Friday, September 3, 1971
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN comment Welfare Tragedy
Editors Note: This is the first of two editors on welfare.
Welfare is perhaps the least understood and most unpopular of our social-governmental institutions. It is here personal prejudice and discrimination are often incorporated into rank discrimination and humiliation.
Of the myths surrounding welfare, perhaps the most cruel is the notion people turn to welfare because they find it easier than working. The welfare system is a pride crushing admission of financial and social dependence. This belief is made familiar with the program that is a whole collection of laws and regulations designed to harass the welfare recipient.
One example of this harassment can be seen in a proposal being conceived in Lawrence, the Attorney at Law, to children (ADC) program generally
the largest single item in most welfare budgets.
Local welfare officials, in conjunction with Mike Elwell, Douglas County attorney, propose a plan that would force a mother whose husband has deserted her or stopped alimony payments, to file a criminal complaint against her husband before she could receive ADC insurance. At face, the move would prevent the father from leaving home for a short period of time, then returning, after ADC payments have begun.
This would be an easy solution if desertion and divorce were simple problems. They aren't. This carrot—and—stick approach ignores the fact the mother and father may be living apart by mutual agreement, or that an element of love still exists that would prevent a woman from filing criminal proceedings against her husband.
It is the children who must pay.
—Tom Slaughter
James J. Kilpatrick
Freeze Halts Reforms
WASHINGTON—as some early Roman Polypanna used to say, exmale bonum: Look at the good side. The President's economic package has its regrettable aspects, but it contains one excellent feature. For the time being, the number of ill-adapted health and welfare plans into a political freeze.
The chief casualty of Mr. Nixon's sudden war upon inception is his own Family
have access to the finest medical care in the world. Our system of essentially private practice has its failings, to be sure, but it is infinitely superior to the state-supported schemes of Europe. In this interim period while time of American medicine have a special obligation to make their defenses secure.
Unhappily, this is one of the problems: As defenders, they are forever on the defensive, and the
The President's economic freeze has halted health and welfare reforms, according to James J. Kilpatrick. The conservative columnist says he has haveives measure the need for reform.
Assistance Plan of welfare reform. This is to be postponed vaguely from "three months to one year," so as to achieve a paper economy of $1.1 billion in the current budget. This is all make-believe. "Family assistance" is a euphemism for guaranteed annual income. The bill proposes not reform, but rather revolution. And such a plan would have been within the Senate Finance Committee that the plan was more dead than alive now.
frustration that so much of medicine remains free of public control. And because there is liveler news in attack than in defense, they have stirred up a large number that is largely unjustified.
ANOTHER NOTABLE causality is the whole concept of a broad federal plan of national health insurance. In the new mood of austerity, there is no prospect whatever that Congress will plunge into any scheme that simultaneously could add billions to the federal deficit and skim off billions of dollars in medical movement toward socialization of American medicine is put off for a while.
It is likely to be only for a while. Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts is a tenacious fellow, full of missionary zeal; as chief apostle for national health insurance, he surely will keep pushing his cause. The senator will have the continuing material benefit of more of them political hypochondriacs who complain incessantly that our system of medical care is sick. sick. sick.
NOW, THIS simply is not so. By any fair yardstick, Americans
THE AMERICAN SYSTEM does indeed have its failings. For the family not covered by group insurance and not eligible for coverage, there is no Medicaid, it can be fearfully expensive. There are not enough doctors in the slums of our central cities. There are too many specialists and too few doctors to be wrong. Malaria practice is proved.
posture is unappealing. The medical profession is kept so busy fending off its critics that it has little time or opportunity for telling the story of doctors who work far harder than most of us, who give more of themselves to public service, who often earn less after taxes than plumbers, politicians, and actors.
For the past twenty years, and especially the past ten, American medicine has suffered relentless attack. Its foremost critics, such as Senator Kennedy, are believed to tend to abhor the "private sector" and exalt the "public sector," and they fume with
But these failings—to the extent that they are failings—ought to be kept in perspective. Doctors' fees, for example, have increased in recent years by no more than the general cost of a medical procedure, have soared out of sight, but the increases are a direct consequence of higher wages for hospital personnel and higher costs of complex equipment. The number of doctors increased by 50 per cent between 1960 and 1970, this made medical schools much more medically schooled up 40 per cent since 1965. The doctor shortage is being liked. And who–besides Senator Kennedy—supposed that national health insurance would be better? The monumental tax burden of such a plan would lead to a massive increase, if it would get no more sick people well. While the freeze is on, we might better concentrate upon improving and preserving the very good system we have.
(C) 1971 The Washington Star Syndicate, Inc.
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Portfolio . . .
In Patriotism's Defense
Garry Wills
It is difficult to defend patriotism from the "patriots"—which means, these days, defending our country from its oppressors. We must be Number One. The Vice President says any criticism of government action or policy is "masochism". Mrs. Mitchell, a charming Lady Charlie Murray, Attorney General (who wi-
triquiles between pipe puffs),
conveys the message that only middle-America loves America,
and everyone else should leave it.
In this bumper-sticker sense,
loving America means loving it blindly,
defending it uncritically,
granting it no faults at all.
well, love is blind, isn't it? No,
not really. Not real love. The current Esquire carries one of those fugitive tales by F. Scott
Fitzgerald that surface, now and then, to haunt us. It is the story of a man going through the pain of watching his daughter's pain during birth, last it is a recurrent drama we all live through—if, that is, we ever grow up, or help our children grow. There are times, like this, when the world's greatest comedian, "***** man, oracle, and king—"
when merely stepped inside the door is a grand occasion, when his every fawn is judgement, and all his smiles rewards. It is fun while it lasts—but it must not last long, for child or father. Both let grow; let reality in, accommodate the fairy tales to the facts.
By Sokoloff
Griff and the Unicorn
we were two years old—that is,
incapable of error, all-wise, with
strength beyond challenge, with
decision not subject to criticism.
But that is not love; it is not even infatuation. It is the careful retention of absurdity by those who could see, and they could see you. Better, then, to close their eyes and chant the silly jingest creed. Our daddy knew how to do this. Uncle Sam, look around all you baddies around the world.
Everyone will admit, if forced to, that children cannot live on with the illusion that their parents are all good and do no wrong. To demand that of them would be a way of arresting growth, inducing false innocence, causing abuse or inflicting officiality of endless pretence among intimates. Yet that is just the blind faith men now describe as patriotism. Our country must be what our parents were when
Those who truly love our country love it with eyes open, knowing its faults, seeing it "warts and all" and trying to from its blind child votaries and fearful, uncritical rulers.
'Copyright 1971, David Sokoloff.
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