National Affairs: Pain, Pressure & Politics Make Powerful Medicine

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The man who struck the political spark is balding Aime Forand, 64. One of 16 children born to a New England loom fixer, Aime Forand quit grade school to help support his blind father ("I know what it means to scratch"), went on to become a Democratic Congressman from Rhode Island. For 22 unspectacular years, Forand was barely noticed in Washington—until he suggested that the social security system be expanded to cover health insurance for the aged. Forand's plan: boost social security taxes ¼% for employees and ¼% for employers, use the funds to finance surgical costs and up to 120 days' combined hospital and nursing-home care per year for people over 65.

The American Medical Association immediately damned the plan as the first giant stride to socialized medicine. Congressmen began receiving phone calls from their private physicians, who urged them to vote down Forand's plan but only succeeded in arousing their curiosity. Labor unions scooped up the Forand bill as a major legislative goal. The campaign was helped along when Michigan's Democratic Senator Pat McNamara, 65, longtime (1937-55) president of the Detroit Pipefitters' Local 636, led his Senate subcommittee on aging into eight major cities across the land for well-publicized hearings. It was helped again when Tennessee's Estes Kefauver caught headlines with his hearings on the high cost of wonder drugs (TIME, Dec. 21). From coast to coast, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. staged foot-stomping rallies of aged unionists. The slogan: pass the Forand bill. The unions also mounted a vigorous write-your-Congressmen campaign. The Forand bill has drawn far more mail than civil rights, much of it clearly of the form-letter ("Pass H.R. 4700") variety, but an impressive amount painfully lettered.

In a peaceful, prosperous election year the Democrats were groping for a bread-and-butter issue, and suddenly they awakened to the Forand bill uproar just about the time that the House Ways & Means Committee, controlled by Democrats, was killing it off. Every one of the front-running Democratic presidential hopefuls endorsed the Forand bill or a close variation. Hubert Humphrey and Jack Kennedy introduced bills of their own that approximate Forand's but cut the surgical benefits.