventual cost: $110 million each year.

¶ Federal mortgage insurance for the construction of privately sponsored hospitals, clinics, medical coops, rural health centers, nursing homes.

¶ Federal grants ($2,000,000 the first year, $3,000,000 the next, $4,000,000 thereafter), to be matched by states, for training practical nurses.

¶ An air-pollution study. Cost: $742,500.

Of her reinsurance plan, Secretary Hobby concluded: "It is not a cureall. There is no magic in the proposal. [It] does offer an opportunity to provide more people with health insurance and to provide them with better health insurance."