Aid for the Aged

Shaping up as one of 1960's most incendiary political issues is the problem of providing adequate medical care for those who need it most and can afford it least: the 15 million U.S. citizens 65 and over. A variety of bills calling for federal medical subsidies to the aged is before both the Senate and House. By far the most popular and controversial of all has been introduced by Rhode Island's Democratic Representative Aime Forand, 64. Last week the Forand bill was drawing more mail than any other bill of any kind before Congress.

Boos For Ike. The Forand bill would have the Federal Government pay medical and surgical benefits, plus up to 120 days' combined hospitalization and nursing-home care per year for all those eligible for social security old-age and survivors' checks. Covering today's 15 million eligibles it would cost, by Republican estimates, about $2 billion a year, might run up to $7.5 billion annually by 1980. It would be bankrolled by boosting the social security tax one-quarter percent for each employee and employer and three-eighths percent for each self-employed person. Last week after heated debate among top Republicans at the President's weekly meeting with legislative leaders, the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, Arthur Flemming, told the House

Ways & Means Committee that the Administration opposes compulsory plans such as Forand's, wants to "study" the problem longer, before submitting an alternative idea.

The rejection was immediately scooped up by the politically active A.F.L.-C.I.O., which has embraced the Forand bill as a prime legislative goal since it was first submitted in 1957. The union mobilized a mass meeting of the elderly in Manhattan, and 6,000 aged members turned.up to boo loudly at the mention of President Eisenhower. Shouted a speaker: "We've got a President who has spent his entire life on the public payroll. He has never paid a doctor's bill, and he is still saying there is no need for a Forand bill." Similar rallies were packing them in from coast to coast.

Plans For All. Republicans argue that Forand's bill is unsoundly financed and paternalistic, discriminatory (against younger people, and against those aged who are not covered by social security), damaging to the private efforts of the American Medical Association and the insurance companies (both of which oppose the Forand bill) to build up medical insurance programs for the aged. With many Democrats also opposing it, the bill stands slim chance of passing this session.

Alternative plans are raining down on all sides. Presidential Aspirants Hubert Humphrey and Jack Kennedy have each put up separate bills that are very similar to Forand's but would drop the surgical benefits. HEW Secretary Flemming wants to try a compromise voluntary plan, in which individuals would pay as much as they could to private insurance companies and the states would make up the rest, with some federal help. Such a plan was originally introduced by the Republicans in both houses back in 1949. It was then co-sponsored by a young Congressman, Richard Nixon of pension-prone California, who this year is also keeping a close eye on the issue.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.