The Congress: Familiar Figure

When it gets around to voting this week on a "new" medicare bill, the Senate will not have to gaze very hard to spy the familiar figure of a controversial companion.

Under attack by medical lobbies and opposed by most Republican and many Democratic Senators, the Kennedy Administration's King-Anderson bill to provide hospital care for the aged under social security has disappeared from view. In its place last week appeared a bipartisan compromise disguised in the legislative equivalent of a newly donned jacket and a different style of hairsplitting. But though the disguise failed to alarm King-Anderson's friends, it also failed to fool its opponents—even if the clothes were a bit more conservative.

The substitute bill provides for exactly the same benefits as King-Anderson: up to 90 days of hospital care for one illness, up to 180 days of nursing home services, and up to 240 home visits by medical personnel other than M.D.s. As in King-Anderson, the patient would still have to meet his own doctor bills. The new measure would be financed in exactly the same way as King-Anderson, too: through an increase of one-quarter of 1% in the social security tax, plus a like levy on the employer.

But the new bill has two additional provisions to distinguish it from King-Anderson. It provides for identical benefits for persons 65 and over who would not be eligible for social security coverage; these benefits would be financed out of the annual general revenues of the Federal Government. The new bill also, to soften conservative opposition, provides an option recommended by New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller: a social security beneficiary would have a choice between accepting the Government benefits or having the Government contribute toward the premium on a private health insurance plan providing equal benefits—but only if the beneficiary had been enrolled in such a private plan for a specified period before becoming eligible for social security.

At his press conference. President Kennedy put in a special plug for the touched-up measure, called it "a strong bill, an effective bill." But most Senators who had originally been opposed to King-Anderson still disliked the substitute. Even so, it may scratch through the Senate. After that, its prospects in the House, congressional leaders calculated, were about the same as King-Anderson's had been: pretty bad.